Cigar life balance

After the cheering and applause eventually died down after my last blog instalment, I decided to get busy with the next one, which is this.

With the festive season now over, I'm sure most of you are planning a bit of weight loss, so I'm going to share some pearls which should help you drop a dress size or two.

You know, people are always coming up to me in the street saying "Here you! How do you do it?  A hectic schedule and all those manly outdoorsy things you do, but you still manage to maintain that perfect physique and winning smile...tell me, what's your secret?".

Well I'll tell you my secret, and if you follow these simple instructions, you too could have a body like Ronan Keating.

Actual Size

So, the secret of being thin is...

Stop eating food.

That's it, that's all there is to it.  A bit of exercise helps, but as they say on the south side of the Liffey, "you need to cut down on your porklife".

The main thing is to stop eating white bread, potatoes and cut out all things sugary, especially sugar.

And Beer too.  Beer is bad.

Apart from being force fed Guinness when I was home in Dublin recently, I haven't had a beer since September, only wine.

Who am I to be talking to you about all this healthy stuff?  Well this is me being quoted on a health food website... Honestly Healthy ... where I recently attended a health food cookery course solely to bring balance to the outdoorsy manly stuff.

So now you know that I know what I'm talking about, even if I don't.

One of the things us beautiful people are down with at the moment is the juice diet, which leads me nicely on to the topic for today, a cigar and juice pairing.

The cigar is a tubed Romeo and Julietta No.1, which is one of about 30 cigars Gearoid recently (and very kindly) brought back from Cuba.

This was my first R&J No. 1, and as all the R&J's I've had thus far have been good smokes, this one turned out to be much the same.  Nothing brilliant but a decent smoke, with a good draw, nice TTS (that's time to smoke...I just made that up) of about one hour, good construction and a good sized stick to boot.  I'd give it 7/10.

The juice to go with this should not be enjoyed at the same time and should be polished off fairly quickly in order to gain the most health benefit, so neck the juice and enjoy the cigar with some fermented grape juice instead, just like I did.

When I say juice, notice that I'm not saying fruit juice, so leave out the apples and oranges.  Only use grapefruit, lemons and limes, and any or all of the following...

Kale, Carrot
Cucumber, Celery
Root ginger, Fennel
Spinach, Beetroot

A splash of Aloe Vera juice too will do wonders too.


Right, that's enough of that.

Next time I'll be blathering on about a proper beverage, as I've been enjoying Rioja lately and been gifted with lots of cigars over Xmas, so I'll be doing a cigar and Rioja pairing instead of this cake and juice malarkey.

Until then.  Muah.