Do You Really Need to Detox this January?
January is the darkest, coldest, longest month. How do you spend it? Do you hunker down with good claret, hot chocolate, the book you got for Christmas, some sudoku and a fascinating documentary on the Incas whilst nourishing body and soul with chunky soups, pies and buttery mash with more mash on the side? Do you, hell. No, what we like to do is give up everything that comforts, nourishes, sustains, indeed, gives us any tingle of enjoyment in a mad attempt to prove to the world we are STRONG, we have WILLPOWER and, most importantly, food and drink are NOT THE BOSS OF US.
If anything exemplifies our increasingly unhealthy relationship with food and drink it is the two-week period of often-calamitous excess called Christmas. Christmas is ONE DAY in the calendar, yet we treat it as an extended free-for-all bonus time, telling ourselves a glass of mulled wine and a slice of warmed stollen are perfectly acceptable every afternoon at 3pm; that the chocolates must be finished by 2nd January; that second helpings of pudding are actually a good idea because otherwise it's food waste, innit? We start with the festive glass of wine/G&T/beer earlier and earlier because it's, well, Christmas and 1st January inevitably dawns with the majority of the population in desperate need of a stomach pump and a McDonald's milkshake as the season reaches its apogee of excess.
Come 2nd January most of us are mired in such a pit of self-loathing and disgust, we swear we shall renounce all that clearly did for us in the last fortnight: And so, just as night follows day, we solemnly trail round supermarkets avoiding the alcohol aisle, picking up fruit and vegetables that will with the same inevitability go in the bin, buying biscuits "just for the kids", eyeing up prune juice and kale with the wary suspicion of a horse approaching the knacker's yard. Because, you see, January is the month we detox. We get fit. We deny ourselves sugar, fat, alcohol, carbs because that's the way it must be. The only way to do penance is to abstain.
But is it? What does a detox actually achieve with all its fantastical resolutions that seem to last no longer than the 16th? Well, for most of us Dry January is a thing, but Alcohol Concern, amongst others, say that abstaining for a month does your liver no good at all, particularly as most of us just swing straight back into over-indulgence in February. Far better to commit to 2-3 alcohol-free days a week. We deny our bodies fat, sugar and carbs just as the year hits its coldest month and wonder why it's so hard to continue with the kale salad. Far better to enact our own version of a 5:2 diet and eat mindfully and slightly less with more fruit and vegetables than you think possible, enjoying every mouthful and allowing ourselves a treat at weekends. We force our lardy thighs into leggings and join the expensive gym, then spend 18 months flagellating ourselves with the money wasted on an unused membership because you're really scared of the instructor, it's hard work and you're knackered. Far better to commit to walking briskly a bit more in the colder months and save the sweaty stuff for Spring, when the lighter days make you feel less like being in bed.
For once, we'd like to see the New Year as, yes, a time to start afresh, but without the concomitant self-loathing that inspires these hideous New Year resolutions that no-one sticks to but reinforces the message that food is our enemy, that we must fight it with all our weapons, instead of allowing it as a friend, into our lives, to be enjoyed at our leisure and with our full knowledge. Happy New Year.
