WAM

I'm on a new diet. It's called the WAM diet.

The Whatever and Multi-vitamins diet.

And it's my healthiest lifestyle choice yet.

This is how it works. You get up in the morning, and you eat whatever you can find. A yoghurt, a piece of chocolate, a pot noodle: the remains of last night's stir fry. At lunch time, you eat whatever is left over from breakfast: half a pot noodle, the crumbly bits from the packet of chocolate, the remains of this morning's stir fry, left over from the night before. If you're lucky, you find a packet of crisps in a bottom drawer, unopened, and you eat some of those as well (and leave the ones that fall out on the floor, because maybe you can fight the ants for them later). Then, for dinner, you drive to the local takeaway and you get the cheapest thing on the menu.

And then - and this is the key bit - you eat a multi-vitamin.

Not just any old multi-vitamin. Oh, no. You have to eat a good quality one, or who knows what kind of rubbish vitamins you're getting? All the bits of the alphabet you don't really want, like Q and W2 and F. No: a good multi-vitamin, with the right alphabet pieces, and you're there. Your body won't have a clue that you've just eaten a bowl of fried noodles, because it's busy going 'oooh, vitamin C! What shall I do with this? Perhaps a little clean out of the liver, might be a good idea' or 'potassium! Awesome! Just what I needed to get rid of this spot.' And before you know it, you're glowing with health and vibrant on the inside and on the outside.

Much more importantly, because you don't spend half of your day running around trying to find yams to peel and ginger to crush and coriander to chop up - because you don't spend the majority of your day standing in the middle of a supermarket screaming 'will somebody help me???' - and the other half trying to work out what the hell you're going to do with them, you have plenty of time for other things. Like life. And writing. And a sense of humour.

And it works an absolute treat. I've decided to drop 'being healthy' in favour of a nice period of 'being busy,' and by God it's cleared my health right up. Now, instead of running on a treadmill, I'm walking up and down in a straight line outside my house, smoking a cigarette and thinking of what's going to happen in my next chapter. Instead of eating brown rice neatly at my table like a responsible adult, I'm eating jelly at my computer and surrounding myself in empty packets and dirty spoons. And I'm infinitely happier as a result.

And infinitely more creative. I've written more today than I have in the last six months: two whole chapters, no less. Or, at least, I think I have. I can't quite see the screen over the top of the pot noodle packets, but it's looking promising.

The WAM diet. Beloved by writers, students and artists everywhere, for a goddamn reason.

Because it works.