Losing weight

A friend of mine approached me for some advice on how to curb his increasing girth. Yes, he needed serious advice because his waist to hip measure was showing whale-like proportions and his bulging belly looked like he was carrying a large Thoddoo watermelon under his shirt permanently.

I told him that losing weight was one of arithmetic or one of book-keeping - one of addition and subtraction. What you add will remain if you don't take it out. Translating this into what we eat, it's a matter of the calories (energy content or fat potential) we put into our bodies versus that we expend. What we don't spend (or burn of) will remain in our body as adipose tissue (the technical word for FAT).

True, our body is a very efficient machine. A little food goes a long way, but what happens is that our brain doesn't act according to our body's requirements. Neither do our eyes which many a time act not according to what our body is crying out. When we see delectable food items, our brain goes wild and pushes us to go have it -- consume with little consideration of how much of it we will need for sustaining ourselves which is the real purpose of food. Our affluence has turned this around from food being a NEED to one of WANT. So we gorge on delectable spreads or whatever we see as enticing -- fueled by the power of adverts on TV, billboards and news magazines, or even narrations from trendy friends – to want ever more than we need.

So I told my friend that he has two choices for losing weight; in fact three. One is to eat less, the other is to burn off what is eaten in the form of heavy duty exercise - for it is not easy to burn off those heavy calories we dump in, and yet the third is to do both. I told him that the small piece of frosted cake he eats needed half an hour of walking in the least to burn those calories it contains. So would it not be better to keep away from that piece of cake or if your brain got the better of you, at least choose to have half a serving instead of the full; to avoid drowning in those fizzy and energy intensive drinks that will accumulate toxins inside us (don’t listen to the food Incs. of the world enticing its citizens) and the burgers and doughnuts dripping with calories. The choice really was his, for it is the seriousness with which he exercised this arithmetic that his success on the bathroom scales will show.

He seemed very happy to hear what I said which must mean he was truly serious about losing weight. Not to let down on his enthusiasm, I further filled him in with some understanding of the basic mechanics of calorie metabolism. On hearing this alas, I detected a momentary face-fall; he told me he was sad to know that this challenge of losing weight entailed a lot of sacrifice. I told him that in life nothing worthy is gained without some toil. Achieving a lighter body is not without some effort (again, don’t believe those adverts that say ‘lose weight as you sleep’); but that the rewards of the effort would be substantial in the way he would feel – from outside to the inside, including the praises of his ego that gets its bloating from other people’s admiration – isn't it what we all crave most times anyway, and thus the greatest puller of all to the gyms of the world after all!? But of course, in losing weight, it can’t all be vain musings of insecure minds. As we achieve it, our bodies will indeed sing the grateful praises of having many more years of healthy lives; and we can double that wellness if we throw away those cigarettes. That will be the best present anyone can ask for in life.