Losing Weight

I've just lost 8 kg.

Yes, thank you, I appreciate the applause. Especially since losing weight has never been a piece of cake for me or for anyone else, I gather. At least as easy as piling on the kilos.

Everyone is asking me
1) How I lost so much weight (which I interpret as "How can you be so consistent in exercise or diet or whatever it is you do ?")
2) Why you need to lose 6 kg more ( which means "Being 5 ft 9 inches, you look quite presentable after losing all that weight. So why do you want to put us all into a complex by seeking to lose some more ?")

I have a few things to say about losing weight at all :

I've realised in the last couple of years that health is wealth. If you're not well, you aren't in a position to enjoy the pleasure or comforts of life, even if you're stinking rich. You need to be physically and mentally at peace with yourself to appreciate life at all.

Exercise is not an option. It's a must. It's as important as eating or sleeping or recreation is to our well-being. Just as a door long shut will creak when you finally open it, your body will protest when after years of inertia of rest, you suddenly decide to explore its possibilities. Do you want to be self-sufficient in your old age ? Then you have to exercise.

Losing weight is not just about looking good. It's also about feeling good. If you exercise, your body is toned and conditioned and that shows in your face. Your circulation improves, you sleep better, your digestive system works optimally, your face has the glow that not even a Rs 500 worth cream can buy.

Losing weight means you can carry off any and every fashion with confidence and charisma. Even make up becomes superfluous when people stare at you with awe. After all, let's be honest. All we want at the end of the day is to stand out in a crowd. Try exercising for rapid results !

I love food. And yet, I've never found it a depressing challenge to lose weight. That's because I don't believe in starving my body or being unkind to it in any way. You need to understand the needs of your own body to help it fight the flab.

I'm lucky in that I'm partial by preference to most healthy 'diet foods' like salad, most vegetables (I hate potol or pointed gourd, though) and fruits, grilled and steamed dishes, soups and dairy products, and abhor the usual Bangali spicy and overfried stuff, I do have my own particular weakness for eggs, desserts, salad dressings and Indian Chinese. Naturally, that has to be taken into consideration when I am determined to lose weight. So I've researched and found out the ways in which I can cheat a little. It's fun :-)

To lose weight , you need to motivate yourself. Others can't help you if you're lazy and a glutton.

The book I recommend to all of you is Rujuta Diwekar's 'Don't Lose Your Mind, Lose Your Weight', published by Random House India, priced at Rs 199. She's the lady instrumental into leading Kareena into size zero mode. You'll find the necessary details in the book itself and it really makes for an interesting story. The book itself is an amazing read. It's lucid, layman-friendly and practical. It's transformed my thoughts on the subject of losing weight forever.

For those who aren't into reading anything as complicated as a book, I'll be here soon with another short (hopefully) article soon on the most important things to do or avoid. Till then, you'd better check out yourself on the scales ! ;-)

Just to show you that I'm not half as narcissistic as some of you may think, here are two of my own photos, gym-ad style ('before' and 'after') to show you the difference, especially since the first place where my excess weight shows up happens to be my face !

Me now :



Me then :

It was a pleasant surprise to read that Aamir Khan's thoughts run on lines similar to what Rujuta Diwekar's book suggests.


I can't help but be impressed.

Respite

Ah.... at last, it seems, it rained. After much patient suffering and powercuts related sensationalism.



Well, but it seems the grass is always greener on the other side. Here it's been dripping incessantly right from Friday onwards and the miserable weather seems likely to persist till we're ready to scream with frustration. Which I already am.



And to add to it, I've not been well for some time. Abdominal cramps which began last Tue after I returned from a round of jogging and caused me to sit on the edge of the sofa with clenched mouth and contorted features, continued to haunt me with threats of a return for the next few days. Till I had to consult a local gastroenterologist on Fri noon. After noting all the related gynaecological complications, I was packed off to Somerset Medical Center for urine, blood and ultrasonography (involving some quite embarrassing invasion of anatomical privacy) procedures. Although each and every human being related to the medical technicalities was unexpectedly kind and reassuring, the very nature of the day, sullen and overcast, tortured me with vague premonitions of some unpleasant tale in the making. I'm not superstitious by nature, but as I remarked earlier, weather related changes influence me to a ridiculous extreme. The reports are due soon. I wonder.



We were watching X-Men 2 (X2) and 3 (X-Men : The Last Stand) back-to-back on FX Channel yesterday evening. It struck me as ominous that people like Bobby's parents and the President/Jean's parents should judge any aberration from the normal human condition as a disease needing some sort of cure, however drastic or painful the latter might be to the person in consideration. Or that Jean's id-like unconscious and violent passions, in the avatar of Phoenix, seek to be harnessed by Magneto for all the wrong reasons. It's most curious indeed how we all seem to have this predisposition to form cults/clans/groups/gangs against anything/anyone else that might threaten our individualism. As if ganging up itself was not a theoretic oxymoron with respect to the virtue of individualism and uniqueness. But I did find the use of the Freudian conscious = ego = Jean/unconscious = id = Phoenix symbolism intriguing. The portrayal of Jean as the life-giver towards the end of X-Men 2 in stark juxtaposition to Phoenix as the death-wreaker right at the beginning of X-Men 3 is compelling. Although it does remain a problem that all these moral implications somehow tend to get overwhelmed in the light of the visual kaleidoscope that is the film.



Amistad, watched on Friday night on DVD, however, stunned all our perceived notions of humaneness and nobility. The fact that Cinque actually has to fight for the basic human right of independence in a world where Declarations of Independence form such a mouthful in history, jars and jeers at our jaundiced desensitisation to the trauma that underlies the history of 'civilizations'. It was sobering, this rude realisation how we humans have knowingly and willingly contributed to the ghastly and shameful apparition of the subaltern. It is a testimony of incessant narcissistic human enterprises (instanced in the oft-dismissed diatribe of the 'Communist Manifesto') that we are too mired in academic technicalities to analyse with all the respect due to our collective conscience. We are too busy hoarding for our respective (a)moral futures in a world of globalisation to trace our tortuous way back to the lives we trample and tyrannise over in our effort to surface as the surviving elite. In short, we remain uncivilized primates, be it in our conspiracy to preserve class divides to serve our vested self-interests or in our blasphemous exploitation of God-given genes of complexion to further motivated neurotic (non)needs.



And all this for the ego ?! Which, as Lacan shows, is itself a human construct, the ultimate exercise in self-deception.



Mercy me.

Poila Boishakh

I decided to inaugurate the Bengali New Year by the actual (and long overdue) implementation of some healthy (quite literally) determinations. We went out jogging today.



I discovered that I was horribly out of form. We had to stop every 5 mins so that I could catch my breath. I myself wasn't very happy at the discovery, especially since we'd quite dressed the part (in our new purchases) and were secretly feeling very upbeat about this new-look us. Both of us have gained weight, as I did confess earlier, and we are eager to start losing all the unwanted excess. We have acquired a habit of going out for a brisk walk for over a month now, but as K (and Madhav) love saying, no pain without gain and I couldn't really expect to see any dramatic difference by mere diet and walks, though they did of course matter for people who didn't entertain such gigantic expectations from one's own thoughts and actions (like me) at every point of life. So...



K has really impressed me though. He does reiterate that he is quite out of form and seems to mean it, but oh, the gulf between our so-called forms cannot but make me flush with sheer embarrassment. I have been medically diagnosed with low lung capacity (after lung function tests at repeated intervals) and have been advised to increase my exercise sessions in slow steps. It used to try my patience earlier and I'd often disobeyed it but have now learned my lesson, by being at the receiving end of the rebellious tendencies. I was a health freak once upon a time, one of the fastest runners in my class way back in school in MHS, having fared well in broad jump, badminton and relay races in those ancient days. After that, throughout my 5 years in JU, I kept up with the habit of skipping, floor and freehand exercise continuously except for a brief period in 2002 when I had had a breast tumour removal operation and was strictly debarred from any form of exercise whatsoever except walking for almost six months, which ended up in my gaining a nightmarish 10 kg that in a slow and insidious manner, turned me from athletic to fat almost overnight.



I will not bore you with my reaction. It's predictable. But what might entertain you is my discovery of the sheer extent to which gaining weight had transformed my features, so that I was scared and scarred by the shock of the chance discovery. Baba and I had gone to Guwahati to attend the Annual Urological Conference (USICON) and while Baba was participating in a seminar, I humoured one of the commissioned artists at the entertainment zone by posing for my portrait. When he finally handed it to me, I stared. He smiled expectantly, hoping for a heartfelt and enthusiastic thanks. I had simply smiled wanly, unable to oblige him. I was in shock at what I saw. I looked like a married woman, the mother of 10 children with plump cheeks and a hint of a double chin. I hated it.



I went home and read up everything on weight loss I could lay my hands on. I finally found my dream workout solution in a theory offered by a nutritionist, which claimed that the body had a peak metabolic rate upto an hour after every meal and hence, could work out to its optimal level if put into exercise mode at that point of time. I began to implement the theory with a vengeance, after each major meal of the day i.e. breakfast, lunch and dinner. Within a month, I could fit into all my old salwars and didn't have to stick to the jeans-kurti routine any more at college. After a couple of months, friends at college ( I particularly recall Jhinuk) asking about the secret to my achievement. I began to regain confidence. And within 5 months, I had lost more weight than I'd ever hoped to. My parents congratulated me on my perseverance, despite their secret fears that I'd been overdoing it. But I had never overdone it, that I'd made sure of. I just decreased portions at each meal, gave up fries and fried sweets, started to have pulses and raita for snacks and ate sensibly at invitations. It worked. Later I included pranayam in my routine. I felt even better, both physically and mentally.



That's why I'm not scared now, even after gaining more than I did the last time. I know I'll work it off. But not by torturing myself. I know the limits and limitations of my body now and my weakness for desserts and potatoes. I know my target weight and the clinically recommended one, too. I mean to strike a balance between the two. By increasing the amount of jogging I do on a daily basis. I'll reach the goal slowly and steadily. Nothing and no one else can discourage or demoralise me. I'm a survivor.

Healthy Food

K experienced a sudden and urgent desire to have fruit salad on Tue evening, after coming home from office. But he was very tired at that point of time. So he took off on a nap for an hour or so, while I did a quick begun-bandhakopi-tomato-yellow capsicum curry which btw, turned out to be a surprise success (it seems I'm the one most surprised when one of my dishes actually work out well ). After that, we dashed off to Stop N Shop, which mercifully remains open till midnight on weekdays. We picked up a tub of plain non-fat yogurt, one of non-fat vanilla yogurt, two tubs of low-fat icecream (French Vanilla and Chocolate), a can of condensed milk, cherry flavoured dried cranberries and bananas. K dished up, with the additional help of refrigerated apples, pears, blackberries and some salted nuts an awesome dessert. And a healthy, guiltless one. He looked immensely satisfied at this feat. Cheers !

Yesterday, we bravely tried out a new tilapia fish recipe, baking it instead of the usual cooking-on-gas with either tomato-onion-ginger or chilli-soya-vinegar sauces-and-capsicum varieties. Sorry I forgot to take a photo, it did look very picturesque indeed when done...well, next time perhaps ! It tasted exactly like fish kebabs, healthy and amazingly subtle. Here's the recipe :

Tilapia with Garlic Butter

Cook Time: 20 minutes

Ingredients:
2 tablespoons butter
2 cloves garlic, finely minced
dash pepper
dash salt
pinch dried dill or parsley
dash paprika
4 tilapia fillets

Preparation:
In a saucepan/non-stick frying pan, combine butter, garlic, pepper, salt, dill, and paprika. Heat over low heat until butter is melted and starts simmering. Remove from heat. Brush a little of the butter mixture in the bottom of a shallow baking dish (line baking dish with foil, if desired) then place tilapia fillets on the buttered area. Brush top of each tilapia fillet with the seasoned butter mixture. Bake at 350° for 20 to 25 minutes, until tilapia flakes easily with a fork.
Serves 2.

Note : I didn't have dill, so I used plain old cilantro (dhonepata) instead. Don't know how it would have tasted with dill, but the dhonepata sure worked wonders for us !

P.S. K is quite indignant. I took the liberty of informing him that his snoring resembles fireworks.