Genesis !!!

Okay

So there I was, 42 waisted.
I give credence to my distance from Home, during my engineering years.
It is the hostel food that helped me maintain my glorious figure. I was in shape.
The Round kind. Not to say that I didn’t take up exercise then, Oooo I Did..
More than once….Jogging, Gym etc etc…But there was always some bummer in the plans.
And well, I remained a hippo.

Time passed, and I came here, to Dubai. And when I arrived, I had to buy a suit. I was going professional you see. So In Doha, I and my parents went SUIT hunting.
Surprise Surprise….They didn’t have one which could fit my shoulders and belly simultaneously. So if it fit my shoulders, I had to suck my belly in and into my back to get the buttons fixed, and if it fit my belly, its length came upto my knees.
I’m pretty sure you get the picture now.
I finally got a suit.

You see, we fat people have this problem. When we look into the mirror, we choose to believe that we exist only in the top half, by which I mean, above the shoulders. And most of us look and go “I’m not fat…” Reality raises its ugly head when someone comes and stands next to us. And that’s where we look and see a giraffe standing next to an Airbus A380.
So when I donned the suit, I saw myself as a formal business attired human from chest up. And from chest down, the cargo hold of Titanic.

Anyways, I came to Dubai. And with a resolution, that when I would go back to Doha, I’d be slimmer than before, (This was probably my 75th STRONG resolution). I started with a salad diet. And a good way into my first weak, I realized that the morons at the hotel were “decorating” my salad with grated cheese and whatnots.

YOU SEE WHY I BLAME THE WORLD FOR BEING FAT !!!!

1. They call an 18 year old the FATHER of a 13 year old
2. They laugh when you step inside the gym
3. They laugh when you go for prayers (I’m gonna whoop the asses of those kids someday)
4. When you are winning the swimming race and are swimming at full throttle, they laugh and say, Who’s this Whale?? (This happened in doha as well, BUT I CAME IN FIRST, so Nyaaaah to the loser slim line jerks)
5. They grate cheese on my Healthy alternative to fatty foods.

Kiss my ass, I will rebel against fitness and remain fat.

And then november 2008 rolled around. And it was an ugly month. And it didn’t help that my birthday fell in that month, just made it worse somehow.
And on the 30th of November, I made the most awesome decision of mine since the day I left Doha for India. I decided to join the Gym. It happened out of a whim I guess. I mean, I was over weight, and well, Had to do something about my mental imbalance in those days.
So I had 2 roommates, One we will call Maama, (Not to be read as MOM or MOMMA or any such maternal call sign)
Maama was fatter than I was, (Or so I thought).
No seriously, he was chubbier. The difference between us was, He had fat all over him, I had a wide mid-section more than anything else. Bringing it down to business terms, it was a comparison of Apple and Pear.
The other roommate was actually a fit guy. We’ll call him Aashiq. He was madly in love. And well, he had just seen the promos of Ghajini. For the uninitiated, Ghajini was, according to us, the best film of 2008. Not to mention Aamir Khan’s finest performances. And the physique he had built for that movie was beyond what words can describe. I mean, from a short flaccid body, this man crafted a War machine body in a year and a half. And well, he gave us a complex.





I’d joined Gyms before, but never went regularly for more than a few days. My longest affair with the weight loss program was a month and a half. And I recognized the problem was, in the initial days, you require a teammate to pull you to gym. Going solo requires will power of a Bull charging a Matador. Kill or Die attitude. And well, if I had that attitude, I wouldn’t be in this place would I?
So the 3 of us join up. And on the first day, we have tests run on us by the fitness trainers.

There is a fancy machine which calculates all parameters of your body, mapping your structure, to your Weight, Mass, Bone Mass, Fat Mass, Christmas and all that jazz.
Maama had to loose about 25+ Kgs to come to a normal size for his height. I got onto the machine and saw the weird graphs go up and down. Whenever they went down on something, my heart jumped with joy. The test was all-round normal, except my fat level, but I already knew that. There was this parameter wherein I was really low. I was gonna cry happy tears. And later the trainer tells me, “Tch tch, you see, that low count there is your bone mass, you need to build more bones dude”
I wanted to cry tears alright. DAMN!!!!

And then we hit the Treadmills with the enthusiasm of a kid on the first day to school. The cardio theatre (as it was called) was filled with cardio machines of all kinds, all facing a wall which had 16 or 18 Huge LCDs running different channels. So when you did your cardio (Which I must tell you is the most boring form of exercise) You were well and truly distracted.

I got on the machine and set the dial to 20 mins cardio. I looked at Maama, he was oogling at the chickadees. And Aashiq gave me a look and said, “I am gonna take 5 mins cardio and hit the weights”
Lucky bugger had the right to do that. Someday I said to myself…….Someday

I looked back at Maama, his face was plastered with a wide grin, clearly the gym’s stock of chickadees was approved by him.

I pressed START and the treadmill started moving.

The journey of a million calories began with that one step !!!