Alison Bezzina

It’s been one of those days... so bad, that when I got home after work, I considered myself lucky that dogs had not peed on my shoes. By the end of days like this one, I’m absolutely convinced that a day spent working in a coal mine would have been easier and less nerve-racking. For the past ten years – that’s ever since I started having to work for a living – I’ve sworn not to stress about anything that is not life or love threatening. In fact every New Year I promise myself two things - to stress much less, and to exercise much more - but by the 2^nd of January of every year, not only do I break both resolutions, but pick up at least another four bad habits.

 

This year however was different! Even though I broke both resolutions once again, I also had a mind blowing revelation. Whilst I lay in my bed nursing the standard New Year’s Day hangover, I came to realise that stressing less and exercising more, are the most conflicting resolutions I could have ever picked. Since I get most of my exercise by jumping to conclusions, flying off the handle, pushing my luck, and blowing people off, the moment I stop stressing, all this good exercise ends too.

 

Of course, I’ve read the health books telling me how healthy it is to raise my heartbeat for at least half an hour a day, but seriously, what’s half an hour when compared to at least nine hours of answering emails, phones, faxes, mobiles, instant messages, smses, and attending meetings with colleagues I wouldn’t see so much of had I married them?

 

What if it’s true that your heart is only good for so many given beats? What if you get assigned a number of heart beats at birth and whether you waste them on panting between the sheets, training for the marathon, or losing your marbles over inter-departmental arguments, is entirely up to you? If this theory is correct, as all believers of destiny would have you think, then exercising is either irrelevant or actually detrimental to living longer. For those of us who have to work for a living, avoiding long hours of head-banging stress is not an option, so the logical thing to do is to preserve the rest of our assigned heartbeats for the few pleasures of life, and not for lifting weights and skipping ropes!

 

Before this eye-opening revelation jumped off the wall at me, I had tried every trick in the book to keep up with some sort of exercise regime. Nothing ever worked. One year I tried putting on weight on purpose, so as to have the motivation to exercise in order to lose it, but instead, I lost the weight, and my head, by stressing over a three year business forecast that came with a ridiculous deadline.

 

The next year I joined a snazzy gym (again).

 

• Gym Day 1-none of the people on the treadmills are smiling. They all seem like all they really want is cake;
• Gym Day 2- I have set up permanent residence in the gym’s Jacuzzi
• Gym Day 3- why can’t gym devotees comb their hair, brush their teeth and put on their make up with more than a pink thong on? You might be comfortable with your body but where is one to look?
• Gym Day 4- there is more than clear water running around my feet in the showers. I’m freaking out never to return to the gym again.

 

Then I joined a pool, but after watching a documentary about whales, I just couldn’t imagine how swimming is good for you! I even tried to do team sports. I thought that in this way I’d feel obliged to turn up for ‘for the team’; what I did not know is that fifteen years of private education and competitive jobs, strips you from any sort of moral obligation. I also tried exercising early in the morning, that is before my brain figures out what I’m doing, but the coffee kept falling out of my mug. I even dated a couple of personal trainers, but they had other innovative ways to get my heart beating faster. So finally, I just placed the sofa as far away from the fridge as possible, otherwise I wouldn’t get any exercise at all.

 

Thanks to a childhood appetite deficiency, an innate hyperactivity, and a natural aversion to big portions and chocolate, I happen to be blessed with an effortless decent shape. What this means however, is that I lack the strongest motivations to exercise – vanity. Still, I wanted to do something in order to die healthier. Considering that I’m an absolute imbecile at sticking to any form of exercise program, I started toying with the idea of adjusting my food intake. In order to soothe my guilt for being a couch (or rather a desk) potato, I started with controlling my weekend alcohol intake. But suddenly, my otherwise great bunch of friends, turned into silly and juvenile weekend gits. A few bad Saturday nights later another revelation jumped off the pub wall and hit me in the face - wine is made from grapes, and beer from wheat and grains, so by controlling their intake all I was doing was actually not drinking myself to health.

 

After that, I tried increasing my intake of fruits and vegetables, whilst decreasing the amount of meats that I eat. But, if my love for animals had not been motivation enough to turn me into a strict vegan, then my health concerns simply did not stand a chance of convincing me to stay away from the bloody protein. I figure that if a cow eats hay and corn all day, then the odd steak is nothing more than an efficient mechanism of delivering vegetables to my system.

 

So now I’ve temporarily given up once again. But it’s not all lazy bones for me. Although the only type of leg raises that I’m doing are canine in nature, and the only reason I will bend down and touch the ground is if there’s are Euro notes lying on the floor, I’ve also spent countless days and nights sneezing violently, running to the toilet, blowing my nose into another century, coughing my chest out and shivering with fever; so in my opinion, my heart has got it’s share of raised acceleration, at least until next year.

Having said all this, remember that life could either be a safe journey to the grave, where all the well preserved bodies are then stacked in shelves for no future use whatsoever, or else a roller coaster ride in which we skid in sideways screaming Weah hey!! whilst holding a Martini in one hand and ice-cream in the other, and where all the worn out, totally banged up bodies are thrown in a ditch for no future use whatsoever.

 

First published on FM Magazine February 2008