If you had to choose between food and sex, which would you go for? I pose the question because, as regular readers of my blog will know, there does seem to be a trade-off. Revel in food and the resulting spare tyre means you can’t revel in sex as much as you would have done.
Probably the worst time of the year for sex, then, is the Christmas/New Year holiday. Which means that all the sexy underwear from Father Christmas is going to waste. Christmas just isn’t a very good time for the art of love. There’s all that shopping, wrapping, cooking and cleaning, not to mention the guests in the spare bedroom. And, of course, the overeating.
Research by Carnegie Weight Management suggests the typical Christmas lunch with all the trimmings would have amounted to about two thousand calories. Add in breakfast, supper, drinks and snacks during the day and plenty of revellers would have downed as much as four thousand or even six thousand calories.
Just to remind you, there’s a theory that if the ratio of your waist to your hips exceeds 0.9 for a man or 0.85 for a woman then your sex drive and performance will be compromised. Well, I’ve been testing this out. And after a bit of a struggle I finally got down to the magic ratio on Christmas Day. That’s to say my waist measures 84.5 cm and my hips measure 94 cm, and dividing the former by the latter produces 0.899.
It was actually harder than I thought it would be, because as you lose weight around your middle you also tend to lose it around your hips, so the ratio doesn’t change that much. You have to do something to build up your thigh and buttock muscles and in my case it was cycling. And on Christmas Day itself a touch of snowboarding.
So has it worked? Well – and I’m trying to be scientific here – I think it has. Not that I exactly had love handles the size of elephants’ ears anyway. And, of course, the effects of these kinds of things are fairly subtle. Sex drive and performance are not constants and it’s not always easy to work out what was the cause of any change.
All I can say is, give it a go. Put that Christmas lunch firmly behind you and resolve that in the New Year those love handles will be no more.
Meanwhile, if any of you have stories or data on the relationship between your sexual prowess and your waist:hip ratio please share them with us by clicking on ‘comments’. Or, indeed, if your sex drive suffered (or increased) when you put on weight that would also be interesting.
So which will it be for you? Food or sex? Which makes you happiest? I’ve made my own decision. I’d rather have more sex and less food, rather than the other way around. So my own Christmas lunch was muesli eaten out of a plastic pot in the car park of my nearest ski station. I was about to write that sometimes you have to forego a pleasure in the search for a greater happiness. But, actually, it’s not true. The muesli was great!
I hope you had a wonderful Christmas and I wish you a 0.9 (or 0.85) New Year.