It's Nearly Time to Head Back to France
Seven weeks in Lagos and what do you get? Stronger thighs, I would say!
Welcome to the latest fun from our 14th century playmates, now featuring Mother Chattox, a character based on a woman of the same name who starred in the Lancashire witch trials back in the 17th century. I’ve pinched the name because no matter how hard I might have tried, I would never have come up with such an appropriate one. Apologies to anyone out there called Chattox but I just think it might be unique. Indeed, if you do an online search, she is the sole individual who seems to appear.
In the usual fashion, the first three strips below set the scene and the last one is the latest. You always get your money’s worth with me!
Talking of money, I will, in the fullness of time, be asking my pals to buy me a beer once a month in order to follow the Merrie England strip. I’m sure you’d do that if we met, so it really isn’t any kind of imposition at all. Especially as you’ll be following the exploits of Brother Ralph, Abbot Pardieu, Esme Gat-Tooth and now, Mother Chattox and all the characters yet to come. So, please, unstring your purse, light up a smile and sign up. If, for any reason, I have to take a break from providing the strip, I’ll turn off the payments, so don’t worry at all: value will be maintained.
Back to France in a couple of days, with much stronger thighs..
It’s all hills here in Lagos.
With very few exceptions, the walk home means climbing a series of very steep inclines. Now, you might think that such climbs are great for health, heart and lungs and all that but frankly, there’s quite a lot of me and even though I do my level best to keep the calory intake down, I’m not shifting all that much.
All of which means that I have a considerable amount of resplendence to haul up these hills every day on my way back to our rented apartment. You would also be forgiven for thinking that ‘hard yakka’, as my antipodean friends like to call it, will burn off all your excess calories. There’s no end of stuff out there in the online world exhorting us to jog, run, box, dance and otherwise exhaust ourselves in pursuit of the lithe and ballerina-like form, so imagine my great surprise upon discovering that quite possibly, it really doesn’t work that way.
I have been listening to some podcasts recently in which the respected Doctor Chris Van Tulleken, a regular on British TV along with his twin brother Xand, quoted a study by one Herman Pontzer, showing that it doesn’t matter how many miles you walk or how many kilos you lift at all! It seems that we men are designed to burn up to 2,500 calories a day no matter what we might do. It seems that the figure for women is around 2,000 calories. If we run a mile, the calories used in doing that are simply taken from where they would have been burned if we hadn’t gone running or otherwise worn ourselves to a gasping shadow.
Astonishing, isn’t it? I won’t pretend to understand this idea and I would urge those of you who are interested in this subject to do your own research. In the end, it seems, we simply have to consume fewer calories. Damn, but isn’t it incredible that we have to study at university for decades and carry out extensive studies only to discover that it’s all about the calories consumed minus what we’re going to burn.
To my surprise, this study adds that sitting at a desk during your working day, idly shoving bits of paper back and forth, you will still burn your full quota of calories, which really does seem crazy.
At the same time, though, these experts do say that we should do about 150 minutes a week of proper exercise, even if that is just walking. That’s only just over 20 minutes every day, so I have a clear conscience, having been out walking the cobbled hills of Lagos most days. Going to the local Spar shop is a half-mile round trip, the first half of which is a dizzying, oxygen-starved incline to the top of the hill, mitigated in no small part by the return leg, which is all downhill, exercising different muscles from those used on the outward trip. The exercise, these experts tell us, will simply keep all our essential bits working better than they otherwise would. Brilliant, isn’t it? Such ground-breaking news.
So, at the end of all this, I have offered you the searing insight that to lose weight, you simply need to consume less than you burn.
No, no, don’t thank me!
Really, it’s all part of the service.
Now, here’s today’s link to a video about a sandwich. Do subscribe to my channel, won’t you?