Pick me up, I'm too low to tango

I don't normally do what I'm about to tell you I've done. I have this instinctive mistrust of tablets and potions, but I'm still not back to full performance after having been wrung dry by the Norah-Virus (sic) strain I recently wrote about. Breathless after walking from the car park to the supermarket, I bought two sets of vitamin supplements; a Seven-seas tonic liquid to be taken three times daily, and a one-a-day tablet pack aimed specifically at 'men of all ages with busy lifestyles'. The Seven-seas tonic is smooth and tasty, and makes no great promises on the label. It follows the thinking that people who believe that the only medicine that will do you good has to taste nasty are far more likely to go out and dig up the wild plants to make the potion themselves rather than buy it ready-made, and I can see the logic.

The other pack used more of a hard-sell approach, suggesting that I would benefit in health, vitality, and general goodness by trying their product. In addition to suggesting when and how frequently I should swallow the capsule, they added several other useful tips that they felt would help me get the best out of their product. The advice on the tablet pack is to

1) eat a balanced diet with plenty of fresh fruit and vegetables. OK, I'm already doing that, with eggs, fish and chicken featuring in my main meals rather than pork or beef.
2) Reduce the amount of fat in the diet. I'll have to research that, but I think I'm fairly safe with my dislike of meat, and I don't eat chips anymore. And I forgo beef dripping as part of my 'eat nothing you wouldn't be prepared to kill and prepare yourself' ethos. A shame, I loved the golden jelly and smooth creamy fat of dripping.
3) Avoid bingeing, try to drink no more than three alcoholic drinks in any one day. OK, for four days a week I have two bottles of Newcastle Brown with my evening meal, and at the weekend I might have a bottle of red wine, taken diluted with plenty of water. I don't even try to cheat by drinking three bottles of wine in a day and claiming that's three alcoholic drinks.
4) Make sure to get enough sleep. Tricky when you have to get up at 3:30 on a Monday morning to drive 270 miles to work, and are also a bit of a night-owl, but I'm managing well enough now I'm in a comfy bed in the hotel.
5) Cut down your caffeine intake. OK, I have started doing that, I have a single cup of coffee for breakfast, and one to two more during the remainder of the morning. I don't touch it after lunchtime now. And I never have it just before going to bed as I used to do.
6) try to drink 8 glasses of water a day. All in one go? Does Dandelion and Burdock count as water? Have you seen the state of the water that comes from the taps? I think I'm fairly well behaved on this one, although I'm wondering if squashes count towards the water intake or not. Tai Ch'i thinking is that any concentrates or re-hydrated substances are intrinsically bad for you. This probably explains why nobody who manages or works in Chinese restaurants is an obvious Tai Ch'i devotee.

So what is missing from all of that? No exhortation to exercise frequently. Why not? It is one of the single most crucial factors for a healthy lifestyle that there is; in fact you could probably indulge in more than half of the other forbidden activities if you went out seven days a week and walked a brisk five miles. Is it because demographics have shown the supplement manufacturer that the people who will buy their product lead such hectic lifestyles that the only exercise they are likely to get is pushing the trolley around the supermarket and unloading the car when they get home? Or is it that people who exercise regularly don't need the supplements that they are trying to sell?

Yet another of the mysteries of modern micro-controlled living to go on my corkboard, together with why do people in supermarkets park their trolleys diagonally across the aisles whilst making up their minds which of the five different packets of chicken drumsticks they are going to choose? And why, when they do that, do they park the trolley on the opposite side of the aisle to where the chicken drumsticks are? And why, when I pick one of the reduced items, is it always the one with the broken barcode so that the checkout girl has to holler into the tannoy system for a price and incidentally tell everyone that the customer at her till is a cheapskate who wants to take a chance with the only-two-hours-left-to-salmonella-time chicken sandwich and is it really worth saving 30p just for that?