We're Expanding!!!!

I hope you guys had a very happy Diwali!

I just realized that this is my 499th post on this blog. Which means that my next post will be my 500th!!!!

Phew!!!!

It's a little hard to believe that I've sustained at blogging for so long (3 years). I guess that's because blogging acts as a big release for me. Whenever I feel the need to take a break from work or generally switch-off for a bit, I blog! Which is why my posts are almost always random and sometimes funny. I try to stay away from writing about serious issues unless it's something I strongly feel about. So let's see what I come up with for my 500th post. I don't have any ideas...all I know is that I've got to make it special, haven't I? :)

You know what I also realized? I've gained 4 kgs over the past 3 months!!!!!! Someone KILL.ME.NOW.

Honestly, I've no one to blame for this except myself. I haven't been to the gym in a month & a half and I've been eating out 2-3 times in a week. That's not all, I've been gobbling up all forms of desserts like the world's about to face a sugar crisis. Gobble gobble gobble...someone stop me!!

Unfortunately, I also realize that THAT someone will have to be me. Poor me :(

So I've decided that I'm going to apply emergency breaks on my eating habits and haul my ass to the gym, starting this weekend. Here's what I plan to do:

1. I'm going to stick to my rule of 5-6 small meals a day rather than 3 big meals, but I'm going to put more thought into what I snack on in between my main meals. Though I'm generally healthy about this - I snack on carrots and fruits rather than fried stuff or junk food - there are times when I give in to temptation. THAT IS GOING TO STOP. I'm going to include more protein in my snacks such as nuts and yogurt.


2. Contrary to what my physical trainer suggests, I can't call the chef out and talk to him everytime I visit a restaurant. I don't want to be "that" freak-show and I'd also rather not have all sorts of pots & pans hurled at me in a public situation. So I'm going to do the next best thing - I'm going to cut down on eating out. I get bored of home food very easily and end up eating out 2-3 times a week. This is one of my major major weaknesses and I really need to get a handle on it. I'm going to eat out only once a week.


3. I'm going to cut down on desserts. I'll have them only when I'm having a real craving. There's always some - okay, alright, a lot - of chocolate sitting in my fridge. The idea was to get reverse psychology kicking in. If you have chocolate handy at all times, you know it's there when you want to have some, so you don't get cravings and you hardly end up eating any. This was my 'smartypants' logic. The problem was that this reverse psychology worked for a couple of months only. Now I pop in a mini-Bounty or mini-Snickers almost everyday!


4. I'm going to eat my breakfast within an hour of waking up. I think I have a reasonably balanced breakfast consisting of toast, a boiled egg (without the yolk) and fruit juice, or a bowl of muesli with milk and fruit juice. The problem is I generally eat it 2 hours after waking up. I really need to get my metabolism kicking sooner than that.


5. I'm going to stop my carb intake after 6pm. That means no rotis for dinner, only protein and produce.


6. I'm going to try and keep a food diary and enter everything I eat into it religiously. That way I can keep track of how good I've been through the week and feel mortified whenever the fattening/junk food intake starts to spiral. Now I just need to whip up the discipline to do this!
7. I will go to the gym regularly. I will go to the gym regularly. Repeat. If I don't, I'll become a butterball that can roll all the way from Ludhiana to Cochin with a single push, my clothes won't fit me anymore, I would need to be lifted with a crane, I won't get through doors without bringing the wall down and I'll need to ask the airhostess for an extra seat belt while flying! Oh, the horror!

Right, so 7 simple steps and hopefully the pounds will melt away, my jeans will clasp without me having to wrestle with them, my button-downs won't gape, and I won't have to take refuge in salwar-kameezes at work. And maybe, if I'm lucky, I'll also end up with a body like Bipasha Basu's!!

Now, that's something I'm willing to grovel for.

PS: I also just realized that I missed the 3rd birthday of my blog! I started blogging on October 31st three years ago. Happy Belated Birthday to 'Just Can't Get Enough' :)

Will Someone Please Tell Me How This Transformation Took Place?

Photo Courtesy: www.idiva.com

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE

I'm willing to fall at your feet & grovel. I'll be your slave for an entire month! Just tell me how the lady managed to knock off so much weight! Nita Ambani is looking fabulous, and she's glowing like a million watt lightbulb.

Anyone in on her secret?

This Pattern Needs to Break Itself

Starting the year with visits to the doctor’s, path labs etc. is what I’m referring to. It’s been a pattern for the last few years and it’s terribly upsetting. I mean, you don’t want to be starting your year being sick and lining up for check-ups at doctors’ clinics & various tests at hospitals.

2008 started with chronic pharyngitis that took me almost the entire year to get over as the throat infection would just keep coming back. 2009 started with unbelievably rapid weight gain (2 kgs in one week!!) that sent me scurrying to the doctor and then to the hospital to check for polycystic ovaries & hypothyroidism. And 2010 has started with a stomach bug. A short trip over the New Year weekend turned out into a sick weekend that saw me mostly on the bed & on antibiotics. Which meant, no street food, no shopping, no meeting my fabulous friends who call that city home (Vinny, if you’re reading this, now you know why I didn’t get around to calling you :(

I’m hoping 2010 is GOOD and that the first few days do not set the pattern for the rest of the year. Here are the tangible things I want to be looking at by the end of this year:

1. 7 kgs weight-loss (minimum 5)
2. Better fitness levels
3. Better all-round health
4. Cutting down on my expenses by 10-15%
5. At least a few lacs sitting pretty in my bank account
6. Respectable investments
7. A more stylish wardrobe

And with all the positive influences around me (read a boy who believes being over-weight & non-stylish are the two biggest crimes on this planet, punishable by death) and the fact that I now live in a city that doesn’t force you to be counting how many pennies you have left in your bank account at the end of each month, I think the goals mentioned above should be attainable.

In my defense though, I’m not technically over-weight. According to the BMI calculator, I’m on the border of normal & over-weight. And I think I’m reasonably stylish. Just that the goddamn companies want only skinny people to wear their clothes these days, so finding an outfit that I like AND that flatters my body (that is of cow-like proportions right now) is tougher than finding a needle in a haystack. And unfortunately for me, I don't possess the patience of The Boy who can spend an entire day trying to find a pair of jeans or a t-shirt that he likes, and is still perfectly happy to not have found anything by the end of the day!!

Do Not Try This At Home

I’m talking about making Tandoori Chicken on a gas stove. Which moron tries to do that, you ask?

Well, you get three guesses & the first two don’t count!

Why did I do that? Because a) I don’t have a tandoor oven or a gas tandoor at home but I really wanted to make tandoori chicken, and b) A friend of mine made it on the gas stove once & it came out looking just like it looks at restaurants.

You want to know how mine looked? It looked like a chicken dish without the curry!

To be fair to myself though - and to my dearest gas burner - it didn’t taste bad at all. It tasted quite good actually, thanks to my superior marination skills. I beat some yogurt, added generous amounts of ginger-garlic paste, lots of tandoori chicken masala (in the hope that the damn chicken would come out looking red as it does in restaurants, but it came out as pinkish-orange at best) & kept it in the fridge for 24 hrs. It tasted awesome…just that it didn’t look like tandoori chicken at all!

I must get hold of my friend & torture her until she spills the secret as to how she made hers look just like professionally made tandoori chicken.

On an aside, I’ve been going for a jog/walk since Monday. Have made it 3 days in a row! Let’s hope it continues.

There is a huge lake about 100 meters from my house that I’d never seen the face of in the one & a half years I’ve been living here. On Monday I decided to go. It was a momentour occasion in the history of mankind, I tell you, because I’ve been planning to go for a jog around the lake for about a year now. There is a nice jogging track and tons of people walking, jogging & doing yoga & all kinds of weird exercises. There are companies peddling health food/drinks at the entrance, and food stalls. The grossly obese uncles & aunties who come for their “morning walk” – because their arteries are choked with cholesterol & the weighing scale threatens to shatter under their weight – put a nice end to their walk by gulping down kachories deep fried in oil & jalebis that are saturated with sugar syrup. I wonder why they bother to get up in the morning & come for a walk at all, because trust me, it’s a BIG pain to do so!

It takes all the motivation that I can gather to wake up at 7am (I set my alarm for 6.30 & hit snooze at least 3 times before I get up) with the prospect of having to torture myself physically. No one likes to exercise, accept it. The motivation for me is that I need to lose 6 more kgs (yes people, I have lost 6 kgs already!!) , and the bonus is that I get to watch rowers glide through the lake in their boats & lech at their toned, muscular, dark glistening bodies jog by my side after their rowing sessions. You see, the lake is home to the Calcutta Rowing Club.

SALE is a four-letter word

That’s been my mantra for the past 6 months. While every shop around has been setting itself on fire with sales, trying to outdo each other on the percentage off, I've been walking around like a race horse with blinkers on!

The past couple of months have been a carnival for shopaholics. Right from brands such as UCB, Levis, Reebok & Adidas to shops selling unbranded stuff – they’ve all been screaming ‘SALE’!! And I’ve been trying to stay away from them like one stays away from the plague, or swine flu in these times - partly because I’ve realized I need to get my investments & rainy day savings in place, partly because I felt I really need to have enough money to travel to places I’ve always dreamt of going to but never seem to have enough dough to swing a trip (read Paris, Italy, Greece, Turkey), and partly because I have a very strong feeling that if I try to stuff any more into my already over-flowing closet, my clothes might just come to life & decide to strangle me in the dead of the night when I’m sleeping soundlessly in my sexy, satiny, strappy, slinky red negligee! Ahem.

So shopping’s been out of the list of things to do when one is bored or depressed. Watching movies has been out too for the most part thanks to a movie draught over the past few months. That leaves eating out – which of course I’ve been OD-ing on, given the piglet that I am! Suddenly, I seem to have forgotten that my weight loss target was 10 kgs & not 5!

Last night I was reminded of it very rudely by ‘The Boy’ who made it a point to pinch every inch of adipose on my body and accuse me of having become complacent. He also reminded me that I haven’t been to gym in more than 4 weeks and threatened to drag me there by the hair if I didn’t get my act together ASAP! Excuse me, but aren’t boyfriends supposed to be showering you with flowers, smothering you with hugs & kisses, and pampering you with chocolates and NOT SUPPOSED TO BE TELLING YOU THAT YOU ARE BECOMING FAT!!!!!

So we literally had a physical fight by the end of which I was thrown off the bed & onto the floor by virtue of ‘The Boy’s’ sheer physical strength. But I felt strangely light (in spirit), emotionally relieved & ecstatic...like one did after playing a game that involved running around when one was a kid. Or after a good physical fight with one’s sibling - that did not involve getting one’s hair pulled by the fistful!

So when was the last time you played/wrestled/got into a physical fight with someone? And I do not mean men beating the daylights out of each other.

PS: I didn't know what direction this post would take when I started writing it. From 'sales' we've ended up on men beating each other up. Now if this only extended to men beating each other up in order to decide who would get to buy the most number of gifts for the woman. That wouldn't be so bad, eh?

Halfway There

I’m halfway down the road to losing 10 kgs. I’ve lost 5kgs (11 lbs). Flat.

I didn’t know how I’ll manage to knock off 10 kgs when I started out. Anyone who’s tried losing weight knows just how difficult and frustrating it can be! You can keep sweating it out at the gym & starve yourself to the point of dizziness, without any results. But now I know...losing weight is tough but it’s doable. If you do it the right way, of course. And the right way to shed pounds, while ensuring they don’t find their way right back on to you, is to not kill yourself at the gym or starve!

Ironic, isn’t it?

You don’t need to work out for more than 1-1.5 hours at a time. You just need to do it consistently, under proper guidance, and you need to do both cardio & resistance training. You don’t need to skip meals, go on crash diets or live on fruit juices. You need to eat more frequently than you normally do...about 5-6 small meals a day, but you need to be sensible & careful about what you eat. You need not deprive yourself of food you love either (whatever that may be!), but you need to eat those things in moderation & know where to stop!

A big credit for the -5 goes to A. I was making only half-hearted attempts initially. He was always pushing me to do it (I mean, the man has not an ounce of fat on his body. He isn’t thin either...he’s just perfect...but he still thinks of himself as overweight). He’s gone completely out of his way to drop me at gym on days when I was slacking off...he’s rearranged his plans countless number of times so I could accommodate gym & he could still get to see me...he cut down on eating out himself because I was trying to avoid eating out. So more than myself, I’ve done it for him. And I’ll go the rest of the way too, for him.

In fact, I’m feeling adventurous & think I’ll give myself a stretch target - to lose a total of 12 kgs instead of 10. Howzzat??