Gabby Logan was on Desert Island Discs yesterday morning. I vaguely knew she was a sports presenter of some kind but I had not got much of a real idea who she was so I googled her. Here’s a bit of Wikipedia information:
“Gabrielle Nicole Logan is a Welsh presenter and a former international rhythmic gymnast who represented Wales and Great Britain. She hosted Final Score for BBC Sport from 2009 until 2013. She has also presented a variety of live sports events for the BBC, including a revived episode of Superstars in December 2012 and the London Marathon since 2015. Since 2013, she has co-hosted Sports Personality of the Year for the BBC and she presented the second series of The Edge in 2015.“
It’s still quite an achievement to be a female sports reporter and she told of the “banter” she had to put up with in her early years in the almost entirely male club of sports reporters - comments about her shape, questions about how many top footballers he had had to take to bed to get on in the profession! Now, she said, she wonders if she should not have called them out for their misogyny but at the time she was simply determined to prove that she could be a success. Despite her claims to be very pleased with the diversity that now exists in sports reporting, she is still in a minority. You only need to look at the panel on Match of the Day, very much a lads’ club, even with its good ethnic mix. But then, I wonder about the make-up of the crowds of supporters at football matches, probably still very male dominated.
She also talked about her early teenage years as a gymnast when she and all the other young female gymnasts were obsessed with maintaining their pre-pubescent shape. It wasn’t, she maintained, that they were being bullied into it by their trainers, definitely not a case of abuse this time. In fact, she said, they would probably have appreciated some real and useful advice on what they should and shouldn’t be eating. She and her fellow young gymnasts would go on obsessive diets where they ate only one foodstuff for weeks at a time. She spoke of surviving on tomatoes! Now she speculates on how close she might have been to having an eating disorder but recognises that her mother was monitoring the situation. Besides, she was already sensible enough to realise that she needed more just tomatoes to be have the energy to compete.
I was reminded of a friend of mine back in the late 1980s who went on a diet of hard boiled eggs and black coffee. She lost weight but goodness knows what such a diet did to her system.
Later in the morning, on the Food Programme, they were talking about people going on post-Christmas diet and fitness routines, in some cases men being urged on by their teenage sons to tackle early middle-age spread. (By the way, when does middle age start these days?)
One of the commentators admitted to being on the keto diet, a new one for me. When I investigated it I wondered if it was so called because of a nutritional therapist called Kerry Torrens. After all, so many things get their name from odd combinations of the name of the person who came up with the idea. But it seems to have more to do with someone called Russell Morse Wilder, an American I think, who coined the term ketogenic diet to describe a diet that produced a high level of ketone bodies in the blood (ketonemia) through excess fat and lack of carbohydrates. Apparently it has been used to help,prevent seizures in children. There you go.
As with so many such diets there is a list of stuff you can and can’t eat, the latter being almost all pasta and bread and pastries and, surprisingly, a whole lot of fruit and fruit juices. Avocado OK! Bananas bad! Here’s a link to some information about it.
And here’s a link to an article I found today about plants and how they are able to communicate and think.
I confess that my first reaction to the headline was: whatever will the vegans be able to eat now? And then I really enjoyed the closing paragraph:
“I would say breatharianism – only “eating” air – is due a revival, but it is mad, dangerous and probably a cult, so no. Alternatively, we could fly in the face of decades of medical advice and stick to stuff with no discernible relationship to anything living: the Irn-Bru diet?”
After all, we all know that Irn-Bru is made from girders in Scotland. So that’s all right.
With that, I am about to put my boots on and go for a walk in the sunshine. This morning we have had snow - briefly - but now the garden is mostly white, where the sun has not reached it, but the sky is blue! Pleasingly odd!
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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