Search This Blog

Thursday, July 21, 2016

Dealing with weight woes and the balancing act

As the old adage goes, 'You can never be too rich or too thin' and while I’m not going to debate the first part of that statement, it’s the second part I’m talking about today.

Imagine this scenario (and it's something that almost everybody will identify with almost instantaneously).

You’re at a party and enjoying yourself and a certain lady enters. Now, she’s someone who you haven’t seen for a while, so you can clearly see that she’s gained some weight. That’s when you hear someone  telling her how great she looks and that outfit of hers is 'to die for!' She smiles, says a polite ‘thank you’ and turnsaway to talk to someone else. And then you hear the first lady tell the group of people she’s standing with” Have you seen how much weight she’s gained?”Those words say it all, they define a mindset that people have- that a person must look a certain way and maintain a certain weight and heaven help them if he/she has added a few extra pounds!


Here’s another scenario, you walk into an event and someone tells you that you’ve lost weight. Makes you feel good, doesn’t it? That’s because you have probably made your weight a significant part of your sense of self esteem and because those words touch that part of your psyche, it makesyou feel happy. Each one to their own of course, and I’m no one to pass judgmentbut I’ve known of so many cases where weight gain has made some of my friendsand acquaintances so miserable that they have resorted to shelling out big bucks and going in for weight loss treatments - some of which do work, but an equal number of them don’t. Sadly, the fact of the matter is that weight loss becomes more difficult as a person ages, so for all those over 40 and trying to manage their weight, it would be great to keep that in perspective.
It's no secret that Oprah Winfrey has struggled with her weight for decades. Over the years, she's spoken candidly about bouncing from one diet to the next. In 1992, Oprah lost a considerable amount of weight and by her 50th birthday  in 2004, she seemed to have her health and weight under control. But that weight seems to come backt ime and again and she continues to be candid about it. Watching Aishwarya Rai walking the red carpet at Cannes a few years back was an eye opener. Here was 'the most beautiful woman in the world' with at least 20 extra pounds post motherhood,seemingly happy with the way she looks. In the interview that followed, she talked of coming back to films, but nowhere did I hear her mention her rush to lose that weight. Made me think, how very different her approach was from the Victoria Beckhams and the Beyonces after they had their babies.

On a less serious note, ‘The toughest part of a diet isn't watching what you eat. It's watching what other people eat!’ 

This was a line that I posted on my FB profile some time back and was amazed at the number of comments that it generated. To cut the long story short, most of them were incomplete agreement with the line and ruefully acknowledged that that it was 'oh so true'.

As someone who has been through the ‘Yo Yo’ syndrome myself,I consider myself as somewhat of an authority to talk about it. Diets are indeed a hard act to follow through and it is the easiest thing in the world to fall off the wagon. You gain some, then decide to lose it, which you do up to a point then get fed up, or just plain bored And that’s where the cycle starts all over again. So at this point in my life, this is where I'm at. I eat all that I want to for a few days, then do the balancing act for the next few. That way I'm able to successfully maintain at least the semblance of a ‘status quo’.

But for all that I do/don't do, what I definitely try and do is walk off some of it away. At least five evenings a week I set out and try and do about 30-45 minutes at as brisk a pace that I'm able to manage on that given day. It mostly works for me,  try it and I'm fairly sure that it will work for you as well.


NB- This piece was originally written for my column My Take in Muscat Daily

No comments: