MY OWN WALKING - March Journal 2025

Consequences, everything eventually reveals its consequences. Sometimes it pursues you like a thief, a rogue shadow following you through the sickly yellow glow of evening streetlights. Its never easy to predict what or when the outcome might catch up with you. Our apparent cluelessness does not prevent us from reaping them nonetheless. 

One of the consequences for me of the HA! has been recognising that this was also a consequence, the outcome of - I am what I eat. The type of food I'd been eating most of my life, my broader health choices, a pretty sedentary lifestyle with insufficient physical exercise, the type of culture I live in.  The genetic and parental nurtured inheritance aside, it has largely been achieved through my choices as an individual over 67 years that has led me to this consequential juncture.

I've grown up in a relatively wealthy and individualistic society, that has no guard rails of a surrounding natural circumstance to constrain us, even to eat proportionately. There may be growing food poverty in our society, but this is not a consequence of crops failing, and there has not been a state of famine in the UK this century. But there is consumer outrage when there's a hummus shortage. Conspicuous consumption is the empty headed mantra, the modus operandi of our neo liberal capitalist society. Is it unsurprising then, that our world is full of inconsequential short lived fads, that businesses make their fortunes out of. Including peculiar forms of diet and Tick Tok, and then Tik Tok diets. 

We rarely have to respond to real hunger, we hardly ever feel hunger in any substantial way. We eat before hunger even rears its head. As though experiencing hunger was something to be feared. When I was younger and my body more sylph like than now, it was adaptable and recovered quickly from any excess I could throw at it, Filled with a youthful bravado that dismissed 'nanny state' like injunctions to moderate or monitor what I ate and drank. Nothing appeared to have much consequence then. Its a fundamental of secular individualism, to tolerate no restrictions nor injunctions to reduce or exclude even chronically unhealthy foods, and to use this resistance to bolster one's individual right to be a complete knob-head if you choose to.

As men grow older and enter their middle age,our bodies ability to process food and not put on weight disappears. So a 'dad bod' or a beer paunch can quite comfortably settle in. We continue stuffing our face with the same junk food we've eaten since childhood, whilst viewing all sorts of diverting, but inconsequential stuff on a laptop or TV,  Our internal two fingers up reactionary response to reining in or adjusting our consumption, becomes reminiscent of a petulant childish tantrum. Demonstrating how Western notions of individuality effectively keeps us in an infantilised, immature and naive state. One very reluctant to consider what consequence to our actions there might be. These rarely arrive right away, so we can clearly ignore, deny or delay any corrective response to later, much much later on.. 

Until, that is, we get some bodily shock to awaken that concern from its drugged slumber. A touch with death, or feel our vulnerability through some injury, and suddenly staying alive moves higher up the list of priorities. By then it is often too late, some sort of consequence for the past abuse of one's body has become almost set in on a bone and muscle level. Only able to ameliorate this with the help of medicinal interventions or a draconian overturning in our diet or lifestyle. Paradoxically, we can be at too old an age to countenance change, too set in our ways to tolerate innovations in our elderly lifestyle. We reach an age where we'd prefer a comfortable trouble free retirement. Extending ones lifespan by denying ourselves familiar creature comforts, well, that perhaps cuts no mustard. Why bother now? Habits, however bad for us, become what makes us happy. A healthier diet does not readily fit into the slipstream of a cosy retirement plan.

Yet it has always been - why bother now? For in truth there never appears to be a right time for considering some things. Usually its whatever reminds you of your mortality, like writing a will for instance (Note to self, just get on and do it)  We often talk of ''comfort food', as though this were an entirely separate form of eating, and maybe it is. Because what makes me desire to eat 'comfort food' is not hunger at all, but concerns I don't like to consciously think about or coming into close contact with, difficult troubling esteem issues, spiritual issues, mortality issues. When these surface I have in the past reached for the crisp bag for comfort, the Belgian bun for sweetening the troubled heart, the sugary fizzy drink to bring a brief respite. I know I can utilise food in this way, as a form of analgesic  And in extremis this is fine. If, however, it's everyday I reach for the 'comfort food', in a never ending sequence of danish pastries, then there might be troubling territory I'm avoiding being fully conscious of. Metaphorically drowning it in highly processed and refined fat and sugar.