A few days ago, a friend of mine began telling me the story of an overweight person I’ve never met and am hardly ever likely to. I don’t know why this person came up in conversation because we weren’t even talking about weight or health. But somehow this person and her weight took up a large part of our conversation.

“How did she get to this size ?”

“Doesn’t she look at herself in the mirror?”

These rhetorical questions triggered off a response quite unknown in my psyche: it made me want to cry because the person under discussion, could very well have been me. And it could have been one of the millions who aren’t blessed with a metabolism that allows them to live the way they want to.

Eating when when you want to and what you want to; exercising/walking because you want to and not because you have to; filling your library with books you want to read and not books about healthy eating and healthy living, is a blessing.
Because being healthy is not synonymous with being thin.

Weighty Matters

I have been having a weight problem ever since I was born. Initially, the problem was lack of weight. . Where other babies looked like angels, I was scrawny and emaciated. As a toddler and a young girl, I was the stick figure with wild curls. Then when my hormones kicked in ( and rather early at that ) I began to put on the pounds. And they never stopped piling on till my teenage years. During my mid-teens, I was mocked by the neighbourhood kids who called me Empress Ashoka after the first Jumbo Jet that was acquired by Air India. And later on as a middle aged woman, my Yoga teacher would point out to my bingo wings and say “Ay joh ni? Porbundar nu asli ghee!” ( Look at this fine specimen of Porbunder Ghee)

During the six-month break we had after the school leaving exams I invented my own routine to become an acceptable size before beginning college. I would walk 5 miles every day and dance to disco music for an hour after that. I played an hour of badminton three days a week and continued with my daily dog walking routine. The effort paid off because I came to a medically and socially acceptable weight. But sadly I was still known as the fat girl with the curly hair.

Still Pleasantly Plump

In my early twenties I managed to control my weight even after marriage and two pregnancies . I was not exactly my ‘ideal’ weight but still only 2 kg off my pre-pregnancy weight. However, it was exactly when I hit my 30th birthday that I began losing the battle of the bulge.

In an effort to lose those two kilos, I stuck a Video Cassette in my VCR and jumped around with Jane Fonda while the babies looked on in amusement. They loved the music and The Girl with the Pony Tail as they called one of the dancers in the class.

But that didn’t do me much good so I joined an Aerobics class that was not too far to walk to. So for three days a week, I would burn calories walking briskly to the class and back, burn up some calories during the hour’s class but before I knew it, I had put on 2 kgs instead of losing them!

So now I was 4 kilos heavier than my ‘target’ weight and the instructor’s words “Muscle weighs more than fat,” offered me little comfort. I was soon morphing from a fat person into a bodybuilder!

I changed my exercise program and went back to walking which had yielded results in the first place and was more sustainable than gymming (as it is now called).

For about two years I managed to walk regularly for 8 km a day but the girls’ school timings changed and I had to squeeze in a walk at 4 am. This was an ungodly hour so I changed to exercising while the girls were playing some sport at the Club.

Despite a busy schedule of dropping and picking the kids, walking to Bhaji Gulley twice a week for the veggies and the erratic exercise schedule, the pounds kept on piling.

You become what you eat

I found a new ‘solution’: dieting. I discovered books like the Scarsdale Diet, Dr Atkins diet and challenged myself to find suitable Indian alternatives to a very impractical American Diet. When that didn’t work, I did the General Motors Diet, the Don’t Eat After Sunset Diet, the Avoid Dairy and All things White Diet, the Give up Sugar Diet, the Cabbage Soup Diet, the Only Sambar Diet, Only Fruits Till Noon Diet, fasting on Wednesdays …….. and the list can go on.

I drank warm water and lemon to kick start my metabolism first thing in the morning. I switched over to green tea. I had the apple cider vinegar shots that actually wore down the enamel of my teeth and made me eventually replace all my teeth with caps and crowns. I brought home a Kombucha Mushroom and nurtured it reverentially till I ran out of people to gift the new one to. I had homoeopathic and Ayurvedic tablets to lose weight and even tried Lavanya Tailam an Ayurvedic massage oil to massage away the cellulite!

My thyroid was tested and treated for Hypothyroidism , and I continued with my Yoga at home and at various classes through the years. But alas! I still remain fat.

After half a century ( which is almost my entire life) I have tried to lose weight so the next time you see a fat person please don’t ask “how could you reach this size?”

We do look in the mirror but unfortunately that doesn’t work .

Is this your story too?

Featured image was taken without permission from the net