The other day I was at my cousin’s place. Since he just got that home, hes got tons of shiny objects that I love to play with. One of them was a weighing scale, the kinds you see at expensive hotels. And now when I have been running intermittently and controlling my food intake, I decided to measure the impact. I ought to have lost a lot of weight in last 6 months! All the hard work has to pay off. I had kept a serious tab on my fetish for junk food and cola. I was bound to have lost weight.
With butterflies in my stomach and a heart that was jumping so hard that it could pop out of my throat, I tapped on the scale to activate it and then I stepped on it. To measure myself.
They say when you face death, time flows slower and the entire life somehow flashes past your eyes. And that is what happened when I saw the number on the weighing scale. I was struck by a lightening. As ferocious as it would have been when the day of reckoning would have tormented mother Earth. When all Dinosaurs perished and when we were engulfed in a white storm. The time stood still.
And like all victims of calamities that us humans cant control, I went through the following five stages of emotions – anger, denial, question, acceptance and depression.
It started with my pent up anger coming to surface. I was angry at myself for letting the athletic me of the late nineties to have become the fatso of now. Like most things in life, I did not plan for my inflated belly but I know that I could have controlled it. And to be honest it does not take much to do so. And yet I let is grow like crazy. To a point where I cant breathe after even little exertion.
Next up was denial. When I tried to tell myself that its not me and may be the weighing scale has made some mistake. May be the scale was rigged and its a conspiracy against me and my weight loss mission. May be its an attempt to derail me from writing the Nidhi Kapoor story.
And then the question. I questioned Mother Nature. I asked about her decision to punish me. Me of all her 7 billion children. There are times when you want her to select you and shower you with goodies but at times like these when she singles you out and slaps you hard in the face, you wonder, why me.
I realized that like lot of other things this has been forced upon me. Yes, I am responsible for a large part of it. And I accepted the way I am. I told myself that I’d be happy and try to live with my chin held high. I would close my eyes everytime I see someone who is fitter and leaner. That in reality means that I walk like a blind man, for everyone else around me is fitter and leaner than I. But since I have accepted to live with this, I shall do so.
But the hard part is to actually do it everyday. Day after day. Hour after hour. Minute after minute and second after second. There is no way I can keep depression away from my head. Not about my poverty or about my thinning bank balance. But about my uncontrollable weight. Whatever I have tried, may not be much. But it definitely is not working. The only options left for me, as I see, are either to go into the sharan of Nirmal Baba, or renounce from this material life and goto the mountains. But I think going to mountains requires serious commitment and effort. But then, I wish I was the kinds to put in effort 🙁