REALITY CHECK.

I weigh the most I have ever weighed.

I have graduated from the small to the medium or even large size.

I used to weigh 57 kg in 2020. Now I'm a whopping 67 kg.

My clothing choices have dramatically shifted.

Yet its not just about the food at all.

It's the link with my emotions and cognition.

I find myself thinking about food all the time.

I binge eat, two whole big bags of Funyuns and cheetos and eat dessert on top of it.

My mind feels cluttered, hazy and not good at all.

Even this post is so cluttered. I will define my problem statement:

Problem statement:

I am officially overweight. I don't feel good physically ( i don't enjoy dressing up) , mentally ( my mind is occupied with thoughts of food) or emotionally ( I binge eat whenever I feel that I can).

I want to change. 

Idea: Don't be swept away by EVERYTHING!

Subject: Sarah Jessica Parker in Sex and the City & Kiara Advani eating sliced apples with peanut butter.

First of all, I love Sarah Jessica Parker. At 58, she can carry any fashion look under the Sun. One of the things I really admire about her is that she never got a nose job despite being the absolute fashion icon in the ruthless entertainment industry. Apart from the strength and self acceptance she represents, she is a joy to watch. I find her extremely elegant, feminine and poised. I love her voice and how she speaks.

 I loved the blingy word of the women in STC, specially because my sister accompanied me on those blissful summer evenings where we sat glued to HBO, watching Carrie (SJP) and her girlfriends.  There is an ease to watching such shows and movies ; the no-brainer aspect of visually pleasing entertainment. Watching Carrie  in every outfit has been a delight.

All this praise being valid, I will now put it to the side.

When i watch such shows, I must remember, I am not SJP or any of her friends, and I am not existing in their universe. It's very evident on the surface that I am not SJP but here I am talking about the internal experience of having desires about her lifestyle. I am talking about being swept away with things you watch, an experience many people will confess to having when they watch shows like Gossip Girl or STC . In most circumstances, when you look at something on screen and say: '' oh I want it'' Or that, '' I think I should have it'', you should first question your inner philosophy.

Recently, I saw a clip in which the bollywood actress Kiara Advani was talking about how her favorite snack is sliced apple with peanut butter.  Her fitness is admirable , and the novel food combination struck me as interesting.Inspired, I tried a whole apple with spoonfuls of peanut butter. It was good indeed. But the difference between me and Kiara Advani is that, she has this snack before an intense workout, wisely positioned between other very healthy, oil free, low carb, portion controlled meals, to maintain a size 2 that looks good on screen. She has a lifestyle suited, and even required for her job and she is sharing glimpses from it. 

On the other hand, I had that apple and peanut butter on top of the fried chicken sandwich from Shake Shack and a whole plate of fish over rice. Of note, I had also had two cups of my new favorite iced matcha latte. And there was no workout on that day! This random inspiration just added clutter and extra calories to my life because her lifestyle is not MY lifestyle. Her job is not mine. Her goal is not mine. As mine is not hers!

 I work 60 plus hours a week and I am a doctor. Mostly I am concerned with staying awake and alert at work. Now I have nothing against being inspired, but that inspiration has to fit into YOUR life plan and YOUR lifestyle. If I admire something about SJP or Kiara Advani, I should be clear and precise about that and then begin to incorporate what that is, into my life in a realistic manner instead of just bringing random clutter in my life, either in the form of desires or material things. Why? Because that distracts me from MY life story.

The way social media and entertainment works is that you, the common man, are exposed to such attractive faces doing doing attractive and glamorous things at all times. Even if you are scrolling mindlessly, or you are watching something for fun, you begin wanting things that may not be for you and they add unnecessary clutter to your life if you have not set up filters for yourself. Such sporadic pursuits have never made ME a happier person at least.

The vibe I dig about any of the people I see on TV, the look I admire, is not a one-off instance. It involves a lot of work and commitment on their part. Their whole life revolves around curating that image and looking that good and being that fit. It's a whole job that requires hardwork.

Having a bucketload of abandoned goals in my basket, I know it serves to have very clear idea about the goal at first and not to be easily distracted by EVERYTHING charming and flashy.

Even if its something as good as SJP killing this combination of colors.

When you are an original thinker, you come up with new ideas and thoughts, instead of just regurgitating and reproducing what you have been told.

Are you an original thinker?

ok

Bloopers

Even if you are not special as an object, you can become special as a subject.

It's 3-o clock in the summer afternoon and we are all sitting in the verandah, the ice cubes that Naani-ma (grand-mother) took out from the Rooh-Afza sherbet, are melting in the tray.
By her side, Ammi is knitting a woolen sweater for the first-born of my Maamu (Uncle)  . Her gold bangles make a sound with each turn of her hand. There is a tin-box of imported butter cookies in her lap, in which she stores an assortment of her spools of thread.
  The peace of the situation is so sedating, I lie flat on the charpoy and look at the sky. The clouds are moving slowly in a swirling pattern, a dance you can only pick if you look at them for a long enough time. Likewise, you can miss the beauty in people if you only look at them only with hurried glances. Having thought this, I turn to look at Naani-ma, intentionally for a longer time than I usually do. Her brown eyes are surrounded by deep wrinkles, but there's a glint in them. 'Haters will say it's glaucoma'. An inward joke, rises and dies within me. But there IS something remarkable about her face. Gravity turns the smiles of people upside down if they live long enough, but it has not been able to undermine her smile entirely. It's that feature that trickled down from her to my Aunt, and then to me in the next generation, making me look more like my Aunt's daughter than I ever looked like my mother's daughter. I feel so much love for Naani-ma in my heart. But as soon as the word 'love' enters the canvas of my mind,I feel perplexed by a quandary.

 Naani-ma loves my mother, but she also admonishes her often and expects her to do a lot of things she does not want to do for the sake of keeping appearances in front of people. It makes my mother different from how she usually is, lively and spirited. And the same Naani-ma who is the kindest possible person to all of us, can be very unkind to my Mumani (Uncle's wife).  It's confusing.  People display different shades of their character with different people in the same room. There is not one universal body of love that we can all go to and expect love and fairness from . Up until some years ago, I would have thought that Only God could offer that. But It is foolhardy to believe that anymore. Every other evening, Maulvi Sahab told us about the ways God likes to punish people for the crime of loving, or worshipping him in a different way than the one he approves. Love.... surely, it must be too much to expect that even the highest ideal that human beings could come up with, is so stringent about offering it. 

 

 'It's so frustrating when you cannot separate these threads from each other'' my mother's voice interrupts my thoughts  ' The more you try to yank them apart, the tighter they get''  In her hands are lying the two hopelessly intertwined spools of thread, red merging into blue going into red, an infinite appearing mess, a chaos.

 'That is why you should be careful where you put them when you put them' Naani shakes her head at my mother. 'If everything is neatly aligned from the start, you don't reach this point''.  She takes the spools of thread from my mother's hands and gives them to me.

' Now it's your job. You are the young one with better eyesight. Try to solve this mess for your mother'

  I feel that the prophet has spoken.

 I stare at the mess in my hands, the big junk that I have to figure out, the red that I have to separate from blue, a task akin to prising apart the intermingling patterns of love and pain in one's life, all of one's life.  Out in the verandah, there is a cupboard where Abbu stores the operating manual for every thing that exists in the house and sometimes, even the things that don't. That is the place where I run to, when I want to crack a problem in a systematic way. Sometimes reading a manual helps me crack a problem that does not even have anything to do with machines. 

   But there is no manual for disentangling stuff, because only the one with his fingers around the knot realizes the complexity of it. There are techniques which can help you, but they can only offer you a minimal guiding light. The judgement and the decision regarding when to pull, and if to pull is mine. The responsibility of knowing when to give up and cut the knot, instead of trying to resolve it, is mine too.  With my fingers around the heart of the knot, there is only this idea, that there is a way for this knot to not exist, which makes me take up the task in the first place. It's only this idea that makes me want to deal with it in the first place.

 Otherwise I see the hopelessly enmeshed pools of thread, forgotten inside the imported tin-boxes lying around, everywhere, in the house, and in people’s lives.

 

Do you understand what I mean?