‘Perhaps it’s time to address my lockdown eating habits’

There’s plenty of research to say that when it comes to fitness you can’t outrun a bad diet, and so as lockdown easing continued, Trudy Tyler decided it was time to end the bad habits. By Christine Manby

(Tom Ford)

Seeing myself in the hairdresser’s brightly lit mirror after four months of blissful lockdown ignorance was something of a shock. I’ve been living with a blown bulb in the bathroom for roughly the same time. There’s no excuse, I know, for such laziness. I know how to change a light bulb. Obviously there was a subconscious, psychological benefit to living in the dark. But I can no longer put off the end of my hibernation. Despite my cynical belief that Johnson’s road map would have brought us to a dead-end by now, it seems that we’re still on target for a further relaxation of lockdown measures, including the possibility of overseas travel and with it the distant promise of a summer holiday requiring something other than heavy knits and a cagoule. I’m not talking about bikinis and shorts – they’d have to be part of a prison uniform before I could be compelled to wear either – but I used to quite like my arms. Alas, I seem to have gained my quarantine 15 from the elbows up.

“Drastic measures needed, Minky,” I told my hamster, who never misses an opportunity for a spot of cardio in her wheel. Though it doesn’t seem to make her happy. There’s something menacing about the way Minky looks at me when she’s done a few spins and who can blame her, conned back into captivity by a smear of peanut butter in a humane mouse trap, when she could be living free beneath the fridge. Talking of the fridge, there’s plenty of research to say that when it comes to fitness you can’t outrun a bad diet. Perhaps it was time to address my lockdown eating habits.

I began by chucking out all the things that have made lockdown worth living. Well, I didn’t really throw out my wine. I put that in the loft – likewise my crisps and my biscuits. Out of sight, out of mind. I would have to hope that the pest expert really had done something to stop the mice getting in when he spent an hour up there on the day he came to mouse-proof my house.