In class VIII, my parents took me to a hospital, to get some
basic check-up done for getting obese. After few lab tests, the advice was diet
and exercise. I did not have enough know-how about how all those things worked.
The only things that I was aware of was I was being asked to eat
less, do yoga while my father's exercising and I was being sneered at in
public.
I once had a dream, I was in a blue dress in front of a
mirror and thin. It just remained that, a dream and an impossibility till
it became true.
After Class XII, I joined Siddha Samadhi Yoga classes with my
mom. After a week, we had to stop eating cooked food. That psyched me so much,
that I could see only through one eye for a couple of weeks. It was a terror to
not eat rice which I ate for so many years of my life, four times a day.
During my first year of undergrad, I weighed 154lb. I swam for a
semester and came to 143lb. But that was all lost enthusiasm, once I got into
the college routine. I came to 159lb by the fourth year. Thats when my friends
and I started going to the gym whenever possible, nothing much happened by way
of weight loss but there was a feel-good factor when we were up in the morning,
when it was so beautiful. Slowly I started eating rotis (tortillas). I can say
that this is the turning point in my life enroute losing weight. By then I had
read in Readers Digest that appetite can be controlled. It was very very hard
to shift to rotis from rice. Living on lots of rice for 20 years, made it
difficult to shift to rotis. With rice, I did not know how much I was
eating. With rotis, I could count.
By the end of that year I reduced to 154lb.
When I was doing my internhsip at Bangalore, my office was 4.5km
away. I had lots of time. I was still a student, so I wasnt comfortable paying
30Rs a day, so I just walked. My mom would tell me that ' I walk without
whining'.. When we go to our village, we
need to walk for a km or more. As a kid I did not have problem doing that
while my sister threw tantrums. Each time we had to walk, my mom praised my
enthusiasm to walk. This somehow increased my interest in walking. I had time
and I kept walking 9km a day. I started losing 1.5lb a month. That is a very
unnoticeable change. But I was told that you will never get this weight back. Walking is
a very good exercise, to get you started. This I did for six months and I kept
working on having only rotis for lunch. By the end of it I got to 143lb.
Still kept walking whenever I could. this was in 2003
In 2006, I didnt know what got onto me. I was a well-prepared
playground for diet and exercise. I kept working out every day on the
elliptical for an hour. As I kept losing weight, I came to see the elliptical as
a fat melting machine. I reached 115lb ... I did not think that was possible.
After all the weight loss, I felt like my legs were made of
hollow-bamboo. Soon people started telling me, that they could not recognise me
or that I was getting smaller and smaller each time they saw me.
Looking through the journey, I realise that once I figured what
worked for me, I kept at it and emerged successful. Later, I went on to do a
rim to rim hike in Grand Canyon. Any weekend with good weather, I had to be out
walking.
