Are you on a diet? Are you still recovering from Christmas and New Year?

Did you – and I know I did – get a shock when you stepped on your scales?

And have you made yourself a promise to cut back on the food and quit the easy chair and go in for some energetic walking more often? I know I did, but when it’s bucketing down outside, you’re relaxing in your comfortable chair, supping a cup of coffee and watching something interesting on the telly, all those get fit promises can be all too easily forgotten.

I am greatly impressed by Times & Star columnist Nicole Regan’s running achievements, but I must confess that just reading about them leaves me a trifle exhausted – so I don’t think pounding the pavements is for me.

I suspect that very few of us have never been on a diet. You haven’t? Then aren’t you the lucky one.

Every newspaper and magazine is full of them.

Now I have, over the years, known a few people who have gone on some of these diets and very few of them have worked.

Most of us probably know someone who has achieved drastic weight reduction by undergoing one of the surgical procedures currently available.

These can improve the lives of people who are suffering from some medical malfunction – but I just cannot understand why any healthy person would choose to go down that road for purely cosmetic reasons.

I am at a loss to understand why the “powers that be” have taken to highlighting the perceived national increase of obesity in our population, both young and old. Are some of these politicians and bureaucrats, I wonder, the same people who cheerfully permitted the selling off over the years of school playing fields? And when it comes to the physical fitness of schoolchildren, I can remember, a few years ago, that certain streets in Workington would be occupied by youngsters in tracksuits who were obviously taking part in some form of running exercise.

It was quite obvious to any observer that not all the participants were too keen on the activity, as they dragged themselves through the streets, but I suppose it did contribute towards their general fitness.

So, do any local secondary schools still send their pupils to run round the streets – or anywhere else?

So what did our Victorian ancestors think about obesity? Did they think it was a problem?

I honestly think that the men didn’t worry too much about their weight or their girth.

All you have to do is to cast an eye over photographs of that age and you will soon realise that few of the wealthy and successful men were thin.

Being “well-built” was the aim of many – and all you have to do is to scan some of the photographs of many of the significantly poorer members of society to understand why. When the Government tried to recruit men into the army to fight in the Boer War, they discovered that a great many volunteers were too underfed and physically unfit to make good soldiers.

I seem to remember that, some 20 or so years ago, the army were also complaining that some of their intending recruits were not fit enough to pass the fitness test and had to be sent off somewhere to get themselves fit enough to join up.

Obesity was not the word generally used by Victorians. The word which crops up in the adverts of the day was corpulency.

Companies did jump on the corpulency bandwagon – some things never change.

The most well known of these experts was a Mr F Cecil Russell, who traded from Store Street, Bedford Square, London.

He advertised widely and he must have been successful because his ads appeared in many provincial papers.

The overweight had merely to send him three penny stamps to receive a copy of his booklet Corpulency and the Cure .

I have never seen a copy of this book so I am unaware of what he recommended, although he promised that it covered “everything that a stout person desirous of permanent relief may wish to know”.

It was while I was on the internet searching for a painless diet that I came across mention of National Cabbage Day, which occurs every year on February 17.

I suspect that it is American in origin.

I also discovered that John Christian Curwen made great improvements in the growing of cabbages on his farms.

Another item for my to be researched file.

Did I celebrate National Cabbage Day? No! Especially as the day after was National Drink Wine Day. Much more interesting!