exercise for weight loss and muscle tone. I have mixed feelings about the gym. I’ve never quite mastered the special etiquette that others seem to find so natural. There seems to be an inherent contradiction in striving, on the one hand, to become

recommend the Blackford Diet to anyone except hardened masochists and the criminally insane. By next month, of course, I may feel different.

knew I’d have to downsize.I gave up bread, beer and pasta. Instantly, my body went into shock.The weight fell off me. For six weeks, I was the Incredible Shrinking Man. As the nutritionally informed amongst you will have recognised, my regime was a sort

chrome and mirrors and black leatherette, it’s like something Damian Hirst might have dreamed after visiting a bondage club, then eating cheese too late at night. There are no weights – just rows of diabolical machines, each wringing sweat and moans from

, the Geordie failed to show up and Bunk feared the worst.It turned out he’d tried to hang himself from a wooden beam placed across the trapdoor to his loft. He’d kicked away the chair, the beam had snapped under his weight and the two jagged ends had fallen

endured for too long the weight of too much concrete, too many people. We weren’t made to live like this, and the city built upon a mistaken assumption is now sagging – a massive, impossible monument to failure.However, right now, Manhattan is 19 miles up

of the new Ice Age. Only days before, a tornado had cruised majestically up the Humber, and Hull was buried under hailstones the size and weight of hedgehogs. With Oscar The World’s Fittest Dog at my side, I climbed out of the sleepy fishing village

with the red cells filtered off, cottage bloody cheese. Instantly, I put on weight. I began to feel like a character in a sequel to Thinner by that master of the macabre, Stephen King– Tubbier. I resolved to clean up my act – to renounce once again the good old