Laura Davis: If guilt burned more calories, we’d all be really slim

Jan 7 2009 by Laura Davis, Liverpool Daily Post

HOW do you plan to spend your two hours 15 minutes worrying time today?

Will you, like the majority of the nation, dedicate the deepening of the old forehead grooves to the rising cost of living, energy prices, debt, the recession, job security, personal health and losing your looks?

Or do you have a more unusual, personal concern to ponder – perhaps that single, obstinate hair growing just underneath your chin or the number of your Facebook friends getting out of control.

Maybe you’ll spend it fretting about fretting – as a new survey by reallyworried.com, revealing we spend an average 135 minutes a day or 6½ years in a state of agitation, has given us something else to worry about.

And it’s even worse if you’re a woman – thanks for that – because the more lackadaisical attitude of men has skewed the figures. We spend seven years and 10 days stressing, compared to their five years, eight months and 23 days.

Optimists would argue this is something else women do better than men, self-empowerment gurus would put it down to the female aptitude for multi-tasking but I think it just gives us yet another excuse to buy expensive moisturiser, and consequently another reason to worry about debt, the rising cost of living, and losing our looks.

At this time of year, losing your looks is top of the anxiety agenda as sandwich shops experience a rush on salad leaves (no dressing), tarnished celebrities take extended leave from the supermarket check-out to launch a fat-busting DVD and numbers not seen since the Woolworths closing down sale all decide to join the gym on the very same day.

Signing up for a year’s access to a selection of figure-trimming contraptions creates its own concerns: Have you chosen the best deal? Does your gym have the crucial piece of equipment that Madonna/Gwyneth Paltrow/Mr T claims helps shift those stubborn last few pounds?

Will you actually go this year or spend the next 12 months imagining the holiday you could have bought with the money you are paying out for a service you never use? If only guilt burned more calories.

Even those who continue to make it through the door in the weeks after Valentine’s Day are not insouciant. There is still the agitation that accompanies every trip on the treadmill – will this be the time that you fly off the back, Ronnie Corbett-style?

And then there’s that terrifying machine with the steps that some women manage to bounce up and down on as if the “zero” on the label in the back of their Stella Does Adidas T-shirt referred to gravity instead of their dress size.