Long-haul holidays can seriously damage your well-being, as MAXINE GORDON discovers.

I EXPECTED to come back from my holiday of a lifetime in Hawaii tanned and revived, ready to plunge back into work and the hectic festive season. Little did I imagine that 48 hours after landing at Manchester Airport I'd be passing out in the office and booking an appointment with my GP.

My lip trembled in anticipation of what her diagnosis might be as I reeled off my symptoms: nausea, headaches, wobbly legs, insomnia, fatigue and loss of appetite. "I feel like I've been up all night at a New Year's Party and had to go to work the next day only to find I'm coming down with the flu," is how I described my state of ill health.

I wondered if she knew they had Dengue fever in Hawaii? And like everyone else, I'd read of the dangers of deep vein thrombosis - could this be the problem?

My doctor discounted this after checking my calf muscles for any signs of swelling.

"You might have caught a virus on the aeroplane," she said cautiously, "but it sounds to me like you've got jet lag."

Jet lag. Could she be serious? Was the 24-hour journey from the Tropics to North Yorkshire really to blame for my miserable cocktail of ailments? And how could I tell my boss that I was too tired to come to work after two weeks of lounging on the beach?

Not surprisingly, some colleagues and friends were amused when I told them what was wrong. But take my word for it, jet lag is no laughing matter. Just last week two Aussie players with Leeds United were deemed unfit to play because they had a dose of jet lag.

For me, the tiredness was all-consuming. Even when I awoke from a snooze, I still felt as if I'd not slept for a week. My head felt like it had been insulated with lagging and it took all my energy to stay awake at work.

I felt sick all the time and had no appetite: within five days I'd lost half a stone.

As for my legs, they felt heavy and twitchy and just weird, as if the blood wasn't circulating properly.

To discover more about this condition - and pass the time one sleepless night - I logged on to the Internet.

The first crumb of comfort was discovering that I wasn't alone. A survey found 94 per cent of long-haul fliers experienced some form of jet lag, although some suffer more than others. Indeed my partner Nick had less severe symptoms than me.

Jet lag occurs, I learned, because changes in time zones confuse our internal body clock or our 'circadian rhythms'; profound biorhythms which date back to Stone Age man. Crucially, it's not the length of the flight which determines how bad your jet lag might be but how many time zones you cross: in other words it's flying east or west that mucks you up not north and south. They say flying east is worse, and take my word for it, it is.

The next fact I discovered filled me with dismay: it can take your body as long as one day to adjust for each time zone you cross. As Hawaii is 11 hours behind England, I was facing a long-haul journey back to feeling normal again.

Frantically, I began searching for tips on what I could do to speed up the process.

I found a lot of information on what to do before a flight and during it to offset the impact of jet lag - such as be well-rested, lay off the booze, stretch your legs frequently and adjust to your arrival time ASAP - but not much on what to do once you reach your destination, save the obvious such as don't hit the sack if it's morning there.

In the end, I had to let time take its toll and it was a full seven days before I started to feel OK again.

York nutritionist Damien Downing, a former GP and regular Evening Press columnist, has written about jet lag in his book Daylight Robbery. He says many factors contribute towards the condition including dehydration caused by the high altitudes plus alcohol, poor-quality airline food and the re-cycled oxygen supplies on board.

"But it is clear that the major component, and the one that can last for several days after flying, is a disturbance of the day/night biorhythm," he says.

"A flight from New York to London, or vice versa, results in a shift of

five time zones. Therefore, what was bedtime becomes either the middle

of the night or the middle of the afternoon. We either wake up in the

small hours and fall asleep at our desk in the afternoon, or the other way round.

"Under normal circumstances it takes at least five days to adjust your biorhythm to the new time zone, and the unaccustomed waves of fatigue or attacks of insomnia may linger for up to a fortnight."

He believes the drug Melatonin is useful in helping to reset the body clock, but it is not available in the UK. "Frequent flyers and others pick it up in health stores in the USA and bring it home to use for jet lag and insomnia," he says.

In the absence of Melatonin, he suggests exposing yourself to bright light in the mornings as light therapy is found to help overcome the symptoms of jet lag.

Like most things, however, prevention is better than cure and Aussie Vanessa Gossage, 37, who now lives in York and has done several long-haul journeys home, swears by her programme on how to beat jet lag. "The minute I board the plane, I set my watch to Australian time and I try to eat and sleep accordingly during the flight, so that when I arrive I have less adjustments to make," she says.

"I try not to eat too much on the plane, but I drink lots of water as it's important not to get dehydrated. I always take a two-litre bottle of water with me - in case they run out - and take nuts and raisins to snack on. I never drink alcohol.

"Also, I try to get up and walk about as much as possible. It's best if you can get an aisle seat, then you don't have to clamber over someone if they are asleep."

Vanessa's tips echo much of the advice I found on the Internet, and if you're going on a long-haul trip over the festive season I suggest you follow these tips to ensure you're not too tired to enjoy your holiday - or too worn-out to return to work.