Climbing the cliff

Khaleej Times (Issues) / 6 March 2013

THE KIND of things people tell you soon after you return from a vacation!

Most of it has to do with your looks and overall bearing – a kind of ‘before and after holiday’ reaction. How can you escape a comment or two on your bulk from people who seem to keep such a close watch on you?

The last time I returned from India, a friend said, almost with alarm, “Oh my God! Whatever has happened to you? Lost so much weight!”

She sounded as if I had shrunk so miserably in a month that I could now pull out my primary school outfits and fit in comfortably.

“Oh yeah? Good for me,” I said.

Soon a second friend came along and exclaimed, “Gosh! Look at her cheeks! So full and rasgulla-like. Looks like you have been eating like a horse for a month!”

The hilarity of the situation made me want to whoop out loud, but I quashed the urge in time. I tried not to look at my first friend for the fear of finding her acutely mortified. “Mom’s cooking,” I said and shrugged.

That was in the halcyon days when I did not care a fig about fitness for I wasn’t bulky, nor did I belong to any of the weight watching categories because I wasn’t a victim of slimming woes. Bathroom scales were then used only to weigh holiday baggage. It was a time when life was awash with ice creams and faloodas, garnished with butter and cream and I lived in the blissful ignorance of a silent scourge in my body called LDL cholesterol.

Actually, there was no blessed need for me to go and take a test, but I did. A regular check-up was warranted after forty, people said repeatedly, and after a long period of inaction I finally subjected myself to a complete medical assessment in the supreme certainty that all would be well. But Murphy has testified that things would go wrong if they possibly can, and so I returned with figures that ushered in forbidding terms like clogged arteries and heart attack into my chirpy life.

The wickedest thing you can do to yourself is to go to the physician when you are in fine fettle and there are no major anatomical grievances. Wisdom has always made late entries in my life and so I got a fool’s due. A moratorium was declared on all my dessert drives, and my daily bread lost the intimate company of butter. Milk was toned down and yogurt became enviously fat free.

It is only some weeks since the heart breaking news rattled my peace and so far it hasn’t been easy to follow the doctor’s diktat of salad and ration. What do you do when you have a three-day wedding to attend with four meals to savour every day? What do you do when you visit relations after four years and they serve you copiously? What do you do when a young nephew takes you out for a treat to celebrate his new job? Imagine telling them all that I have become a rabbit and would henceforth eat only carrots and cabbages, and so would they please make arrangements for the flavourless fare? 

It is going to be an uphill task to shed the bad fat and burn the calories, but when the menace is stark and staring in the face, one simply has to comply and tighten the belt. I have no clue how I am going to achieve it, and how much of external counsel from veterans and internal control from a weak will I am going to follow. But the writing is on the wall – age is catching up and it is no more fashionable to say it is enough to feel young at heart, when the heart itself is at stake.