My Experiments With Weight Loss

Sunday, March 8, 2009

My Experiments With Weight Loss

On the international women’s day, I dedicate this post to all those ladies with eternal quest for the perfect figure.....

I can not exactly remember when this burning desire to reduce body fat engulfed me. I suppose it was few years back. I am not certain whether it was after I started getting chance remarks like " you should seriously think of morning walks or join a gym / yoga classes " or when old clothes just would not fit me any more , when there were not enough choices in front of me in my favourite boutique or when the doctor measuring my blood pressure was surprised that the instrument's tape was’nt wide enough to wrap around the arm completely. But I am sure, the last straw was when my friend who I had gone to receive at the airport , exclaimed with an unconcealed glee “You have become healthier than I last saw you !”

The euphemism was not lost on me. The conclusion was obvious – I was putting on weight. I pressed the panic button and started making action plans for my battle against the bulges.

Being an MBA, I wanted to approach this problem methodically, in an organized manner with proper plan of action and follow up. My first course of action was to consult experts in this field , a dietician and a nutritionist. The dietician was supremely happy to have got a customer like me, (since 10 years back not many people visited dieticians unless advised by their medicos). With lot of seriousness , she told me that the key to weight loss lies in one simple theory : “your body should burn more calorie than it absorbs. Hence the extra calorie requirement would be taken care of by burning the existing body fat.” The way she sounded, she could well be explaining Einstein’s theory of relativity. Any way, after making a few enquiries about my weight , life style, food habits she gave me a diet chart to be followed religiously with 1 hour of brisk walking every day . But after 45 minutes of consultation when I came out of the dietician’s chamber, poorer by 400 bucks and richer by a diet chart , I was none too happy. The chart suggested taking protein rich , low carb , low fat diets with high fibre content. I had to take 75 gm of fish , 55 gm of cereal , omelettes made of egg white only , lotus seeds as snacks , one fruit at 11.45 am and one fruit (with low glycemic index) at 4.15 pm etc…. etc. I knew it was going to be really difficult to adhere to such schedule. This made me a little sceptical, but never the less I wanted to give it a try. I gave proper instructions to my cook to prepare food according to the diet chart and bought a weighing scale for proper monitoring during cooking. After I started on the diet, almost every day I checked the weight at least twice to note any improvement. But to my utter disappointment, I could not notice any alteration from the initial reading. May be the scale was not calibrated to read micro or nano grams ! Whether due to the frustration of not getting any immediate result or the continuous struggle to keep binging impulses at bay, slowly and steadily I started weaning away from the diet plan to my original diet, the place from where I had started. You can not just have one bread , egg white and lots of salad for break fast every day, refuse ice creams / pastries or chocolates when offered, have tea without sugar for long , replace evening snacks by lotus seeds and still survive. For a week or so, as a temporary measure, it is tolerable. But as a long term measure , it was just not acceptable, at least not to a foodie like me. I realized now more than ever before that – Every thing good in life is either illegal, immoral or fattening !

So I started looking for less impractical solutions. I searched the web, scrammed through the books on obesity, read any available articles on weight loss, watched Television Shows, discussed with friends and relatives hoping for a miraculous short term solution. I spent more time reading “How to lose 10 lbs in 7 days” than my favourite author. Most of my talks with friends revolved around this topic. As a result of my quest for the elusive short cut solution , I became an expert on BMR, body Mass Index, Calorie Meter, Daily Calorie requirement, Glycemic Index, Satiety Index, low-cal food, calorie burning food and many more such terms. I tried experimenting with Atkinson Diet, Lauki diet, Warm water with lemon juice , phenugrik powder, etc. etc. , but to no avail. There was again no improvement in the readings of the weighing scale. As every other forms of human effort, I realised there was no short cut to success in fat-loss as well and definitely there was no substitute to hard work.

Hence I decided to join a Gymnasium for workouts as exercising seemed to be the key to obtaining a great physique. I bought a pair of walking shoes and a track suit from the nearest Reebok outlet and jumped on to the band wagon of avid gymmers. But there too life was not a bed of roses. The only machine which suited my temperament was the treadmill and there would invariably be a big rush for the same as my time coincided with many other office going gymmers. Hence after I returned from gym, I would have had to rush to make it to the office on time. Not only that, I constantly missed my morning news paper sessions and chit-chats with my hubby in the morning. I tried to shift my gymming time to the evening. But even that did not work out, as it was too much to expect from a lazy person like me to go for work-outs in the evening after a hard day’s work at office. Also it interfered with the time I was spending with my son and neither of us was ready to sacrifice that at any cost. Similar things ensued for Yoga classes and late evening walks. Since I could only afford to go for walks at unearthly hours, I did not get any company and solitary long walks were getting on my nerves ! So I was back to square one.

There were also other options like slimming tablets, dietary substitutes, low-cal sweetners , morning walkers, ab-rockers , thermal belts , massagers etc. which are advertised daily as the sure shot solutions. But then I just did not want to go for anything which was not backed by medical science as I am a strong believer of the fact that for my son “Healthy(Fat) mama” is any day better than a “Sick mama”.

10 years down the line, the bottom line is, I have not gained much apart from experience. May be the burning desire in me which forced the plunge into less-fat regime, just did not have enough heat. Probably my short-term desires over powered the long-term goal of a perfect body. There can be no other explanation for the lack of success. But there was an exception. The only time when without even trying I managed to shed a lot of weight was the time when I was in Singapore and where my husband was undergoing his Master’s course. Since I was there for only 2.5 months, we did not have any domestic help. So from the morning I landed there, I was busy cooking , washing , cleaning , shopping and doing other house hold chores. Add to that, my husband decided to play host and invited his friends with their families to our apartment for a taste of Indian food. I on my part tried my best not to let them down. Consequently, by the time my this trip came to an end, I was weighing a few kilos lesser . It is another thing that I managed to get back all those lost kilos and may be a few additional ones after my return to the mother land. But this definitely gave my dear hubby a brilliant idea that instead of investing in gyms and dieticians if I just got rid of my domestic helps, much better results could be ensured. But I declined the proposal demonstrating the practical difficulties associated with it.

All the same , until recently , I was feeling extremely guilty with a sense of failure for not having been able to achieve a goal set by me years back. I always cursed myself for not posessing that "Do or Die" attitude. But recently , I came across an article which gave me a new lease of guilt - free life. This article had published a research finding saying the body weight of a person is not only a function of diet and metabolism but also has some thing to do with the genes. I mean genes also have some role to play in making a person a Laurel or a Hardy. Bless those scientists, this was a great guilt lessener for me. Now I am armed with a scientific explanation to counter my unconscious guilt feeling of not doing enough in war on fat. This also solved the mystery to me, why some people having all the luck in the world, do not seem to put on an extra ounce even after binging to glory.

Lastly on the international women's day I am taking five resolutions which will help me overcome this silly issue over fat tissues : a) I must learn to accept my self as the mirror reflects b) I would rather change my wardrobe instead of trying to change myself to fit into it c)I will not allow Slimming clinics , Fancy fitness clubs, health food centers, manufactures of so called slimming equipments to feed my quest for the perfect figure..d) will try and increase the absolute body mass of people around me , so that my relative weight becomes lesser and e) I will never be jealous of any man or woman with greek god/goddess like figure as I now know the amount of hard work and sacrifice that goes into it.

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