Tag: sweets

Guest Post: 7 Reasons You’ll Put Weight On This Winter

As we head into winter, you’re probably dreading the added expense of Christmas and New Year. Our wallets are already stretched to breaking point, with families up and down the land having to make cut-backs here, there and everywhere, so the last thing we need is another visit from Rudolph and co.

That said, although you may be worrying about whether Santa will survive on the less-than-luxury mince pies you leave him at the foot of your chimney, you should probably be worrying about your waistline too. Why? Because winter is when many of us let ourselves go.

So, if you don’t want to enter 2013 looking like you do on the back of a dessert spoon, watch what you eat. Otherwise you might find yourself adhering to all seven of these reasons why you’ll put on more weight.

1. Cold weather. As winter is the coldest season of the year it’s pretty much a given that people are less active. Gone are the early morning walks with the dog, the sunset jogs around the block and the weekend cycles in the countryside. In comes the staying indoors, the radiators turned up and rubbish on the TV. Out goes the range cookers and the hearty filling food, in comes the takeaways and the microwave meals….

2. Wet weather. The winter brings with it wet weather too. If it’s wet you’re less likely to want to walk, cycle or snake-board to work, turning to your car instead. Understandably too. Why turn up to work like a drowned rat, when you can get there in the warm and relative comfort of your own pride and joy? The thing is, though, while it may be convenient, not only will your travel expenses rise, so will the size of your trousers.

3. Less light. With the clocks going back the nights get longer. You end up going to work in the dark, and coming home in the dark. As such, many of us start to ‘hibernate’, with our body clocks thinking it’s time to shut down for the evening. “Shall I go to the gym?” you ask yourself. “Nahhhh. I’ll go home to the warm, thanks.” Less daylight and longer nights reduce your desire to keep active, leading to a night in front of the tellybox, rather than the exercise mat. Unless you’re watching Aerobics Oz Style on Sky Sports 2 of course.

4. Winter blues. Talk to any sufferer of Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) and they will tell you the same thing, as soon as the clocks go back their mood suffers horribly. They rue the loss of summer and dread the cold winter months. They get depressed, they get down and they miss the sun. They crave sweet and carb-heavy foods to keep up their energy and spirits. If that sounds familiar, watch the scales go up.

5. Seasonal food. Christmas is coming earlier and earlier nowadays. In fact, it was August this year when we first started noticing festive fare on the shelves. Mince pies, Christmas puddings, Twiglets, nuts, selection boxes, advent calendas… you could actually buy them IN AUGUST this year. Surely a new record? If you’re tempted by these offers (£5 for a tub of Celebrations for example), then just think to yourself, “I’m going to get fat!” That should stop you. Unless you say it with pride and conviction, in which case no one can help you.

6. Seasonal drink. Now this one is a sore point for many of us. Supermarkets up and down the land know that us Brits love a drink. We do. We can’t get by without the odd glass of wine now and again. But with Christmas coming, it’s fair game. “A bottle of Baileys for £12, when the normal RRP is £20? I’m there!” But so are those pesky little calories. If you don’t want to slam on the festive flab, then try and avoid these festive drink offers. Or use a straw. You’ll probably feel better that way.

7. Office treats. No matter how hard you try to stay cheery in the winter months, whether that’s keeping up your exercise routine, going for walks or constructing a stationary tower out of paper clips, you can bet your bottom dollar/pound that your workmates won’t be as committed as you. As a result, before you know it, the office will be inundated with sugary treats to help celebrate…erm… nothing in particular. So, if you don’t want to see your scales creak under the weight of all that office joviality, the trick is to learn to say no. Good luck.

October 30, 2012
Guest Post: 7 Reasons To Believe Harry Potter Exists

As you may have noticed, here at 7 Reasons we have a habit of belittling other people’s muppetry. The question, ‘Is Harry Potter Real?’, for instance, would have us stampeding towards our pencil cases. As indeed we did when we discovered this. However, when today’s guest post dropped on our inbox mat, we had to take a step back. And question ourselves. Because today we are confronted with seven compelling reasons that suggest maybe, just maybe, we were too quick to judge. Perhaps, just perhaps, Harry Potter does exist after all. So, with that in mind, let’s get to the post. Written today by massive Harry Potter nerd, Rachel, who went to boarding school and Oxford University just to have an education as close to the Hogwarts experience as possible.

Come on, admit it: at least once in your life, you’ve fantasised about what it would be like to go to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Depending on the level of your Harry Potter obsession, you might even have gone as far as to have a careful think about which House you’d get put into by the Sorting Hat (definitely Ravenclaw for me). If you’re still waiting for that Hogwarts acceptance letter to drop down your chimney, check out our seven great reasons why you should hold out hope that the magical world of Harry Potter really exists…

1. Online Stores. Anyone looking for a reason to believe need search no further than their computer screen. A decent Google session later and you could quite easily purchase yourself a wide array of wizarding accessories. With anything from school supplies to apparel, time turners and hand carved wands available, any budding witch or wizard can easily stock up for their first day at Hogwarts. Just order your acceptance letter (again, available online) and head on down to platform 9¾ at King’s Cross Station.

2. Muggle Wear. When wizards attempt to dress in ‘Muggle clothes’, the result is notoriously hilarious: slippers with pinstripe suits, a middle-aged man sporting a flowery dress and a bowler hat, or unusual patterns and colour combinations, the ensembles that they come up with are anything but normal. I’m sure everyone has seen someone whose outfit garners a second glance or a funny look, someone who doesn’t seem to understand that you shouldn’t wear a dressing gown with skinny jeans. Maybe they were just cold? Or maybe they were an undercover wizard.

3. Supernatural Sightings. Yetis in Tibet, the Loch Ness Monster in Scotland or aliens in Roswell: hundreds of unbelievable, supernatural sightings and occurrences are reported every year. What’s easier to believe: that a UFO sighting is proof of alien life from space, or that it was just a glimpse of Mr Weasley’s flying Ford Anglia? Or even a small bespectacled boy riding on a hippogriff.

4. History. Ancient records are littered with references to the occult: Merlin in Camelot, witch hunts in Salem or stories of immortality elixirs – tales of witches and wizards permeate the fabric of our history. There’s no smoke, as they say, without fire.

5. Sweet Stuff. Sugar Quills, Fizzing Whizzbees, Butterbeer, Exploding Bonbons, Liquorice Wands, Jelly Slugs, Chocolate Frogs, Cauldron Cakes, Pumpkin Pasties, Firewhiskey, Pepper Imps, Drooble’s Best Blowing Gum, Acid Pops and Bertie Bott’s Every Flavour Beans. I don’t know about you, but I’m not prepared to live in a world where these sweet treats don’t exist.

6. Quidditch. The strangest of games, Quidditch defies the laws of logic. Not only is this school sport played in mid-air (health and safety anyone?), but unless one of the teams is able to gain a lead of at least 160 points, the whole match, and subsequently the final score, rests on the shoulders of the Seeker. You can’t make this stuff up, so it must be real.

7. The International Statue Of Wizarding Secrecy. This may be the most obvious reason of all, but the only reason for not believing that Harry Potter is real lies in the absence of proof: why would we have proof? These are not wayward sorcerers who cast spells at random; the Ministry of Magic has rules about that sort of thing. Officially established in 1692, the Statue of Secrecy was created to “safeguard the wizard community from Muggles, and hide their presence from the world at large”. With such a law in place, I’m sure that any Muggle with proof would find themselves on the wrong end of a memory charm pretty sharpish.

If you have any further reasons to add, please leave a comment below – we are the believers!

December 15, 2011
7 Reasons That Staying in for Halloween was Disappointing

We never stay in on Halloween and this year we were due to go out for a meal and to see a film. But my wife decided at the last-minute that she didn’t want to go out; she wanted to stay in and watch Downton Abbey. So, we braced ourselves for the inevitable throng of trick-or-treaters and settled in for the night. But none came. And, though by any normal measure, I should be pleased about that. It was disappointing. Here are seven reasons why.

We don’t really live in a spooky mansion, this is just for illustration. We live in a spooky town-house.

1. Ouch. Evening came and it became dark. We had decided on the timeless strategy of pretending-to-be-out, so we didn’t put the lights on. And, after several minutes of darkness, I fell over the cat in the hallway. This clearly wasn’t going to work, so we had to limp to the shops.

2. Money. In order to stay in – in our own home – we spent £4 on sweets. To give to the children that would surely be round coming round in droves demanding them. Because trick-or-treating isn’t nice. It’s an old-fashioned mafia style shakedown. But unlike the mafia, they often come round with their parents, so you can’t tell them to sod off. Because that would make them cry (the children that is, the parents probably have their own reasons for crying). So we spent money on sweets for them so that we didn’t have to sit in the dark and pretend to be out. But they didn’t come. And that’s £4 wasted. We could have bought over twenty-four litres of sparkling mineral water for that. Or two-thirds of a sandwich at a petrol station.

3. Money. But then I realised that it isn’t just £4 that we’ve wasted. Because we go out every year to avoid the inevitable plague of trick-or-treaters. But this is expensive and, over the years, we must have spent many hundreds of pounds avoiding trick-or-treaters. Obviously we’ve had lots of fun, consumed many nice meals and enjoyable beers, and seen many good films; but that isn’t the point. We were there for Halloween avoidance. What if the children haven’t come every year? We’ve spent all that money needlessly, and had all that pointless fun. For nothing.

4. Argument. We’ve never argued on Halloween before, but this time we did. We argued about who would go out and give sweets to the trick-or-treaters when they came to the door. “It’s Halloween”, my wife said, “you could go out there and scare the children with your mask”.

“Yes, but you could go out there and scare them with your dressing gown”, I replied. And I seem to have won the argument, because she didn’t argue with me further or, in fact, say anything much at all after that. But the argument was moot, because of the absence of trick-or-treaters.

5. Sweets. Because no children came to our house, we now have a huge bowl of sweets and no children to give it to. This means that we’ll have to eat them. But we’re grown-ups, and when grown-ups eat sweets they don’t run around in a sugar-frenzy, they sit still. And get fat. And we don’t want to become hideously fat. We want the neighbour’s children to become hideously fat. And then they won’t run around playing football in the alley behind our house. Our plan’s in tatters.

6. Rejection. As we’re usually out for Halloween, we have no idea of how it works. We sat waiting for trick-or-treaters until gone midnight. But surely they’ll come, we thought. Where are they? We felt unloved and rejected. We checked our armpits and speculated on why no children had come. And then, the only possible explanation occurred to us.

7. Spooky. I don’t believe in the supernatural or the sort of strange phenomena that is celebrated on Halloween because frankly, it’s a big load of guff. But I’m quite happy being a sneering sceptic; in fact, I’m quite well suited to it. But the non-arrival of the children was a genuinely spooky event. Because the last time we’d been in on Halloween – six years ago – we’d forgotten about it, didn’t have any sweets in the house, and had resorted to giving the children fruit and telling them that it was much better for them. And somehow, despite six years having elapsed and despite many children having come and gone from our street, the children somehow knew that we were the house of the fruit and they avoided us. The children knew. Creepy.

November 1, 2010