Mary Hannigan: Let’s jiggle our tummies with pride

‘Just delivered today! So excited! Bye bye tummy!” Followed by a smiley face. Do you get text messages like that from pals of the female persuasion, accompanied by photos of what look like torture devices? And the queue of trucks delivering these gadgets to their homes stretch to the neighbouring suburbs, the mountain of discarded boxes at their gates filling up entire green-bin lorries, and the tears over the assembly instructions flooding their livingrooms? When that treadmill looks like the Eiffel Tower, you know it’s time to disassemble and start again.

It’s not a new phenomenon, of course: unshiftable middle-age tummies have been with us since Methuselah was a nipper.

Just Google “vintage exercise equipment” and you’ll see images of our sisters from bygone days trying to shed them, and looking gleeful while rolling around in giant hamster wheels and positively ecstatic while attached to walls by vibrating belts.

And that’s another thing that hasn’t changed: the notion that it’s fun to use these machines when having your wisdom teeth extracted by rusty pliers would be better craic.

Check out the pictures on any of today’s torture-device packaging and you’ll generally see beaming ladies who are so happy with their new toys, they’re about to combust. And need it be said, there’s not a pick on them; divil an unshiftable tummy in sight.

Alas, the initial enthusiasm often wanes, the machines usually stored away with the foot spa you thought was a great gift for your ma at Christmas, but was never even opened.

As a colleague confessed: “I should go to the attic and retrieve the super-jelly-belly-abdo-flab-blaster that I got in Argos about 25 years ago, with a view to doing sit-ups in front of the telly. Yes, really.” We’ve all been there. How many of us don’t have some form of gut-buster stashed away in the attic, unused despite it setting us back 20 shillings?

Medicine balls too. We were told plyometric weight training would transform us into finely-tuned athletes, increase our explosive power and leave our tummies pancake flat, but instead we ended up with concussion after rolling into the kitchen table.

Personal trainers

Having an expert instruct you with this kind of equipment is, of course, advisable to avoid accidents, but unless you can afford to hire a personal trainer (why do their first names only ever comprise one syllable? – Chuck, Mike, Jo, Pete, Jade, Troy) – it actually involves joining a gym. Cue the music from

Psycho

’s shower scene.

If as many people pay the water charges as now go to gyms, the compliance rate will be eye-popping.

Nights out

Girls’ nights out have become fitness roundtables, “OMG, DOMS!”

Excuse me? “Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness.”

They speak a language with which you are not familiar. And they all have dumbbells in their handbags, where they used to have a Snickers lest they became peckish. And they’re drinking fizzy water and looking at you in a ‘LOLZ’ kind of way when you offer them beer nuts. And then they jog home.

And when you get back and check your email, they’ve sent you photos of themselves completing a half-marathon at the weekend – and now you know they’ve become one of those women who spend more on Lycra than they do on food and would mow you down on the path if you got in their way because they can’t have their high-intensity interval training disturbed.

Deleting numbers from your phone is always an enormous decision because you’re deleting someone from your life; similarly, marking their email as spam. But sometimes it’s all you can do.

For too long, the sisters have been trapped in giant hamster wheels and jiggled by vibrating belts. The day they can embrace their unshiftable tummies is the day they will be free.