Really keen coaches (i.e. control freaks) , as well as trying to make you
swim faster than is natural, often try to control every other aspect of your
life as well. Chief among their lifestyle obsessions is diet. I was brought
up in an age when 'diet' meant trying to loose weight, but nowadays your
diet is everything you eat, whereas what the coach would have you eat is
your 'nutritional regime'. "You are what you eat" they tell us.

I was pondering this thought while observing a group of early-teen club
swimmers waiting for the transport to an away gala recently. The boys seemed
mostly to be consuming the contents of their noses, inserting their fingers
so far up their nostrils in pursuit of the king of bogies, that I could hear
scraping noises coming out of their ears. Meanwhile, the girls seemed to be
using their hair as straws to suck out their brains. The logical conclusion
of this self cannibalism is that both groups would end up with nothing left
in their heads at all, vindicating the club coach's many comments on their
IQ. 'You eat what you are', can also apply I thought.

However, the more orthodox interpretation of the old saying uses the logic
which says that you are the net result of that which goes in, less that
which goes out. Something rather magical happens in between, or else we
would all look rather like an overfilled hamburger (in John Prescott's case
perhaps the magic is missing). The magic is, we are told, the body's
metabolic chemistry. Coaching tradition has it that if you stock the old bod
up with that which is Good For You, and keep it short of that which is Bad
for You, you will end up with a Better Body. It's a starting point I
suppose, but it poses the question of how do you know what is Good and Bad ?
The answer you get depends on when and where you ask the question.

When I was a lad and I accompanied my Mum shopping with her ration book
(this was just after the send world war and you were luck to get any food at
all), we were told that to be healthy you should eat fried eggs and bacon
with toast and dripping for breakfast, red meat for lunch and red meat again
for dinner, washed down with Guinness if you were old enough, if not then
full cream milk. Bread was white and served with about ½ inch (that's about
1 ¼ cm to you) of butter on it, with a slab of cheese the size of the
cenotaph. Not only was the milk recommended, it was actually compulsory at
school, until Margaret Thatcher discovered her talent for redundancy by
firing all the nation's milk monitors. Potatoes were to be avoided because
they made you fat, and pasta because it was foreign. Coffee was all four
star, and kept you awake all afternoon. Added to this we were all encouraged
to go out in the sun as much as possible and  film stars all smoked  both on
the screen and in real life.

Modern science has changed all that. Potatoes and pasta are now Good, and
most other things are Bad. So bad in fact that I suspect the nanny state
will soon ban them with the same conviction that it forced milk down my
adolescent gullet. Red meat already carries a health warning (when you are
allowed to buy it at all), so surely cheese will soon only be able to be
ordered from offshore internet grocers to be delivered by post in plain
brown envelopes along with all the other things you are ashamed of (like
Swimming Times). I foresee the  Food Police framing suspects  by planting
boiled eggs in their lunch boxes, or stop-and-search raids on suspected
milkmen. Indeed even skimmed milk, which already tastes like water, will be
classed as likely to deprave and corrupt the drinker and all milk will have
to be completely transparent. Chocolate will become a Class A drug due to
its addictive qualities and the tendency of users to go in to a dreamy
state.  Those things which are Good will be inflicted upon the young. Salad
Monitors will be appointed, and children refusing to eat the State Minimum
will be detained after school to program their word processors to print out
100 times '2 carrots good, 4 carrots better'. Vicars will entreat 'Lettuce
Pray', and the new digestive orthodoxy finally will be complete when
meetings are re-named gatherings (ie no meat) so as not to offend
vegetarians. Sunbathing will soon be made illegal and the only person who
still smokes in public is Ian Paisley - and that's from his ears. I suppose
we should be grateful that we are now recommended to drink 2 glasses of red
wine a day, but how the hell am I expected to cut down to that level?

In other words, ideas change. So how come they're so sure they've got it
right now? True, all the film stars who smoked have died of lung cancer, but
at least that cleared the way for a better looking and less smelly lot. But
I haven't died yet from all those eggs, meat, butter, and so on. I still go
out in the sun and haven't melted or whatever. Doubtless I shall join in the
class action of all those who went to school between 1948 and 1973 and had
milk forced down us, when we sue the Government for furred up arteries and
obesity, but my motive will be purely mercenary - and I haven't even felt
the need of counselling yet.

Where you ask,'What is Good For You?' also matters, in the answer you get.
Ask it at a body builders gym and you'll be told tuna, boiled eggs and
veterinary steroids (secretly they'll also add senna-pods - to keep such a
diet moving). Ask in a hospital kitchen and it will be boiled cabbage and
tapioca. Ask in a swimming pool café and it will be whatever the catering
manager happens to have in that day. If they really believed what all the
sports nutrition journals say, why are there chocolate and crisp machines
everywhere and not a single carrot vendor? Ask any coach what is Good and
they will probably tell you whatever they read on the health page of
Electronics Weekly yesterday.

Ahha! - you say - all you need to do is to see what the best swimmers eat
and do the same. Sorry, that doesn't work either. There are two types of top
swimmer. The first lot think what you eat is vital, and so keep their diet
secret so you won't get better than them. The second lot couldn't give a
damn, eat everything and still win.

The only thing I can add to this counsel of despair, from my own experience,
is that swimming definitely makes you hungry. So when you go swimming take
some of what you consider to be Good with you, so you can scoff it before
you get to the chocolate machine, or chip shop. I never follow this advice
myself, and am too often mugged by a Mars Bar on the way out of the pool. I
promise shall go on a diet though.. starting tomorrow.