Too much Hunny, not enough Celery

I read an article in The Times online in which they talk about ‘Health Expert’ Gillian McKeith’s new mail order service which she has launched on an unsuspecting public.

For those of you who don’t have the joy of being familiar with Ms. McKeith, she is a fierce, Scottish lady who frightens people into losing weight and becoming healthy via the power of her television show and a lot of alfalfa sprouts.  She is quite often seen leaping out of the shrubbery brandishing celery like a lethal weapon and screaming like a harpy about how ‘Dave’ who weighs 25 stone and lives off a diet of lard pies is about to expire on the spot. It’s more likely to be the shock at seeing a small, middle aged ginger woman leaping out of a laurel bush that will off him, rather than his diet of trans fats, but we don’t mention that.

Gillian’s preferred method of guiding people to the promised land of beetroot smoothies and and raw mung beans is hectoring.  Once Dave has been resuscitated with a bit of wet celery leaf he is frogmarched home and forced to turn over the contents of his kitchen to Gillian’s critical eye.  She inevitably piles the table with family sized bags of pickled onion flavoured Monster Munch and bars of Dairy Milk so large you could use them as a raft to escape damp holiday  cottages in the Lake District, and smacks him about with a bit of two by four, all the while referring to his imminent demise.

She then takes him to the local church hall where some brave researcher has put together the entire contents of Dave’s diet over the space of a week, on fourteen trestle tables in the manner of the most unhealthy Harvest Festival on the planet.  At this point, Dave usually breaks down in a quivering mass of chins and snot, while undertakers promenade solemnly past the window, groaning under the weight of a Dave sized coffin, just to emphasis the message: ‘Mung beans or death.’

Gillian’s message is tough love.  She guides him to the table of enlightenment and gives him a ring binder full of recipes entitled: ‘Forty ways with celeriac’, and lets him get on with it.  Just so that he doesn’t slack off and pay too much mind to the call of the kebab shop across the road, she spends the next month harrassing him with a series of surprise, ninja raids involving things like forcible trampolining lessons or fresh air and star jumps.  Dave is a wreck.  He spends all night, paranoid and wakeful, wondering if Gillian is going to creep out from under the duvet and lecture him on how many calories he could lose via a vigorous bout of copulation.  He is not happy.  His eye starts to twitch.

Still, at the end of the month he is a shadow of his former self and able to do star jumps without having to replace the paving stones on the patio.  Gillian has triumphed.

I have left one important event out of this litany of torture. 

The pooh.

Gillian is quite literally obsesssed with pooh.

In the course of every programme there comes a point where she forces her unwilling victim to take a dump in a small, tupperware container.  She then dons her rubber gloves with a brisk and enthusiastic snapping sound, and proceeds to open the box and prod around in it with great gusto.  During these poohtastic hi jinks she is often accompanied by men who look like Brains from Thunderbirds and who wield clipboards with professional ease.  They are expert in pulling those faces which say: ‘This is disgusting and yet highly and scientifically fascinating at the same time.’

Gillian reads the pooh in the manner of a Roman soothsayer looking at some particularly juicy goat entrails.  From the pooh prodding session she is able to tell her victim/patient exactly what is wrong with them (too much sweetcorn) and how that can be fixed (too many mung beans).

The most amazing thing to me is her obsession with the smell.  She is frankly disgusted by the smell of the pooh.  It is awful.  The pooh smells dreadful.  She has a special ‘pooh smelling’ face in which she wrinkles up her nose in the manner of Samantha in Bewitched when faced with a drain that Darren has failed to rod properly.  The fact that the pooh smells is apparently the final insult to Gillian’s ginger sensibilities.  She declares on national television on a weekly basis that ‘pooh should not smell if it is healthy pooh.’  The brains with the clipboards nod wisely in accord with their evil mistress. No, pooh should not smell.  Good heavens, what a ludicrous thought.

I am always nonplussed by this.  If this is the case then me, and everyone else I know who I have had the misfortune to share a bathroom with are on the verge of extinction.  I may be a freak, or just live in a particularly unhealthy area of the country, but I have never, ever in the history of ever, come across a non smelly pooh either human or animal.  It is, I have been led to believe, one of the fundamental properties that defines pooh, its unpleasant smell.  I thought that it had multiple important functions, such as stopping children from thinking that it may taste as much like chocolate as it looks and eating it.  Which is, of course, a jolly good thing.

But apparently I am wrong and have just been complicit in a massive social illusion.

Gillian is right. 

And to prove how right she is, she is now inviting members of the public to pooh in a tupperware container and send it to her for analysis, so she can tell you how horribly smelly you are and that if you cut down on sweetcorn and ate more mung beans and roses all would be well and you would live for a hundred years.

For this public service you must pay her the princely sum of £360 per pooh. 

Rubber gloves are not cheap.

I can however, offer you a diagnosis for free, should you be contemplating this particular route to health.

Anyone who is thinking of squeezing one of their freshly laid turds into a tupperware container and sending it via the power of Royal Mail to a celery obsessed television celebrity with no medical qualifications and paying them £360 of your English pounds for the privilege needs their head examining first before we have to worry about what’s coming out the other end.

Lunacy. Sheer lunacy.