It’s very difficult to tell how healthy one really is, on a day to day basis. Through dogged repetition and to blow away the Saturday morning cobwebs from the Friday night before I have chipped away at my Park Run result to the extent that I have finally broken the 24 minute barrier, and for someone who isn’t 24 years old anymore that’s not something to grumble about. I’m hoping to chip an extra second off every week so that in 27 years or so I’ll be able to run 5km in literally no time at all. I can never decide whether I like doing the Park Run or not. Of course, I like the joy of finishing with a burst and the thrill of knowing I don’t have to run anywhere for the rest of the day, but the rest is all a bit of a grind. True, I gym regularly but I also still smoke and drink and that’s just the equivalent of someone giving with one hand and taking away with the other, with the someone in question being me. I’m still bald and intend to remain so for quite some time but my dodgy toenail has made a miraculous recovery thanks to a little TLC. Swings and roundabouts. My diet is varied but not varied enough, healthy-ish without being puritanical and littered with enough guilty pleasures to reinforce the notion that eating is an experience to be enjoyed, not dreaded; unless a doctor tells me I am seconds away from a particularly unpleasant, long winded death I will continue to cherish the sugars and the fats, the nicotine and a double figured ABV, safe in the knowledge that, for now at least, I can run 5km faster than four hundred other people on a Saturday morning. Sometimes I wonder if it’s my lack of ambition that keeps me going.
One day I will suddenly be old. Or just older. I will have a man-gut, hairy ears (but, bizarrely, smoother lower legs) and more prominent veins pretty much everywhere. I will groan and crack and gurgle more often and I won’t need to imagine I’m going deaf anymore because I’ll actually be deaf. And all that is if I’m lucky. Because there’s just as much chance that I’ll find I have seven different strains of cancer, each vying to be more aggressive than the next. Or nine varieties of hitherto unheard of colonic inflammation, or a knotted stomach, inversed kidneys, a retired liver, tennis lungs and shingles on the brain. There’s simply too many things out there that can kill you without you even noticing them creeping round the corner, and this is why half the world is obsessed with staying alive for as long as possible while the other half seem dead set on killing themselves as quickly as possible, preferably with an extra serving of mayonnaise. I’d like to think I’m somewhere in the middle, bad habits offset by good intentions, with results that remain, for now at least, very, very hazy. I know that if I want to give myself a few extra years I can always tinker with my restless ways, but I also know that the extra years I give myself as a result could be spent in a horror of confusion, bed baths and cheap biscuits.
The mind boggles at the extremes to which idiots are prepared to go to never get old, or at least appear to have aged differently to everyone else. Take a look at Bryan Johnson, the US tech billionaire who is dedicating far too much time, money, effort and stupidity trying to reverse his biological age so he never appears as old as he is, which is 47. Indeed, he spends approximately $2 million a year on dedicated specialists, pills, serums and a lifestyle scheme that he hopes will turn back time itself so that he will have the sort of body one would expect of an 18 year old (not a fat, out of breath 18 year old, obviously). And they say money can’t buy you sense. Then you’ve got Dalia Naeem, an Iraqi lady who has undergone 43 bouts of cosmetic surgery to make her look like a living Barbie, but in fact has ended up looking like she was born inside out; even on her best day she looks like someone you’d have to invent to stop your children going into the attic. I’ve also seen adverts for a ‘coming soon’ lifestyle show in which a perfectly normal looking woman has decided to reinvent herself as another laughable sort of living doll, but has ended up looking more like a cartoon character in the process of having their face blown up in achingly slow motion. And finally that led me to Valeria Lukyanova, a Ukrainian model who also prizes herself on looking like Barbie, only Barbie from some sinister horror movie that has yet to be made. I suppose in her defence she does does look a lot more like a Barbie doll than Dalia Naeem, but that’s because Dalia Naeem has achieved the substantial feat of looking 43 steps away from looking anything like a human being at all.
One of the more preposterous things I read this morning was that Valeria Lukyanova has at times been so keen to keep her weight down (in order, as one does, to look like a cheap, inert plastic doll manufactured in China) that she has considered living off nothing other than air and water, a dietary regime known as breatharianism; and a regime so popular and taken so seriously that it doesn’t even register as a real word on my computer. Otherwise known as inedia (which apparently is also not a word to be taken seriously), the core principle of this ridiculous practice is that you can live perfectly well by simply absorbing nutrients from the air and from water, in extreme cases dispensing with the later as well, thereby thoroughly ignoring the fact that the body is made of water more than anything else you could care to mention. You would think that such a theory would get absolutely nowhere and yet quite a few people have given it a shot. Now, I’m not saying they were wrong but when almost all of them, over centuries of experimentation, have died from starvation or dehydration I don’t think any self respecting doctor would have taken too long to work out why. There is documentation to suggest that an Indian mystic by the name of Prahlad Jani managed to survive on nothing but air for 15 days, though one must assume that by day 16 he was either dead or running up a hefty tab at his local Nando’s. There is another tale of some idiot trying to survive on nothing but sunshine – one can only hope that he wasn’t living in Scotland at the time.
Certainly it is safe to assume that anyone who has subscribed to breatharianism and lived to tell the tale is either a biological freak of nature or a very, very lucky moron. I live next to a busy dual carriageway and if I tried to survive on air alone I’d collapse from carbon monoxide poisoning before dinner time (not that I’d have to worry about dinner time as technically I’d be eating round the clock). I don’t think silly little Valeria Lukyanova can have stuck to it for very long either because she’s already hit the ripe old age of 39. And as for all these other people that allow themselves to be cut and stitched and injected with all sorts of crap in the name of timeless preservation, well I hope they’re happy, but I think we all know that deep down they are about as sad as they can possibly be. Just look up Justin Jedlica, aka the ‘Human Ken’, who has allowed his face to slowly be turned into a large lump of semi-melted plastic with eyebrows drawn on. To think that he chose this for himself, not to mention paid for it, and all to end up looking like his head had been carved out of the side of a fatberg and sculpted by an unimaginative three year old. The ultimate, tragic lesson is that none of these people will live as long as they’d like or look as beautiful as they’d want, and in the end even TikTok will stop caring. You can’t play God with yourself, that’s not how it works. So if you want my advice (no-one ever says yes, so don’t worry about being polite) I’d just get on with getting on and do your best to do the best you can. Just don’t go running 5km in less than 24 minutes, because that’s my territory and it’s one of the only things I’m half good at. No doubt with a bit of self improvement it could be more than a bit of better, but where would be the fun in that?
G B Burton 27.05.2025
On stupidity......and other causes for concern. 