(CAKE) ON THE ROAD AGAIN

Can you really stay fit and healthy on tour? Rick has a plan!

I’ll admit it: my diet isn’t exactly going to plan. I’m trying my best to eat healthily and reduce my portion size as well as not eat between meals (basically achieved by not stopping meals but letting them run into each other). However, my nutritionist (aka my lovely wife) isn’t impressed. She’s told me all about the importance of staying fit and healthy when you have a heavy workload and busy schedule like mine, and I know I need to take immediate action.

By the time you read this, I’ll be on tour in North America, and so in preparation I’m drawing up a strict health regime. I intend to stick to it rigidly so that by the end of this year I’m the sylph-like figure of supreme fitness that I was in 1957, when I was eight. It’s a tough ask, I know, but here’s the plan:

On tour, I will always have a healthy breakfast, but it will not include muesli or other similar crap that tastes like shredded cardboard. For my lunch, I will have a salad with low-fat dressing, although Americans don’t seem to go for low-fat anything in restaurants so I may need to bring my own. No dinner on show days, as I can’t eat before a show, so instead I’ll carry lots of lowcalorie, low-fat protein bars to nibble when I’m feeling peckish. There will be no snacks in my hotel room except for unsalted nuts and plenty of water. In my dressing room, I’ll simply have nuts, fruit and a packet of PG Tips. I also intend to go for a walk every morning.

Overall, it’s going to be a very healthy, very detoxifying and bloody miserable tour (except for the playing bit of course). It’s called the Grumpy Old Rockstar Tour for a reason. With the lifestyle I’m setting myself, I’m going to be extremely moody and probably will need to be approached with caution at all times. Even the friendliest of greetings is likely to get a rude response ending in the word “off”.

Will I be able to keep it up, I ask myself? Ah, that’s a phrase that has many connotations when you reach 70… Only time will tell, but if I do manage it, then it may well be something I’ll thank myself for in the future, in-between prolonged bouts of extreme misery, of course.

For some additional motivation, I checked the odds of success with the online food betting company, Betfed. Here’s what I was offered:

To complete the tour with the planned diet: 5000/1.

To complete 50 percent of the tour with the planned diet: 2000/1.

To complete the tour: even money.

I think I’ll save my cash for a delicious low-fat Christmas treat.

“It’s called the Grumpy Old Rockstar Tour for a reason…”