We were not, thank god, the great generation that fought tyranny and wrestled Europe from the hands of madmen. Nor were we the counter cultural dreamers of the 60's believing (however incorrectly) we were on the cusp of a new age of understanding. What will come to define us in the privileged western world is the changes brought about by the Internet, and in particular by people like Mark Zuckerberg, Serge Brin and Larry Page.

This is not an "everything new is terrible" type rant. The polarisation of debate, whereby every issue is represented by two entrenched camps who disagree on every point and see things in rigidly dogmatic terms, is itself a product of the media that currently defines our lives. One thing that seems universally true is things are rarely black and white and the truth is often somewhere in the middle. To wade in and say social networking is ruining human communication would be a facile echo of every reactionary down through history who thought the printing press was the work of Satan or taping songs from the radio would bring down the music industry.

Plus it would be hypocritical. I enjoy Facebook and twitter when I don't use them too much and I am grateful to live in a world where information has never been so accessible. I love the internet - But that doesn't mean we don't have problems.

We should have seen this coming. If there's one thing we excel at its seeking efficiency - the easy path. Take food for example. We need calories, and throughout history societies have been shaped by that drive to obtain and consume them. As we developed technologically we became more efficient at hunting and preparing food, and for a time maybe we even found a balance where the energy expended was matched by the calorific reward. The hunt and the farming earned the deer and the grain. This is the utopian concept of Arcadia, of living in balance with nature.

But we didn't stop there, we progressed to the point where highly calorific food can be obtained with no effort. But our bodies don't know it, we're still hard wired to consume, to eat now in case we don't get the chance again. We've built a delivery system that provides more than our bodies can process without developing the internal systems, the psychology, to deal with and regulate this unlimited availability.

So, inevitably, we got fat.

Now, with the bottom layers of Maslow's famous pyramid solidly in place (food, shelter) we've collectively moved onto the next level- friendship, recognition, achievement. And when I'm at my most pessimistic I feel that with the Internet we've built a delivery system just as efficient (and therefore potentially destructive) at satisfying those needs for friendship and recognition as the food system is at satisfying our more basic appetites. We've invented the relationship equivalent of empty calories.

I can't pretend to be immune to this, my girlfriend will tell you if she leaves the dinner table in a restaurant for a second my hand goes straight to my pocket to check email and Facebook, it's an unconscious reaction at this point. Those little red circled alerts in the top left hand corner of your page are perfectly engineered to prompt reward-seeking behaviour, the expectation of reward triggering a highly addictive hormonal cascade . Make no mistake , you are Pavlov's dog with an iPhone. Of course most friendships on Facebook aren't real friendships and no "like" or flattering comment can compare to recognition by someone you truly care about, but it's a cheap and abundant form of interaction.

Another brutally efficient delivery system is internet pornography (a word I've just noticed my prudish iPhone refuses to autocorrect). Porn delivers a quick dopamine hit, that rush of happiness we feel when we achieve something, it's association with sex having an obvious evolutionary benefit. But just as too much sugar reduces our insulin sensitivity, too much porn reduces our dopamine sensitivity . Like laboratory monkeys we keep hitting the feed button but eventually we require bigger hits to reach the same high.

Junk food, junk friendship, junk sex.

The pattern is the same; take something we're hard wired to crave and Darwinianly disinclined to limit our consumption of, something that was once a self-limiting commodity requiring work to obtain , then refine it, strip it of its most enriching components and make it freely and infinitely available.

Take the brakes off our primal desires and we run into problems.

But let's not freak out just yet. If we're smart enough to invent the Internet surely we can become smart enough to use it responsibly.

The junk food parallel is instructive. Just as there's no problem with having unhealthy foods in moderation, so it is with social media and the Internet . I don't want to be alarmist and pretend this is the biggest cultural problem we're facing and of course there a benefits.

One criticism that tends to be levelled at things like Facebook is that the friendships are meaningless,

"If they're really your friends just call them up or email them or see them in person."

But I disagree, I see my real friends in person all the time, regardless of Facebook. What social media is good for is maintaining soft contacts with people who, at any other point in history, you would have lost touch with. It shouldn't be seen as a replacement for true friendship and it never will be. It is a new medium and in many ways a fascinating one, for the first time we are communicating in real time via text and the methods we've developed to quickly convey emotions are interesting to watch as they emerge and evolve.

Simply by being aware that problems can arise, you can start to recognise them if they do. A friend of mine recently came off Facebook because it was stressing him out and making him less productive. I noticed something similar a few years ago and instigated a "cull" which I still ruthlessly enact when I see idiotic "sweat is fat crying" type slogans or constant promotion of a product or service.

But just as with nutrition, relying on willpower alone is less effective than building habits that naturally limit your usage.

Turn your phone off or go for walks without it regularly.

Use apps like AntiSocial to disable social networks when you're working on something and need to eliminate distractions.

As ever, make time to see and speak to your friends for real. Life has always thrown up distractions that can get in the way of our fundamental need to socialise. Social media is no different, we still need to make an effort.

Now please share and tweet this blog.

You probably have a vague notion of these things: Lie in a tank, suspended in salt-water in total silence and total darkness. With no sensory input, unloaded by gravity and drifting in blackness you can supposedly put the meditative process on steroids. Instant zen. Floatworks near London Bridge is the premiere venue so I booked a course and was on my way.

The tank originated in the fifties, a golden age of psychological and behavioral research. Timothy Leary and his cohorts at Harvard were bringing a scientific legitimacy to the field of psychedelics, and John C Lilly was busy loading students up on LSD and locking them in the tank for up to ten hours at a time. If you’ve ever seen the movie “Altered States” with William Hurt you get the idea. Hurt plays a Lilly-esque professor exploring the outer psychic reaches through the LSD/tank combo. The upshot? He devolves into a prehistoric ape-man and slashes a hole in the fabric of reality (a sequence which inspired the music video for Take On Me by Aha, fact fans.) I’ve never experimented with psychedelics in my life and on a list of places to try them a silent, black, watery coffin is not even in my top ten. So I chose to forego the LSD and combine simple meditation with sensory deprivation.

At Floatworks, before I get anywhere near the tank, the mood is set. A book of artwork inspired by sensory deprivation lies on a coffee table. The imagery is typical new age stuff - sleeping bodies drifting in tranquility through Sergeant Pepper landscapes. I’m handed a booklet that quickly answers any questions I have about the session - How do you know when the session is over? (Relaxing music plays for the last five minutes) How do you get out of the tank? (You push it open.) An aquarium bubbles away serenely in the background. All in all, everything that can possibly be done to assuage my anxieties and enhance the experience is done.

I meet Peter, the manager, who astutely notes the contradictory position I’m in: Writing an article about altered states, constructing a narrative even as I’m having the experience, is not exactly conducive to the kind of “in-the-moment” mindfulness required to actually have it. He tells me to just focus on my breathing, have no expectations, and relax.  

The tank itself is beautiful - far from the welded, clanking death box of the William Hurt movie, more like the stasis pods from the film Alien if Steve Jobs had designed them. It’s bigger than I’d imagined with plenty of room to drift without bonking the sides, which would tend to harsh your mellow. I have a quick shower, pop in some ear-plugs, climb in and close the lid.

It’s dark, obviously, and silent except for my own blood pumping around my head. The water temperature is so perfectly matched to my own body that the divide between air and water is barely perceptible. I lie back and float, and wait.

Many people are put off by meditation because they have a mistaken impression of the goal, which is not the absence of thought. A truly blank mind is unattainable for all but the most devout BNP member, and trying to achieve it is as futile as trying really hard not to think about a polar bear. The more you try the more you think of the polar bear.

We go in and out of meditative states throughout the day without noticing. If you just detach from what’s around you, allow thoughts to come and go rather than holding onto them, and then redirect your attention to something simple like your breathing, you are meditating. And the benefits are myriad and profound. People who meditate regularly have larger and thicker grey matter in the areas that deal with attention and processing sensory input; your brain literally grows, just like a muscle in response to exercise. When we consider that these areas of the brain usually degrade and thin as we grow older, this amounts to anti-aging.

Time in the tank moves differently. Without a frame of reference I quickly lose the ability to estimate how long I’ve been floating. The physical barrier of the walls helps with detaching from the world outside and I find it easy to forget about emails and obligations.

Over the next hour I lapse into long moments of non-thought, a sort of mental passivity, until my conscious mind notices and butts in with “hey look! I’m thinking about nothing” - at which point the spell is broken and I am of course thinking again. This happens repeatedly but in sum I am, if not quite transported to bodiless blissful oblivion, enormously relaxed.

But the most profound effects occur after I leave the tank.

Until I say it, it’s unlikely you’re currently aware that your shoes are full of feet. In other words, we tune out the constant sensory awareness that we have a body with weight and mass and skin rubbing against clothes. When I get out of the tank I feel, for the first time in my life, the physical weight of the biological machine I live in. It’s so striking I need to sit down for about twenty minutes, pupils dilated, gulping water and testing the weight of my arms. (Floatworks has an entire post-tank “chill out” area for this so it’s clearly a common effect.) Even hours after I’ve left, a shopkeeper appears to be speaking in fast-forward. That night’s sleep is like returning to the womb and I awake calm and refreshed.

Try the tank; you’ll like it, and I’ll definitely be booking more sessions. It probably helps if you’ve done some meditation in the past, but I think anyone will benefit from just slowing down for an hour and doing something solely for their own mental wellbeing.

That said, it’s not quite the shortcut to higher consciousness I’m looking for. I know I need to try different, maybe more extreme methods. I’ve got some travel coming up where I’ll take this experiment further. Also, chatting to Peter prior to my session he’d reminded me of something called the God Helmet.

It should be an interesting summer.

1 - At a certain point, how good you look is directly correlated with how boring a life you're willing to lead.

2 - Not everyone needs to drink in order to have a good time. A non-drinker will always be the first to inform you of this. However, often they will somewhat undermine their point by proceeding to be the most boring person in the room.

3 -Getting into truly remarkable shape requires an obsession with every morsel you put in your mouth on a par with, if not equal to, an eating disorder.

That's not necessarily always a bad thing. When done for a specific period of time and with a level of emotional detachment it can be a powerful and transformative learning experience. But when it becomes a chronic state, creates constant stress and prevents us from having a life outside of the relentless pursuit of a physical ideal, the eating disorder tag becomes more appropriate.

4 -Due to the constant need for new content and marketing, there's a massive emphasis on originality in the fitness industry. This is misplaced. People have been getting in great shape for years, the chance of a trainer actually coming up with a "revolutionary" system or exercise is pretty minimal.

5 - More money is made within the fitness industry from selling courses to trainers than from training the end user. To maintain demand, there is a lot of pressure on trainers to gain ever more technical knowledge, or at least attend more courses. This can become a pissing contest.

In reality, beyond a certain point, a trainer's technical knowledge has zero correlation with how successful they are. That doesn’t mean technical knowledge is a bad thing of course, and many trainers are happy to keep learning purely because they love the subject. But with the average client, this high level technical training knowledge is the equivalent of using a sledgehammer to crack a walnut.

The value that successful trainers provide isn’t their “super secret ab formula.”  It’s in how they communicate and empathise with their clients. They realise that the service is about the client’s values, not the trainer’s ego.

6 - Despite looking the part, people who have always naturally been in great shape often don't make great trainers. Having said that, a trainer who looks like they don't train at all is unlikely to inspire confidence.

7 - Occasionally a client comes along who is prepared and motivated to do anything you tell them. If you say "run through that wall", they'll say "how many sets?" These clients are a gift. You will get amazing results with them. But so would anybody. One way to get incredible results as a trainer is to consistently target and only ever train these clients. The catch is you won't be particularly busy and you will never stretch your coaching abilities.

The delivery of "Enlightenment.”

I'm an uber-rationalist. I believe in reality you can stub your toe on and the merest whiff of new age is enough to send me into a grand mal seizure of eye rolling.

But a scorn for new age bullshit doesn't preclude me from being fascinated with altered states. And there's only so much philosophising and pontificating you can do, eventually you've got to put your money where your aura is.

It’s like travel in a way. People say you should visit Las Vegas, or India, or the pyramids at least once in your life. Well, I feel the same about catching a glimpse of the infinite cosmic consciousness. Given the micro economy of methods promising to deliver psychic tranquility - sweat lodges, meditation retreats, flotation tanks and so on, and given the fact that the real goal of so many religious and cultural rituals is the inducement of that elusive state, I had to admit there was probably something to it.

Two Things Fascinate Me…

Thing 1- There's a part of your mind that's much smarter, funnier and more creative than you are. Most of the time the best you can do is glimpse it. The limbo moments before sleep where a brilliant solution pops into your head unbidden and fully formed. The precarious, golden half-hour when you've had just the right amount of booze to lubricate your thoughts and lower your inhibitions but not so much that you're drunk, and in that languid state you are at your wittiest, your most confident and urbane. Who is that guy and why can't you be him more often? We always contain the potential to be our best self, but our brain’s hardware tends to reign it in. For example - all moments of creative insight are preceded by a suppression of frontal lobe activity. That's why a solution often occurs when you're washing the dishes or going for a walk instead of actively thinking on it; the repetitive and simple task down-regulates frontal lobe activity and allows creative alchemy to occur. That frontal lobe is the gatekeeper of creativity, it keeps your genius self in check.

Could access to higher conscious states grant me power over that oppressive cortex and let me be that guy more often?

Thing 2- Not only is this state the common goal of everything from meditation and religious rituals to LSD use, there's a remarkable uniformity to the experience people describe when they achieve it. Without fail there's talk of a connection to the universe, of "oneness."

Ok, so far so boringly new age. And honestly the language of spirituality leaves me cold, relying as it does on a supernatural higher power in which I have precisely zero belief. But when smart, rational people take psychedelic drugs they without fail report the same sensation almost word for word. Why is that? Evidence of a shared dimension of human experience or just a weird cognitive illusion? just the psychological equivalent of those magic-eye 3D pictures, taking advantage of our brain chemistry to cool effect but ultimately banal and explainable ?

I want to find out.

In part two I’ll I try to remove my mind from my body through sensory deprivation.

It's no big deal really, there are worse intellectual crimes. Creationism for example, or liking dubstep. And yet every time we abandon a book halfway through it feels a little bit like a defeat.

It sits by the bed. Face down, spine broken, bulging slightly where you've folded a page as a bookmark. A page that will now (despite your half-hearted avowal to return to it) forever trumpet the moment of your abdication.

"Too tough for you was I? Never mind. I hear Dan Brown's got a new one in the works."

I'm a promiscuous reader; three or four books on the go at once, each assigned a rough apportionment based on its location in the flat, time of day or other factors. Even travel concerns affect the rota; bulky hardcover or ephemeral iphone download?

But, crucially, the system works. So when it breaks down and I find myself skipping over a book in my daily rounds, putting it off till tomorrow or (worse) forcing myself through a preordained number of pages simply to feel like I'm making headway, I get a little anxious.

It's not that I don't like reading. If anything it's that I love it too much. I just find it hard to commit. I see lists of "100 books to read before you die" as an objective scoring system, a method of quantifying just how uncultured I am.

The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu would say it's due to my lack of a traditional academic background . A university degree in a respected subject engenders security in one's own intellect. In contrast, to be self-taught, working in an industry without the agreed hierarchy of a traditional profession, one is more likely (says Bourdieau) to become an "anxious intellectual hoarder." Like an over-eater whose mind is on the next forkful instead of what's in their mouth, I catch myself worrying about the knowledge I'm missing out on even as I'm reading something I find fascinating.

Not all books provoke conclusion anxiety of course. short story anthologies or collected essays welcome the sporadic reader. A Clive James collection will be content to lie around till whenever we feel like dipping in. In contrast, a half-read War and Peace with its mercilessly vast and bafflingly polyonymous cast is some seriously guilt-inducing book shelf real estate. It will stand there, quietly judging until you come crawling back.

You could argue life's too short to persevere with any book that doesn't instantly grab you and compel you to keep reading. But almost by definition serious literature is the stuff that rewards effort, to shy away from any book that doesn't yield immediate superficial pleasure is to confine yourself to mass market page-turners.

My solution then, for the commitment shy bibliophile is to embrace both your literary sluttishness and a book-rotation system. Following multiple stories in weekly instalments is standard practice for comic book fans. It's also how we watch TV, barring the occasional single show box-set binge, so why be a monogamist in one medium when you already philander in others?

As for when to abandon books, of course it's a personal choice, but I suggest a 100 page rule. If you're that far in and not hooked, no matter how great the book is supposed to be, I say ditch it, guilt-free, and move on.

Kafka apparently reckoned that after a certain point books could finish anywhere, and even left some of his

Suppose I'm a genie, and I'm going to grant you the wish of a perfect holiday.

Stop for a second and form a picture of that holiday. Imagine it in detail. Where would you go? What would you do? What would you see and experience?

Build a vivid picture in your minds eye.

Now, hold on a second because I forgot the catch. At the end of the holiday I'm going to wipe your memory. You can do whatever you like, wherever you like, with whoever you like, but when its over you'll never know what happened.

Does that new information have any effect on your holiday plans? Be honest.

If you're like most people, when I first asked the question you thought of somewhere with amazing landscapes and culture, perhaps the temples of Thailand or the pyramids or the grand canyon. Or maybe you thought of an activity holiday, maybe swimming with dolphins or scuba diving in the great barrier reef.

Or maybe something different, but the motivation would have been the same - wether you realised it or not you wanted to create great memories.

When I gave you the additional information about the mind wipe, that changed. I bet your revised holiday plans were a lot more shallow and hedonistic, because ultimately your only criteria would be to experience immediate and short term pleasure.

What you've just seen is the tension that exists between your experiencing self and your remembering self. Two people you share your head with, both of whom are you, all of which has implications on your ability to live a healthy life.

You think you're one person. Or rather that your mind is a unified entity over which you have a good degree of control. But the modern model of how our brains work says otherwise - it says that your mind is an illusion, a construct you use to make sense of numerous competing agencies, each with different motivations.

Here's another example. I show you a list of movies that includes both frivolous comedies and worthy, "proper" films like Schindler's List. If I ask you to choose one to watch in two weeks time, there's a good chance you'll choose a serious film you perceive as more intellectually stimulating or educational. But if ask you to choose a film to watch immediately you're far more likely to choose the comedy. Instant gratification wins over long term benefit.

We all do this, we make unhealthy choices now because we want a quick buzz and because future consequences like getting fat are too gradual and too far off to offer enough disincentive ( this is called future discounting and it's why we continue to destroy our environment when all evidence shows it will eventually wipe us out).

To make matters worse, we excuse these behaviours by believing we'll make healthy choices in the future to compensate. We falsely attribute qualities to our future selves, like willpower and prudent decision making, even as we are demonstrating our lack of those qualities by eating foods we know are terrible for us.

You may want to be slim, and your remembering self may want to look back upon a life lived in a slim and fit body. Your experiencing self wants to live in a fit body too, but it also wants to have the taste of chocolate in its mouth right now.

This is before we even get into the powerful hormonal drivers of food addiction like dopamine. Dopamine is at the root of drug and alcohol addiction, it even drives romantic love. In a fight between dopamine and willpower, dopamine kicks willpower in the balls and sleeps with its sister for giggles.

So how can you better manage these mad people you share your brain with? These lazy hedonists, these oblivious pleasure seekers.

Your best weapon is knowing they exist, and planning ahead.

Know your willpower, however strong it seems now, will be weak again, so don't have food in your house unless you want to eat it.

Know your ability to make good decisions is finite and degrades as the day goes on, so get your training session in early if you can.

Know that as motivated as you feel right now, your tired and uninspired future self may not be so keen.

Meta-cognition, the ability to rise above the competing thought processes and observe them, can help tip the balance of power back to your more level headed self.

Because who do you want in the driving seat? The responsible, healthy-eating cultural explorer or the guy who wants to party in a Vegas hotel room and then order pizza?

Wait, don't answer that.

These days it seems the very worst thing you can be, the greatest cultural crime you can commit, is to be "negative".

The same people who feel this way are the first to issue that lazy platitude "we're all entitled to our opinion"

But it seems that's only partially true, we're only entitled to our opinion if that opinion is sufficiently sunny, positive and non-critical.

Ironically (or perhaps predictably) we encounter this most in the fields which prompt and indeed deserve the most criticism.

Religion. Self help. Alternative medicine. Conspiracy theories.

To be critical of these is to be a "negative person", and a negative person is the antithesis of what all right-thinking people should be which is of course -"open minded".

Open mindedness is a quality so fetishised it's beyond reproach, beyond rebuttal, it's the default correct position in any debate.

"Well I can't say I know much about homeopathy but there must be something to it'

"Well I was always sure we had landed on the moon but where there's smoke there's fire. I mean, who's to say?"

This is anti-wisdom. Not only does it shut down debate it actually makes a virtue out of ignorance.

Maybe open mindedness once meant looking at the available evidence and making an informed decision; creating mental filters for what you deem credible sources of information. But the term has been warped to mean unrestrained credulity. To have an open mind is to mindlessly believe everything, that every opinion carries equal weight. (Provided it's not negative of course)

Well bollocks I say.

To clarify, you are of course entitled to express your opinion. You are not however, automatically entitled to have it taken seriously. Particularly if it's unsupported by any credible evidence or reasoned argument.

You are entitled to believe in creationism or crystal healing or cosmic ordering or astrology. You're quite capable of being a nice person while doing so.

But don't expect the rest of us to value your ideas as much as the sum of all human learning, simply by virtue of them having popped into your head.

You're entitled to claim that positive thinking will solve my problems, make me rich and happy beyond my wildest dreams, and if you're part of the self help or motivational industries you're entitled to put a price tag on that information. But you should be open minded enough to know you are not above criticism, not every critic is a “negative thinker” or “hater” - now and then they’ll have a point.

You are entitled to believe that I'm being overly negative now, so let me end on a positive note.

 Critical thinking was the driving force behind the Age of Enlightenment, a movement spearheaded by such Negative Nigels as Isaac Newton and Voltaire. It led directly to modern medicine, the scientific revolution, the rise of the arts and democracy in Europe and equal rights for women. And one of its central tenets was that no one is above criticism.

If the architects of the enlightenment were around today, scathing as they were of superstition and the church, they'd be told to be more open-minded. 

In science when you have an idea you try and prove it wrong. And if you find you can't disprove it yourself you ask your peers to try, and they rip it apart. And if they can't rip it apart then maybe you have an idea that will make our lives easier or more fulfilling or even prevent someone from dying.

Critical thinking then, what some call negativity, is quite simply how we get better.

I'm sure of it. In fact I'm absolutely positive.

(I'm in Thailand writing a piece for OutThere Magazine, hence this off topic post. Enjoy the London weather- Zack)

I'd just spent a happy hour in a mostly-empty bar, drinking Chang beer by the bottle and watching a man and his monkey. He, a Thai local, stood on the adjacent street corner hawking pictures with his furry colleague for 100 baht a pop and business was in rude health. Over and over, the European tourists who swarmed phi phi's hot night-time streets were drawn to the monkey. They stroked his fur, held his hand and laughed when he gamely clambered up their arm and plonked himself on their shoulder, draping a oversized arm around their neck or leaning lazily on their head.

Hard-looking, skinheaded and boozed-up Brits melted into childish gaiety, and for the most part handled the monkey with a sweet gentleness and respect. Meanwhile the Thai man was making about 2,000 baht an hour by my reckoning - around 40 quid.

The monkey, meanwhile, was paid in shoots. This, it occurred to me, was a monkey with a job.

And after considering the philosophical implications of this, as well as calculating the local man's hourly rate against my own in London when factoring in the vastly cheaper cost of living on this beach bar paradise - and pondering the price of a monkey, and drinking more Chang - I decided to move on.

Just across the street was a kickboxing bar. I entered and took in the dissonant decor, for the most part modelled on a fifties American diner or bowling alley, or an impression of one (cobbled together from what? Happy Days repeats ?) but dominated by a kickboxing ring. Raucously drunk tourists were stationed in tiered seating at the rear and plastic chairs at the front. Groups of them sat around buckets of beer, directing their cheers at the morbidly obese man in the Hawaiian shirt and boxing gear, currently doing the robot in the ring.

This guy was a performer.

Alternately popping and locking, encouraging the crowd to keep cheering, or throwing air-punch combos, ducking and bobbing with an agility that mocked his bulk.

I signalled to the waitress for a beer and installed myself on the edge a ringside table.

The bell sounded and what turned out to be the final round commenced. The fat man danced toward his opponent. Each party tossed out cautious jabs, circled around, ducked and bobbed because that's what you do. There was a messy, stumbling clinch which the ref swiftly broke up. More dancing. Then, with a speed that probably surprised him as much as the giddy audience, the big guy threw an out-of-nowhere right cross that landed with slapping impact on his opponents jaw. The smaller man's legs immediately gave up any notion of holding him aloft. He went down like a sniper victim.

The crowd oohed, then applauded, then laughed. We looked around , sharing the absurd moment with our neighbours.

To his credit he was right back on his feet, he'd clearly gone down from the surprise as much as the impact.

But the round was over. The bell rang and after a perfunctory, suspense-free pause, the ref hoisted the big guys arm in the air to deafening applause.

To tell the truth, there hadn't been much skill on display. But considering they were just tourists plucked from the crowd, drunk and inexperienced, they had put on a good show.

There was a lull then while the fighters removed their gear and left the ring. Rap music blared, people bought the big guy beers and slapped him on the back. I did too.

Then a frisson of excitement spread, the next fighters had climbed into the ring, and they were girls.

One just stood there slouching slightly. She was tall and French-looking and didn't look to be taking it too seriously.

The other though, had the bearing of expertise, albeit a dainty kind - as though her training was more in ballet than in boxing. But she had an air of confidence that was lacking in her blithe opponent. She put on her headgear and shin guards with an ease that suggested it was a familiar action, then started to perform various stretches and warm up manoeuvres that looked half practiced and half made up on the spot for something to be doing.

They then backed into their corners. the Thai referee approached each in turn. From his gestures it was clear he was explaining the ground rules. He slammed his elbow into his opposite clasped palm, then waved his index finger in admonishment. No elbows.

He drove his knee into an imaginary set of ribs and issued an identical warning.

Finally he mimed throwing his opponent to the mat, then abruptly turned his palms to the floor and spread his arms apart in a gesture of finality. No hitting when they're down. other than that, we could infer, it was fair game.

The music cut out and the ref summoned the two girls to the centre of the ring. They touched gloves, and we were off.

Unlike the men's fight there was no prancing preamble, none of the wary dancing around that had typified the earlier rounds, where neither guy was quite ready to commit himself to a punch thrown with real, damaging intent. The girls were on eachother immediately with a flailing ferocity, surprising the audience into nervous laughter.

Blond hair flew. Both girls were holding nothing back; they jabbed and grabbed, swung kicks to the knee and ribs and head with an intent to hurt that had been utterly absent in the men's bouts.

Women fighting, properly fighting, is like babies crying. It's upsetting on a gut level. conflicting male prerogatives to intervene and prevent harm on one side, and to never man-handle or be in any way rough with women on the other make a uniquely distressing concoction. The artifice of the setting, it's staging for our putative entertainment, enhanced rather than assuaged these feelings. I put down my drink and headed home.

But the next night I came back. And I got my picture taken with the monkey.

For more reactionary commentators these headlines land at their feet like a large stick to beat the "nanny statists" with, distorting the argument with the suggestion that the government want to ban sugar.

I don't believe in prohibition, but prohibition was not actually suggested as a serious option. What is worth talking about is the degree of influence the government should have on what we eat.

Having never been forced to eat a donut at gunpoint I am aware of the personal responsibility argument. At some point we all make a choice about the foods we put in our mouths. Where I diverge from right wing rhetoric is in seeing this as the beginning of the conversation, not the end.

Simply saying "it's all down to personal responsibility" and leaving it there achieves nothing. Yes at some point people choose what to eat, but a complicated set of social forces have led up to the point that you or I or anyone else makes that decision.

The government already have an influence on what we eat and how fat we become, if we want to improve obesity levels in this country then we need discuss how to affect those forces without conflating it with balaclava'd government workers smashing through our kitchen window and snatching the bowl of coco pops from our hands.

The question is not should the government have an influence it's how can that influence be used in the most positive and productive way possible without infringing on our liberties.

We give companies the ability to advertise harmful foods to children in a misleading way. We make healthier food more expensive and harder to come by. We create living environments not conducive to active lives. We then chastise the obese for not exercising their personal choice as if they made that choice in a vacuum.

Again, this gets us nowhere. Every example of successful public health initiatives shows that for people to make healthy choices they must become easy choices and they must become fashionable choices. Say what you like about the "foodie" movement - it most certainly has it's cringeable aspects and is largely a wealthy/middle class phenomenon - but it's proof of concept that large sections of the population can be incentivised and mobilised to seek out healthier foods. This in turn generates the market forces necessary to make such foods more accessible across the board.

Personally I think Jamie Oliver's projects are on the right track precisely because he hasn't sat around and bitched about ideology. He's just got on with attacking the problem at both grass roots and political levels.

Education alone doesn't work any better than the passive and defeatist "personal responsibility and that's the end of it" approach. We either believe in intervention or we don't, so lets try and fix this or shut up and pick up the NHS bill in 20 years time when we really are screwed.

Why not discuss the idea of reducing the amount of a substance we know to be harmful in a food we feed to kids? If people want more sugar they can make the personal choice to sprinkle it on themselves.

But this is just tinkering around the edges, more needs to be done...

Why not look at how foods are marketed at children?

Why not explore how to make it cool to care about food quality, not just amongst the well-off but for everyone?

Why not look at ways to make our communities more conducive to leading active lives?

While none of this is solely the government's responsibility, like it or not the government does have an influence on our health. But we have a pretty powerful influence on them. The question is do we want it to be a positive one?

(I wasn't going to post this as it's a teensy bit off-topic, but this week it's what I got. I'll write something about fat loss next week - Zack)

This weekend I read Mortality by Christopher Hitchens, a collection of his final essays for Vanity Fair documenting his experience with oesophageal cancer. It's a moving and thoroughly unsentimental book, an antidote to the mawkish likes of Randy Pausch's Last Lecture.

Hitchens illustrates (with greater style and persuasiveness than I could muster on my best day, despite being monged out on radiation and chemo while writing it) the biggest gripe I have with the portrayal of cancer victims in the media.

They're brave heroes in a battle we're told, "fighters" who can "beat this thing".
It's well meaning and quite natural to want to offer encouragement to someone in a terrible situation. But it has some ugly implications, for example -

If cancer is a battle, a fight one either wins or lacks the grit to wage, then doesn't that make you a loser if you die from it? Is cancer a meritocratic disease, only taking those who give up?

It strikes me as a patronising way of talking about something we all feel uncomfortable around, offering a simplistic narrative framework; good versus evil, hard work versus seemingly impossible odds. And it ignores the stark reality of the cancer experience which, for Hitchens at least, is passive, dreary and often humiliating. An ordeal he often wasn't sure he had the will to continue.

Hitchens spends one chapter debunking the phrase "what doesn't kill you only makes you stronger", which he had often trotted out to make light of his monstrous booze habit.

(By the way Nietzche, who first wrote those words, contracted syphilis. The illness left him blind, demented and paralysed and his later work was severely compromised as a result ...didn't kill him though).

As Hitch listed the many and various reasons why this platitude was incorrect, it provoked a few thoughts (Aside from the obvious, that debating him must have felt like trying to arm wrestle a gorilla even if the motion was "is water wet?" and you were arguing the affirmative) about motivational slogans in general.

If the goal of these phrases is to encourage hard work, to provide the get up and go necessary to achieve great things, then more often than not I feel it has the opposite effect. Is it truly motivating to read yet another clichéd quote telling us to work harder? Or another example of some long dead VIP who failed a few times before succeeding on a massive scale? The fitness industry is rife with this kind of thing. An endless procession of dead politicians, athletes or authors queue up to chastise us from beyond the grave, telling us to pull up our socks and “never, ever, ever give up”?

I don’t know about you but I think if I was lying on a hospital bed dosed up on radiation I’d get a little sick of it all, and perhaps feel entitled to be down in the dumps occasionally. Sadly in the case of cancer, research has shown that those who chose to “fight” die just as often as those he adopt a more passive mental affect. Yep, I’m just a barrel of laughs today. But wait, there’s more.

The philosopher John Stewart Mill said; “ask yourself wether you are happy, and you cease to be so”

The problem with much motivational imagery is it paints the future as some far away place where you are always happy and fulfilled, always have enough money and never experience stress.

But it’s never the future, it’s only ever now. Focusing on those future goals inevitably means focusing on what you lack. Looking to high achieving people for inspiration means dwelling on the shortfall between yourself and another supposedly more successful person. These are fast routes to unhappiness.

Words are powerful , and we should be mindful of the ones we fill our heads with. Hitchen's knew it. He fought against the tide of inanity to redress the balance in favour of intelligent discourse. We are as much what we read as what we eat. So if inspiration is your goal try skipping the nutrient-poor fast food of motivational quotes in favour of a heartier intellectual feed.

There are a range of emotional states out there from blissed-out euphoria, to melancholy, to fired-up and fully engaged creative flow. A fully rounded human experiences the whole gamut, not shying away from complex or even (gasp) occasionally "negative" feelings, but not dwelling on them either.

If I was to offer a cliche of my own that chimes with my feelings it would be - "This too shall pass". Though often offered as encouragement in times of sadness, the real message is a philosophy of non-attachment. Sad feelings will pass, true, but so too will happy ones.

I'm with the Stoics and Buddhists on this one. If anything, happiness seems to retreat in response to being chased. Serenity is really where it's at. And when you get there happiness seems more likely to come find you anyway.