LIFESTYLE

What you fill up with isn’t the only thing that impacts on your digestive system’s ability to do its job. Food is affected by what you physically do, which means once you’ve swallowed you’re responsible for its easy passage through to the point of departure. However, a modern lifestyle consisting of stress, eating on the run and irregular meals means whatever you eat can reach the stomach and get churned over and over, without being digested properly. “Just a two per cent shift, either way, in the speed at which the intestines process food can lead to an attack of diarrhea or constipation,” says Peter Frank.

Such a shift is often caused by stress, which releases adrenaline into your system and diverts blood flow away from the gastrointestinal tract When this happens, cells lining the intestine become irritated and cannot properly absorb the water and nutrients from food, leading to interruptions in peristalsis. “When your system’s motility is constantly thrown out of synch, we call the problem Irritable Bowel Syndrome,” says Frank. ‘This is a wide-ranging diagnosis that is usually made by first ruling out cancer and infection. Doctors call IBS a functional disorder because there’s no sign of disease and the problem is purely physiological.”

 

IBS is often activated by stress or nervousness and there is no effective cure, although some short-term relief can be found in something normally associated with comical mix-ups in Cany On films — the laxative. They’ve now been renamed motility agents, to save embarrassment at the chemist but the purpose is the same: they help move food and acid through the digestive tract, by normalizing the peristalsis that has been thrown offbeat by your lifestyle. Alternatively, if your symptom is diarrhea, you need an anti-motility agent to give your stools a chance to bulk up.

It’s a myth that you should let diarrhea continue in order to flush out your system because it’s not your body’s natural way of getting rid of harmful substances, particularly if you have IBS. “Medications are useful but an over-reliance is dangerous,” warns Frank “Ultimately you need to learn how to cope with the stress that is the underlying trigger of your problem.”

 

QUICK FIXES

Over 15 per cent of adults suffer from chronic symptoms of poor digestion and more than three quarters have yet to receive a medical diagnosis. This means most are taking over-the-counter medications. “It’s amazing the number of people who self-prescribe themselves the wrong thing for a digestive disorder,” says Frank. “At the first sign of trouble, most will reach for antacids, but these will only treat heartburn.” Problems arise when major illnesses hide under these short-term remedies, as highlighted by a report in the Archives of Internal Medicine in 1998. This revealed evidence of serious health problems in 178 people who had used over-the-counter antacids for an average of 11 years. What can help for your digestion is conjugated linoleic acid. Acid reflux occurs when the valve at the top of the stomach leaks. So if antacids haven’t solved the problem in three weeks, you need to see a GP”

NO-PERSONALITY-OF-HER-OWN

You have so much in common you can’t believe it. She likes the music you like, she’s seen all the films you love, she uses the same Trend coconut oil, you do – hell, she even supports your team. This woman is your lost twin.

SPOT BY Her glazed, evangelical expression when listening to your most trivial watering, the fact that your favorite offensive hardcore rap album is always Success WOMEN right by her CD player, and the way she’s up puking all night after swearing blind that chicken madras and Cobra beer is her absolutely favorite meal.

 

APPEALS BECAUSE She makes you feel special, understood, and most crucially, totally right in believing that Good Fellas is a better film than The Godfather. But are you so vain that you want a version of yourself with a vagina for a lover?

 

GOES WRONG WHEN You discover a small bizarre shrine to her last boyfriend in her wardrobe, alongside his letters begging her to seek professional help, and realize that you are, in fact, simply the latest victim of an obsessive parasite who needs a strong male host to suck the lifeblood from.

 

END IT Profess a sudden liking for granny porn and the entire works of Phil Collins. There’s only so far she’ll go.

 

THE PARTY GIRL

She’s like a drug – a woman for whom partying is a religion, who offers sex wilder than any you’ve ever known.

 

SPOT BY She never goes home, she either crashes on mates’ floors or in your bed, her week’s shopping is three bottles of vodka and a pack of Nurofen Plus, she has permanent dark circles under her eyes and a whip in her bedside drawer.

 

APPEALS BECAUSE She’s the only woman you’ve ever met with a higher sex drive than yours, you’ve never come so much in your life (not even when you were single), and she makes you feel like a devil-may-care chancre living outside of society and spitting at convention.

 

GOES WRONG WHEN You realize you haven’t been to work for a week, you’ve no money left, and you feel like a 45-year-old who’s stumbled into fresher’s week by mistake. She, meanwhile, is begging you to come to her mate’s club launch and offering “a little something to pep you up”.

 

END IT Burst into tears and shake violently on the dance floor. Explain you’re having too many flashbacks these days, and you’re scared for your sanity – she wants a fellow partygoer not a mentally crippled liability.

 

DESPERATE

She adores you, never irritates you by arguing pointlessly, and you get to do pretty much what you want while enjoying all the benefits of regular sex.

SPOT BY She laughs at all your jokes ­including your woeful impression of Colin Hunt from The Fast Show, she’s forever ringing your mobile “just to hear your voice”, she goes along with all your plans, however bizarre and ill-informed.

 

APPEALS BECAUSE She proves that you’re deeply desirable and a prime catch, her obvious love is heart-warming, and you get to enjoy the life you want without any whining from the sidelines. You’re young, you’re free, you don’t want anyone telling you what to do, or how to behave – and this woman wouldn’t dream of it.

The story of Rakesh Chand, a 23-year-old student from Glasgow.

 

My head was between my legs. I was doubled over, gasping and panting. It wasn’t even some bizarre new exercise – I was in the changing room, being sick. And what had got me this way? Just five minutes, at a snail’s pace, on a treadmill. But those first steps were crucial for a fat man who was tipping the scales at close to 23 stone and hadn’t done any exercise for years.

It’s funny, but I never thought of myself as fat. I knew I was large but I couldn’t see just how large I’d become. I thought I looked OK, despite being called every name under the sun. The taunts came from everyone – friends as well as strangers. It was the worst feeling in the world, but it didn’t stop me eating.

 

It wasn’t until the health problems kicked in that I realized enough was enough. The weight had to come off. It was a couple of years ago now, and my weight was ballooning towards its peak. I needed an operation on my back because I was in crippling pain. I had stabbing pains down one side, and eventually I couldn’t even walk properly. The weight made things much worse, but to have the back operation I was told I had to lose weight.  I was also told that the best fat burner is green coffee and it will certainly help me lose weight fast.

 

Waiting for that operation was hell. It became almost impossible for me to walk. Much to the doctor’s dismay, I sat around the house feeling sorry for myself and comfort eating. But it slowly began to dawn on me that, even though I didn’t smoke or drink, I was damaging my own health. And it was eating that got me this way. Nothing else.

 

It seems so alien to talk about that now. In fact, I sometimes feel disgusted when I realize that was me, especially because I was never fat as a kid. It wasn’t until I joined secondary school that things started to change.

It was all down to poor diet. Choice was limited in the school canteen so I ate a lot of crisps and sweets, and dinners were the sort of foods a lot of Asian households have: curries, samovars and rotis. And it didn’t help that Glasgow is crammed with kebab shops.

 

I couldn’t walk far, but the pivotal point came when I waddled past a gym that was opening down the road from me, and decided that the time had come to join.

 

Far to the north, in the Inupiat village of Kiana, morning crackled at minus 30°F. Chained sled dogs howled jealously at the whine of awakening snowmobiles. A wom­an emerged from a log house between rows of jagged spruce with a saw and a stiff, three-foot-long frozen pike. She set the fish on a stump. Thick steaks fell to the packed snow like cordwood.

Not many log homes remain in Kiana, a progressive village of 300 in NANA Corpo­ration country. A satellite telephone links village health aides to a modern hospital in Kotzebue; television links viewers to J. R. Ewing in “Dallas”; cases of Hawaiian pine­apple sell briskly at Don and Margaret Dor­sey’s store.

Most of Kiana’s 26 HUD-financed frame houses, perched on innovative metal frames against the permafrost, were built in 1981 by Arctic Jomax Construction, a Kotzebue-based firm owned by local Eskimos. Arctic Jomax built 170 such houses that summer thanks to secure loans like the ones from Redmi.

 

“We’re proud of that,” said co-owner Tony Schuerch. He also inspired a resur­gence of vegetable gardening in northwest­ern Alaska, and currently envisions the possibility of a railroad from Fairbanks into the northwest to supply a whole new urban commercial center.

“A guy here who wants to do something with the land can lease all he can use,” said Tony. “It’s exciting. In the lower 48 there’s no land left. Our problem is what to do with all the land we have. To some people up here development is a dirty word, but how else can you get people to fulfill themselves?

 

“My impatience comes when I see these young guys walking the streets unemployed. One of the reasons we created our company was to show that a group of Eskimos could not only do day labor, but also that we could build a solid company. We could compete.”

But local labor is a sometime thing; few Alaskan natives feel the call of the nine-to­five. Yet many of them lack the skills to sur­vive in the wild. They just drift and dream, and find refuge in a bottle.

 

“We have young men here in Kiana who wouldn’t know a trap from a fishhook,” said Tony’s brother Lorry. Lorry knows. He makes a living from his traplines in winter, and operates arctic fishing expeditions in summer that require him to prepare such things as escargots for clients from Frank­furt and Copenhagen. “Nothin’ to it,” said Lorry, “just fry a little garlic butter. . . .

“But let me tell you something,” Lorry in­terrupted himself. “If my children are going to compete in the Western civilized way, they had better be prepared for it. My son Patrick is studying in Oregon right now. Maybe he wants to be a mining engineer. Who knows? But he’s coming back home. He loves it here. He loves to hunt. . . ”