Resolving to make no Resolutions

So, it's over halfway through January, which is another free Reason to be Cheerful. January is proving to be less boring than usual, as I've decided to give up on giving up booze (I usually spend the first month of every year booze-free as a penance for Christmas/New Year and a vague attempt to lose weight). Instead I've decided that, new life, new habits style - I think you're allowed to use that as a motivating force for the first year of a new life - I shall instead embrace booze. I've been treating myself to red wine at home of an evening, which is proving to be very pleasant.

It is also extremely nice not to feel browbeaten into some sort of punitive detox routine. Magazines and newspapers at this time of year are full to the brim with 'recipes' for juices (you don't need a recipe, you just squash all the fun bits out of anything you were planning to eat and then have to wash up a machine with 37 parts afterwards); exhortations to give up alcohol, caffeine, sugar, meat, dairy, wheat and anything else that's worth eating or drinking at this time of year, and replace them with green tea, pounding away on a treadmill and sweating in a sauna as a treat.

The reason I don't feel the need to do any of this, is that I was kind of doing it anyway before Christmas - well, bar the booze and the coffee, both of which remain mainstays, but the booze is less prevalent than it was when I lived in London. London life, in a rose-tinted way, now seemed to me to revolve round cocktails and wine in pubs and nice bars in a manner that suggested I was either a Sex and the City wannabe, or Jeffrey Bernard. That's not true, I never drank that much, but I really don't go out much here yet, so feel relatively teetotal.

But I've managed to cut right down on dairy (bar milk in the aforementioned coffee), mainly cut out wheat (it really doesn't agree with my digestion and is also on Cheerful James's Banned List) and was trying hard to avoid sugar. I don't very often eat meat, and am still scoffing salmon like a seal, so it was all going fine. Until the Great Carb Rebellion of Christmas and the dreaded Between Christmas and New Year Period, when seemingly all be(l)ts are off and it's a free for all. I threw myself with particularly wild abandon at the pannetone that appeared everywhere. One of my friends got given three for a Christmas party she hosted, one of which made it to mine at New Year.

I ate it with Bailey's in a bread and butter pudding (sugar, wheat, cream and booze - ticking all the boxes there). I had it toasted with butter for breakfast. I had big chunks of it just because it was there. Still there. Still not stale enough to justify throwing it away (wasteful). There was some exciting shop-bought custard that hadn't been eaten, so I had some of that with pannetone and prunes (surprisingly good). I probably would've made it into a duvet and slept under it if I could've.

But like many a holiday romance, mine has now ended. Now it is back to scrambled eggs for breakfast and salmon for lunch. It's back to pounding away at the gym, praying that Cheerful James will let me off another week of being weighed and measured. I was doing so well before Christmas that I very nearly awarded myself a Chufty Medal for Exercise - I'd managed to get down to something like 14.5% body fat (from 22.3% - ooh, STATS!) and had put on 7lb of muscle since the middle of September, for anyone who cares about such things. CJ is threatening to put 'before' and 'after' photos of me on the wall of the gym. I cannot express how utterly mortifying this would be. Surely that is the preserve of Biggest Loser types, who've lost 5 stone and gone from 'blimpishly fat' to a size 12? Rather than me, who's gone from a bit of a muffin top and arms devoid of any muscle or definition to losing half a stone and being able to get the lids off jam jars? It doesn't feel sufficiently inspirational to see a photo of me with a few wobbly bits, grinning with embarrassment, next to a photo of me with fewer wobbly bits, grinning with embarrassment.

Perhaps I embarked on the Great Carb Rebellion in order to avoid being on the wall of the gym and pointed at by punters thinking, 'Who's that girl, who clearly thinks she's better than she is?' Or perhaps I should just use one of my newly-muscled arms to punch James and tell him to find another former fatty to put on the wall. Yes, that sounds better. I've always meant to try boxing.