A foolproof guide to achieving bodily perfection Ð the HSE way

Date Published: {J}

For those of you holding in your girth just now so that you can get close enough to the table to eat your egg and chips, the accompanying photograph is brought to you as an incentive to show you what your family could look like if only they would only obey a small few simple rules.

It comes free gratis, with the compliments of the HSE – which is not a phrase you hear too often these days – and, having taken a good look at it (don’t get the egg yoke all over it) it’s now just a few easy steps to a blonde wife, a beefy husband and two gorgeous children who would wipe the floor at the Olympics of bonny baby competitions.

It accompanied a substantial body of advice from the Community Nutrition & Dietetic Service of HSE West, which is advising parents to encourage their children to make healthy lifestyle choices every day.

And that’s a most worthy aspiration, because recent research from the WHO Childhood Obesity Surveillance Initiative found that 26% of girls and 18% of boys aged seven are overweight or obese. And I will never be mistaken for a beanpole myself either.

But there’s losing a bit of weight and there’s perfection – and personally I’ve never seen such a beautiful family, although the downside of that must be the pressure to get into the bathroom before leaving the house in the morning.

All of the All Bran and wholemeal bread inthe world couldn’t have me reshaped like this perfect Dad; in actual fact, Caroline Morahan’s Cosmetic Surgery Programme on TV3 couldn’t do. To be honest, a Continuity IRA man with a half a ton of Semtex couldn’t manage it if he detonated it in front of my face.

So perhaps I’m green with envy when I really should be eating my greens.

But I might be more inclined to see this target as attainable if one of the children had a scrape on the forehead or a bruise on the arm, or Daddy’s teeth weren’t more perfect than Shergar’s, or Mammy’s effortlessly blonde hair had even the tiniest hint of a grey root.

Incidentally – and on a related topic – If I had tuppence for every time a proud mother confides that she thinks her little darling has been on this earth before, I’d be as wealthy as these mammies are deluded.

Just because a three month old baby picks up mammy’s mobile and puts it to his ear – as opposed to straight into his mouth – doesn’t actually imply they were once Methuselah in a previous life.

It just means that there’s an in-built acknowledgement that it’s hard to chew phones when you have no teeth.

And when, for example, a mammy tells you that their new born baby was smiling back at her before the umbilical cord was cut – “I know, I know; he’s not supposed to be able to but I just knew he knew me” – he wasn’t and he didn’t; he wasn’t looking at you because he can’t see anything much and he hadn’t a clue who you were either.

Equally he’s not smiling at you from the start, and when he gurgles something that sounds like Mama or Dada at three months, he actually just has wind and it came out in a funny way. And no matter how little sleep you’ve had over the last few months, you should always know the difference between a burp and a catchphrase.

It’s not just mothers of course who think their little darlings are the future of the species before they can even hold their own bottle – fathers have been known to whip out a few baby photos as well, even though nobody asked them to.

But by and large, it is the proud mammies who fly the flag for child prodigies and who believe they have a bond with their baby never before achieved since we humans lost the hair on the palms of our hands.

The painful truth is that little Johnny may indeed look like you, but chances are – if they handed you some other mother’s son from the maternity ward – you’d probably think he looked like you as well. Unless you were both different colours.

Anyway, back to the health and nutrition guidelines and the funny thing is that our family, which as far as we know has not been here before in a previous guise, follows at least half of the suggestions already, without it making the slightest impact.

We eat breakfast and dinner to the point that we can honestly say we do make mealtime a priority – so much so that we prioritise practising our eating between mealtimes as well.

Okay, so the kids don’t necessarily see vegetables as mouthwatering snacks and if they found one in their lunchbox they’d probably ring Rentokil. But we’ve been known to walk to places as well. We have to; sometimes the remote control is on the other couch.

Obesity is a serious issue and we should be taking greater care of ourselves and the kids, but suggesting we could look like this with anything less than massive liposuction and full facial transplant is undoing the good of it.

The only way to look like this is to scan this photograph, have it enlarged to the size of your bathroom mirror and pose in front of it – standing very still – as a family once a week or so.

Then settle back on the couch with a beer and a Yorkie bar – but do walk to the fridge rather than sending the children when you need another cold one.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.