January, as TS Eliot never said, is the cruellest month: dreary weather, nothing in the diary to look forward to and a seemingly endless wait for the treadmill down my local gym. No matter. All that's required is a little patience, for it doesn't take long for the days to lengthen, Easter bank holiday to hove into view and the queue down the gym to disappear. That's the thing about January. It's where good intentions go to die.
Across the country this morning, people will be waking up determined that today is the day they will join their local fitness centre. And they will mean it. They will pop along and hand over £50 a month for what, in the end, will be the six most expensive workouts they will ever have. Be in no doubt. The private gymnasium business is depending on it. Without the thousands of members who sign up for a full year in January and yet never visit after the first week of February, their profits would be shredded.
For those of us who (smugly) go all year round, the phenomenon is just something we have to endure. Eventually, the lightweights will be gone and it will be back to me and the other regulars: the bloke with the nipple rings, the woman who looks like Morticia Addams and the three beefy Poles who may or may not be in training to form their own paramilitary painting and decorating outfit.
It is, I concede, understandable. January feels like the beginning of something. It looks, if viewed purely, numerical, clean and unsullied and so we want to become clean and unsullied too. It is no accident that the government's Change4Life programme, a massive new advertising campaign designed to help families reduce the level of fat in their diets, improve their lifestyle and challenge the scourge of obesity, should have kicked off yesterday. It is an institutionalised version of that traipse down to the new members desk at the local gym.
The problem is that January is the very worst time to do it. When the days are shortest and the weather coldest, what we need is comfort and any regime that strips it away is hard to sustain. It may even be bad for you. Researchers at Michigan State University have found evidence that people on diets are more susceptible to flu. And when's the flu season at its peak? January of course.
When I finally decided to do something about my weight, I didn't do it in January. Or February. Or March. I did it in the month which for me, and so many others, marks the true beginning of the new year: September.
Yes, I know. At 42, I should probably have grown out of it, but I really can't shake the sense that the ninth month, when the schools go back for the new academic year, is the true fresh start. Plus, in September, the weather is clement, the flu season has not yet begun and you are still motivated by the excruciating summer holiday memory of the moment when you got into the swimming pool and the water got out.
So if you were planning to start the search for the new you today, give it up. Stick with the old you for now. Dig in under the duvet. You're too early, by 36 weeks. This is the route to a truly happy new year.
