It started with a banana and got completely out of control!

Doubtless over the next few weeks we’ll be assaulted by a barrage of advertising gyms and preachy magazine articles trying to make us feel like slothful fat slobs.

We all want to live longer and most of us these days recognise that it’s our personal responsibility to do what we can to look after ourselves. 

Tread carefully, dear colyoomistas, into the world of self-medication. I turned round the other day and realised that I’d let a little harmless prevention grow into a monstrous behaviour pattern that threatened to run amok.

It all started very harmlessly, as these things tend to do. Why indeed , it started with a banana. What’s more benign than a banana?

Yes, with due respect to Errol Brown, it started with a banana, just as each of my days do. I drink water, take my blood pressure pills and then sit in bed and read. A splendid way to start each day. That little banana hits me with some sugar, a healthy dose of vitamins C and B6, a little dietary fibre, some potassium to settle the blood pressure and some tryptophan to settle the dark and dangerous early morning thoughts.

Then it’s downstairs to squeeze a lemon into a glass of water. Apparently my Great Aunt Threedlewhispy used to do this every day of her life and she lived to be 143 years old. I know it’s meant to be squeezed into warm water, but fuck it, cold it is and a lovely sharp healthy buzz it gives too, as well as more vitamin C and all those other blardeeblars we get from fresh  fruit.

Then a handful of omega 3 capsules, which really do seem to help with the depression, as well as obscurely and imperceptibly helping my heart.

Sadly they’re not doing a great deal to help my joints. Refusing to be denied the pleasure of walking beside the sea, I try to defy the pain of osteo-arthritis, so I put a tablespoon of cider vinegar into a mug of hot water, and drop in a generous teaspoon of honey, followed by a teaspoon of molasses in a glass of warm water. This triple act might help to reduce the inflammation of arthritis, by reducing the acid levels in my body, whilst beefing up the haemoglobin, which is often low in arthritis sufferers.

But if I'm doing this, I shouldn’t be putting citrus fruit into my body at all, so why did I do that?

Move on, Adley, move on regardless, to the sachet of glucosamine sulphate, which the doctor prescribed for me, despite his own misgivings that it might help form cartilage. 

Thanks to nutritionist friend Annette, I then eat a spoonful of lecithin granules, because she insists that with my family history I need to emulsify my fats better, and this strange mouthful I wash down with a benecol anti-cholesterol drink and

- and hang on just a bleedin’ moment - 

A year ago I did only the banana, the lemon juice and the omegas. 

Now I’m looking like an obsessive nutter hypochondriac who's devouring the contents of health food shop before he even gets to breakfast. 

It’s got to stop. 

I’ve got ease up on this nonsense. 

I’ve got to get back to banana basics.

Hey, did someone mention breakfast?

That’s right, breakfast. 

Hmmmmm, I’m bloody starving.

Think I’ll have a fry. No harm with some bacon and eggs now that I’ve taken that lot!