Fad Diets

Have you ever stopped to try and count how many fad diets there are out there? There are far too many to count. The blood group diet, the atkins diet, the gi diet, slim fast, weight watchers, rosemary connely diet. There are even companies that will pre prepare food and deliver it to you, for a hefty price. But how many of these diets really work, and work with lasting effects? The truth, very few. If things worked, then there would be far few of these diets around. The truth is, the key to losing weight is a numbers game. Calories in, calories out, and people on these fad diets are just too lazy to crunch the numbers, do a bit of exercise and lose the weight they want to lose. I’ve done it with counting calories and exercise. It takes at most an hour a day. I get to have my treats as long as the numbers add up, and I’m losing weight. No ridiculous detox, no extortionate prices, just simple counting. When are we going to stop these companies from taking our money and our control away. You and only you have control over the weight that you lose and gain! It’s about time that we all take responsibility for our own bodies and choices and stopped relying on random companies who, lets face it, are generally only interested in earning money.

Take Responsibility

It’s a word we hear often. Responsibility. Not one we use that often though. People are quite happy to shirk responsibility if it gets them an easy ride. There aren’t many who will actually stand up and be counted. Imagine if we had national service nowadays. How many people would actually volunteer. It  seems that in this day and age, people have decided that it is better to take the easy option. and in doing so are making the world a worse place. It is time that we all stood up and took responsibility for things in this life, before this world becomes one full of lazy cowards who are unable to even remember what the word responsibility means!

In the style of…

I was set a writing task last week, to write a piece in the style of a famous writer. It was not something I’d ever thought of doing, and have no where near finished it, but found it surprising, how difficult it was, firstly, to decide on a style, and secondly, to actually focus on writing in that style.

I circled through several different options, ranging from Sylvia Plath, to Sue Mayfield, to John Marsden, to Emily Bronte, before finally deciding on Jane Austen. I chose her style, because it is a completely different style to my normal style of writing. It is a classical style, which shows major preoccupation with decorum, etiquette, and behaving in a proper way. Austen uses these conventions, and then presents challenges to them, generally through the voice of her main character. Austen is very socially conscious, and her characters, although central, are almost secondary to the plot. She is not a hysterical writer, and does not focus on the innermost workings of her character’s minds. The idea of experimenting with this style appealed to me for just this reason. I always focus on the internal worlds of my characters, and tend to neglect the external. It will be interesting for me to develop this story, and see if I can change my style or not. Watch this space…