Really keen coaches (i.e. control freaks) , as well as trying to make you swim faster than is
natural, often try to control every other aspect of your life as well. Chief among their lifestyle
obsessions is diet. I was brought up in an age when 'diet' meant trying to loose weight, but
nowadays your diet is everything you eat, whereas what the coach would have you eat is your
'nutritional regime'. "You are what you eat" they tell us.
I was pondering this thought while observing a group of early-teen club swimmers waiting for the
transport to an away gala recently. The boys seemed mostly to be consuming the contents of their
noses, inserting their fingers so far up their nostrils in pursuit of the king of bogies, that I
could hear scraping noises coming out of their ears. Meanwhile, the girls seemed to be using their
hair as straws to suck out their brains. The logical conclusion of this self cannibalism is that
both groups would end up with nothing left in their heads at all, vindicating the club coach's many
comments on their
IQ. 'You eat what you are', can also apply I thought.
However, the more orthodox interpretation of the old saying uses the logic which says that you are
the net result of that which goes in, less that which goes out. Something rather magical happens in
between, or else we would all look rather like an overfilled hamburger (in John Prescott's case
perhaps the magic is missing). The magic is, we are told, the body's metabolic chemistry. Coaching
tradition has it that if you stock the old bod up with that which is Good For You, and keep it short
of that which is Bad for You, you will end up with a Better Body. It's a starting point I suppose,
but it poses the question of how do you know what is Good and Bad ? The answer you get depends on
when and where you ask the question.
When I was a lad in post war Britain, and I accompanied my Mum shopping with her ration book, we
were told that to be healthy you should eat fried eggs and bacon with toast and dripping for
breakfast, red meat for lunch and red meat again for dinner, washed down with Guinness if you were
old enough, if not then full cream milk. Bread was white and served with about ½ inch (that 's about
1 ¼ cm to you) of butter on it, with a slab of cheese the size of the cenotaph. Not only was the
milk recommended, it was actually compulsory at school, until Margaret Thatcher discovered her
talent for redundancy by firing all the nation's milk monitors. Potatoes were to be avoided because
they made you fat, and pasta because it was foreign. Coffee was all four star, and kept you awake
all afternoon. Added to this we were all encouraged to go out in the sun as much as possible and
film stars all smoked both on the screen and in real life.
Modern science has changed all that. Potatoes and pasta are now Good, and most other things are Bad.
So bad in fact that I suspect the nanny state will soon ban them with the same conviction that it
forced milk down my adolescent gullet. Red meat already carries a health warning (when you are
allowed to buy it at all), so surely cheese will soon only be able to be ordered from offshore
internet grocers to be delivered by post in plain brown envelopes along with all the other things
you are ashamed of but can't seem to give up. I foresee the Food Police framing suspects by planting
boiled eggs in their lunch boxes, or stop-and-search raids on suspected milkmen. Indeed even skimmed
milk, which already tastes like water, will be classed as likely to deprave and corrupt the drinker
and all milk will have to be completely transparent. Chocolate will become a Class A drug due to its
addictive qualities and the tendency of users to go in to a dreamy state. Those things which are
Good will be inflicted upon the young. Salad Monitors will be appointed, and children refusing to
eat the State Minimum will be detained after school to program their word processors to print out
100 times '2 carrots good, 4 carrots better'. Vicars will entreat 'Lettuce Pray', and the new
digestive orthodoxy finally will be complete when meetings are re-named gatherings so as not to
offend vegetarians ('meat-ings' - get it; sorry don't bother). Sunbathing will soon be made illegal
and the only person who still smokes in public is Ian Paisley - and that's from his ears. I suppose
we should be grateful that we are now recommended to drink 2 glasses of red wine a day, but how the
hell am I expected to cut down to that level?
In other words, ideas change. So how come they're so sure they've got it right now? True, all the
film stars who smoked have died of lung cancer, but at least that cleared the way for a better
looking and less smelly lot. But I haven't died yet from all those eggs, meat, butter, and so on. I
still go out in the sun and haven't melted or whatever. Doubtless I shall join in the class action
of all those who went to school between 1948 and 1973 and had milk forced down us, when we sue the
Government for furred up arteries and obesity, but my motive will be purely mercenary - and I
haven't even felt the need of counselling yet.
Where you ask the question'What is Good For You?' also matters in the answer you get. Ask it at a
body builders gym and you'll be told tuna, boiled eggs and veterinary steroids (secretly they'll
also add senna-pods - to keep such a diet moving). Ask in a hospital kitchen and it will be boiled
cabbage and tapioca. Ask in a swimming pool café and it will be whatever the catering manager
happens to have in that day. If they really believed what all the sports nutrition journals say, why
are there chocolate and crisp machines everywhere and not a single carrot vendor? Ask any coach what
is Good and they will probably tell you whatever they read on the health page of Electronics Weekly
yesterday.
Ahha! - you say - all you need to do is to see what the best swimmers eat and do the same. Sorry,
that doesn't work either. There are two types of top swimmer. The first lot think what you eat is
vital, and so keep their diet secret so you won't get better than them. The second lot couldn't give
a damn, eat everything and still win.
The only thing I can add to this counsel of despair, from my own experience, is that swimming
definitely makes you hungry. So when you go swimming take some of what you consider to be Good with
you, so you can scoff it before you get to the chocolate machine, or chip shop. I never follow this
advice myself, and am too often mugged by a Mars Bar on the way out of the pool. I promise shall go
on a diet though.. starting tomorrow.