Dear Fitness Nazi,

Yes, you with the lycra camel toe/lycra Man-vest Of Gayness. Always harping on about healthy eating, healthy living, sport and whatnot. Running your marathons and pumping iron in the gym. Preaching against me smoking, eating tasty food and generally enjoying my (possibly shorter) life more than you.

So you can sprint with the speed of a thousand gazelles,can crack a hazelnut with your arse cheeks and have abs you can grate cheese on. Well done. Here’s a biscuit. I'm sure those skills will come in useful someday. How about trying to hold a conversation not involving your current diet, yesterday’s workout or how fat everyone else is? If you find that difficult, I’m sure Sedqa can get you in touch with a therapist.

What type of psychosis does it take to actually enjoy running 10, 15, 20 km (or ‘k’ in fitness-nazi-speak), on your own, dressed like a twat? I used to do those distances three times a week back in the day, with a gobby corporal (so effortlessly fit you’d have to disconnect his spinal cord to get him to sit down) goading me all the way, alternating between screaming terrible insults and muttering ominous threats in my ear. Sheer physical and mental torture, but at least, the rest of the lads were going through the same so we could piss and moan about it after stand-down, over a pint and a few fags. Fitness had a point in the Army. You wouldn’t want a load of unfit, overweight, chancers defending the realm now would you? It wouldn’t bode well for them either if, in the middle of a firefight, someone went “Phew! Fark me sideways, I’m farking bollocksed. You lot crack on to the objective and I’ll just quietly have a stroke here”. Slaughter would inevitably ensue, whether from enemy fire or at the hands of your mates being the only variable.

But in civvy street? What’s the point? Don’t even think about giving me the old “scientifically proven to live longer” spiel. Pish tosh. Most of the oldest and healthiest people I know smoke like chimneys and drink like thirsty camels at the last watering hole before the Sahara, while people in their mid-thirties nurse injuries from overexertion. And what about those who keel over and die five minutes after a run, or halfway through a spinning class?

If health isn’t the deciding factor what is? Vanity? But you’ve got to be pretty in the first place to be vain, right? Most of the fitness Nazis I know couldn’t get laid without at least two paper bags over their heads, in case one gets ripped. Some would be lucky to be allowed a breathing hole they’re so bloody minging.

What on earth gets people in the gym, on the hamster wheel treadmill or jogging along the Sliema front then? My (cod-Freudian) guess is to compensate for some real or imaginary inadequacy. Billy-no-mates goes to fantasise about flexing his muscles and achieving instant popularity. Never mind his utter lack of social skills/personality/stalker tendency. Ms. Bearded-Trog-Beast, whose unfortunate visage could shatter mirrors at 50 paces, goes there to “shed those last 5kg”. I can’t find it in me to point out to her and her ilk that they are labouring under the delusion that people actually give rat’s arse about how much they weigh, as opposed to their sense of humour deficit/criminal dress sense/halitosis/Picasso-esque facial bone structure. Call me soft,  but I just can't.

Obviously there are shades of the above, but extremes are so much more entertaining.

Charisma. That’s what keeps people interested. You might get a shag or two solely on the basis of your Greek god/dess -like physique, but unless you can talk about something more interesting than the amount of bench press reps you got in yesterday, chances are you’ll be back out in the cold, sharpish. Next thing you know you’ll be doing hen nights wearing a g-string festooned with fluffy pompoms and shaking your baby maker for €200 a pop for the amusement of sex-starved middle to old aged ladies. Not quite what you had in mind during those excruciatingly boring workouts eh?

Me, I’ve always been more or less at home in my skin, (now less so than before what with the middle age-onset extra padding. Some people inherit vast business empires, I inherited middle-age fat genes. Thank you, Life) but I had it easy. Between the ages of 13 and 20 I was Adonis himself, without ever crossing the threshold of a gym. Confidence was never a problem with me. Hello ladies, I’ve arrived, you can swoon now etc. Now I look in the mirror and see more chins than the Beijing phone directory. I have (Shock! Horror!) become my father.

From my experience, accepting your appearance is the hard part. Once you’ve done that it’s all easy breezy from there on in. Looks are just the packaging, Unless the package contains something desirable, it will ultimately remain on the shelf. The trick, as I see it, is not to give too much importance to making your body look younger or more beautiful, but to have a youthful and positive outlook on life, which will then make you “radiate positive energy”. Yes, a bit like Chernobyl. Except those were positive ions.

You could be a septuagenarian, but a bubbly personality will make you the life of the party and the centre of that attention you apparently crave so much. (But please, age gracefully. There is only enough space in the world for one Steve Tyler. We forgive him his foibles on account of his extraordinary talent. Not so, you).

Right. I’m just about ready to go spark one up outside now. I have a sudden craving for a few deep-fried Mars bars too.

You run along and go munch on some organic fair trade non-GM carrot sticks or something.

Pip pip cheerio,

TCM