Football fever!

Yes, its the World Cup. No, I'm not a fan of football, but I'm not afraid to support my country. At the time of writing, its 1 all in the England-USA match, and basically, USA are going DOWN!! Well, we'll see.


So, what am i getting at? Well, two things, firstly, the playing of football, and secondly, the watching of football.
I'd just like to point out to all you Americans, by football i mean 'soccer', the real football, not your fake version. Anyway, I loose track of myself. Onwards.

Here in the UK (I'm not sure I'm able to say for sure about the US or other countries, I've never been away during the world cup), there is a habit of mixing watching the footie with rather a large amount of beer. Now I am not going to be an annoying party pooper and say NAY yee must not driketh of beer, for two reasons, firstly you'll think I'm a dick, and secondly it just won't work, so why bother.

This goes for any kind of big event in which you feel the need to congregate around a tiny pub TV screen with a beer in hand watching tiny men on the screen running towards a net (reminds me of fishing...) and feeling the need to hold a beer (or other alcoholic beverage) in hand, probably accompanied by a large amount of finger food including barbecue, or nuts, (I don't mean you eat a barbecue, that would be silly, you eat whats cooked on it).

Basically, if you are drinking a lot of alcohol there are a few things you have to be aware of. Firstly is the calories in beer and other drinks. I'm not one for counting calories with military precision, but what I'm trying to get at is if you're tipping down you 6 beers plus fatty sausages off the barbie, there is more in it than perhaps you think. And very little in the way of nutrients or anything of any benefit. Now I'm hoping that if you're reading these blogs, you care about such things. If you don't care, keep buggering on, I don't care about you, either.

There is a fairly common rule among most (decent) diet guides which roughly equates to around 90/10. By that I mean, follow the diet 90% of the time, and do as you please for 10%. This is often very misinterpreted as follow it for 27 days a month then for the last 3 days PIG OUT every month. No, no, no, no, NO! It means follow the diet as well as you can all the time, be perfect, but then if your friend is throwing a party you won't feel guilty for having a second piece of cake, because you're good the rest of the time. This applies for communal sporting events also, if you maintain impeccable nutrition in the build up, you can reward yourself with a drink and some... urm... nuts. Just don't make a habit of it. I bet even the fittest people you know splash out occasionally on some sort of 'evil food'.

If you consider yourself a bit of a party animal, then your nutrition is going to have to be bloody amazing if you are hoping to maintain health to any degree, otherwise the excessive alcohol consumption and general lack of sleep is going to catch up with you rather quickly.



The second point is one you probably don't really want to read about because you know all about it yet you do it anyway. But for the benefit of those who don't know, alcohol is a poison!!!! It affects your brain, and tips a load of poison into your liver. Now its your liver's job to clear out poison, its pretty good at it. Its just not so keen on having huge amounts of the stuff poured on it all at once, or fairly consistently over a long period of time. And just because you haven't had liver failure and nearly died doesn't mean A) its not going to happen ever (people often get liver failure long after they stop drinking... be a bit forward thinking) B) mean you have a healthy liver. If you don't have a healthy liver, your body can't deal with other nasty stuff, so you're more likely to die.

Oh yeah, it also kills brain cells, so if you're hoping to be the next Einstein, don't drink (oh, and good luck). By the way please don't comment with some rubbish saying it was very likely that Einstein did drink... I will just laugh at your bad health. You may not feel the effect of it on your brain now, but I'd be willing to bet that if you get 2 people of identical intelligence at birth, one drinks and one doesn't, the one who never drank would perform significantly better on intelligence tests, from quite a young age (after the person starts drinking, obviously).


So yeh, I'm not going to be dumb and say don't do it, I just thought I'd make sure you know what you're doing. Have fun, enjoy life, its too short to be obsessed by fitness and well being, but don't make it shorter by being naive of it.