My most controversial nutritional opinions, in no particular order, so the replies can pick a fight efficiently. - Chicken tastes of nothing because it is nothing. - Salt is a farming invention and I haven't added it in years. - You do not need to eat liver. The animal was using it as a filter. - Vegetables are very healthy, once a cow has eaten them. - Fruit is bait with a stone in it. - Fibre is a word for the part you cannot digest, sold as the point. - Seed oils caused the diabetes. Sugar just turned up to help. - Carbs are not poison. They are a hobby. - Grass-fed is a label for the default. Every British cow is standing on the label. - 30% fat mince was the normal mince. The lean stuff is the deviation. - Butter lives on the counter. The fridge is for people who ration it. - Raw milk is the only food on earth designed to be food. - Olive oil is a seasoning the Mediterranean cooked in lard beside. - Mutton beats lamb. The lamb was two years short of flavour. - A bacon cheeseburger without the bun is as healthy as it gets. - Sunburn is a seed oil problem wearing a sun costume. - The only animal we cannot do without is the one that eats grass. Every one of those is checkable, which is the part the replies find hardest.

Edith Murway-Traina took up powerlifting at 91 because a friend wanted company at the gym, and at 99 she deadlifted 150lb and took a Guinness world record. She lived in Tampa. Her friend dragged her there, by Edith's own account, kicking and screaming. She stayed. By 99 she was the oldest competitive female powerlifter on record, pulling 150lb off the floor, a great-great-grandmother. She said the thing she liked best was the applause. A woman of 91 is not supposed to start anything. She's supposed to be handed a pair of pink dumbbells and told to be careful. A review published this year pulled together 126 trials of resistance training in women, 4,019 of them, two thirds past the menopause. The women after the menopause gained strength just as well as the women before it. The menopause made no measurable difference to how they answered the bar. The muscle never stopped listening. Everybody around it stopped talking to it. At that age heavy is the treatment, and the older the body gets, the more it needs the load and the less it can afford the wasted volume. If you're reading this, you are younger than she was on her first day in the gym.

I have a confession to make: every pound of this physique was built by plants. - Ryegrass, most of it - White clover - Heather, off the hill - Bramble, off the hedge - Nettles and docks - Hay, a whole June of it - Silage, a whole wet June of it - Turnips, in February I didn't eat a single one. The cow, the ewe and the goat did, with the four stomachs and the yard of bacteria that the job needs, and sent them down to me as mince, mutton, butter and a litre of milk a day. So the thanks go to them. A ruminant is the only machine on earth that can turn a hillside into muscle. I just stand at the end of it with a fork. So I'm plant-based, technically. I've simply outsourced the chewing to something that's good at it.

Things I did to my own body in my twenties, on purpose, that I now find genuinely horrifying: - Paid extra for mince with the good part removed - Drained the fat down the sink like I was getting rid of evidence - Ate chicken voluntarily, several times a day, and called it a lifestyle - Weighed rice raw, then cooked, then logged it - Separated eggs and binned the yolk, the only part with anything in it - Trimmed the fat off a steak and left it on the side of the plate - Ate every three hours to stoke a metabolism that never asked - Ate a banana before the gym, like that was what moved the bar - Ate liver weekly for three years because the internet said I'd die without it - Drank electrolyte sachets pulling a face, for cramps I didn't have - Fried things in sunflower oil from a bottle with a heart on the label - Ate a rice cake and called it a snack - Blamed dairy for stomach aches that turned out to be pasteurisation - Went scarlet every summer and blamed the sun And all that time I thought I was the disciplined one, while the 20% mince sat on the bottom shelf, cheaper, waiting for me to grow up.

Six years of carnivore teaches you a second language, and half of every dinner party now needs subtitles. What I say, and what it means. "I'm not that hungry." I had 500 grams of mutton mince at lunch and food hasn't crossed my mind since. "I'll just have the steak." The biggest one. Fat on. Whatever was going next to it, put butter there instead. "I'm easy, whatever you're having." Whatever you're having had a face. "I'll eat later." Once. Enormously. Possibly standing up. "Just a black coffee, thanks." I've already had four eggs and I'm being polite. "Is there any more butter?" There is never enough butter, and we both know it. "Can I have the fat you've just trimmed off?" Yes, I'm serious, and no, it's not for the dog. "I'll bring something." I'll bring a cheeseboard and eat most of it. "No pudding for me." I had my pudding. It was the fat on the lamb. What other people say to me, and what it means. "Everything in moderation." I'm about to have a biscuit. "Where do you get your fibre?" I'm about to tell you about my bowels. "I could never give up bread." I have never tried. "Don't you miss pasta?" Please tell me you miss pasta. "Isn't that expensive?" I've never added up what I spend on snacks. "I'm on a bit of a health kick myself." There's a protein bar in my handbag. "Go on, a little bit won't hurt." I need you to eat this so I feel better about mine. "Have you tried intermittent fasting?" I skipped breakfast once in 2019 and I've been telling people since. "Doesn't it get boring?" I've had the same meal deal at my desk every weekday since the Olympics. "My doctor would have a fit." My doctor has never once asked what I eat. "I'm not judging." I'm judging. "Is that even healthy?" I've never asked myself that about my own lunch. "You'll be dead by sixty." Please don't prove me wrong in front of everyone. And one phrase that needs no translation at all, the one they land on once they've worked through the rest: "You look well, though."