Open Writing

I’m feeling elated today. I’ve just had this idea which could put me into the same money-mountain league as Microsoft’s Bill Gates.

It involves obesity. To be more precise, it concerns dieting.

To begin at the beginning… While I was shaving this morning I found myself contemplating Dr Robert Atkins, and his famous diet, the essence of which, if I have got it right, is to eat lots of meat and to cut out bread, potatoes and pasta.

A chap I know swears by the Atkins diet. “Just look at this,’’ he says proudly, displaying a significant gap between trouser waistband and shirt. “Lost two stones in weight and three inches round the waist in less than a month.’’

Can’t argue with that. He definitely does look fitter, slimmer.

But Dr Atkins weighed more than 18 stones when he died. And it turns out that the famous advocate of a high-protein diet had a history of heart disease.

Small wonder that his family ruled out an autopsy. The Atkins Diet money-making train rumbles on.

Atkins’s books have sold 15 million copies world-wide. He has an estimated 32 million followers in the USA and three million in Britain.

Fat facts weigh heavily on the mind.

* Sixty per cent of Americans are either overweight or obese.

* Revenue from the diet industry in the US is more than $50 billion a year.

* Every fifth British woman is on a diet.

* More than 8 million Brits are members of gyms and health clubs.

* If present trends continue a fifth of British boys and a third of British girls will be clinically obese by 2020.

Which leads me back to my brilliant idea. Well, two ideas actually. Let’s call them Uncle Peter’s two rules for good health.

(I’d better select special type here. I mean, this is momentous. Two ideas that could change your life. Let’s see now… Rockwell Extra Bold. That should do the trick.)

Here goes. Hold on to your trouser belts…

Rule One - Eat less - and never ever diet.

Rule Two - Tear up your gym card and buy a stepper board.

So there you have it. Forget about the Atkins diet, the high-fibre diet, and all the other wretched impossible-to-follow-for-a-lifetime diets,

Eat less. Simple as that.

If you have a cup-and-a-half of breakfast cereal, settle for one cup. If you have three rashers of bacon and two fried eggs, make it two rashers and one egg.

You like chocolates? Eat five chocolates at a time instead of six.

Steak and chips? Make sure there are not so many chips that they are falling off the edge of the plate.

And the stepper board?

I’ve been using one for years. It cost £18 and looks as though it is likely to last for at least another decade.

My local gym charges £19.95 a month for pensioners. Stepper boards are a lot cheaper - and you can use them while listening to the radio at home, avoiding the oft unwelcomed company of all those other sweating bodies.

Most folk would be a lot healthier if they walked to the nearest gym, then, without ever entering the premises, turned around and walked home again.

I walk almost every day. I enjoy being outdoors.

The stepper board is for rainy days. Five minutes of leading with the left foot - up-down, up-down - and five with the right. A 30-minute session.

Boring? Only if you are bored by listening to BBC Radio programmes.

So there you have them. Uncle Peter’s health rules.

Eat a little bit less. Exercise a little bit more.

Mind you, to make this work you need will power. And there is no magic quick-fix formula for acquiring that.

Come to think of it, I don’t think I will ever match Bill Gates or Dr Atkins as a wealth creator.

I’ve said all that I have to say about eating and exercise in 10 words.

Eat a little bit less. Exercise a little bit more.

Can’t make a book out of that. Can’t make millions of dollars out of common sense.

Never mind. I’ll just have to settle for being poor and healthy.