Great Greedy Guts

It caught me unawares. There was I, stuffing myself with Nanz pastries, fat roadside momos, and Abba chow and curling up in my blanket to ward off the cold Shillong days and nights. One day I noticed that my jeans started to feel uncomfortably tight, and that the flesh on my stomach, no longer content with feeling just the insides of my waistband, had spilled over and started skimming the outside too. And getting in the way of me buttoning my jeans up.

After that there wasnt anything I could do to get rid of my fat gut. It was totally in sync with my movements- it moved when I did, it jiggled when I did, it spread its expansive self all over when I lay down, it doubled up when I sat, it helpfully supported my breasts when I squatted.

Becky said we should play basketball on the courts near the hostel so that we could get rid of it. It heard her and it made the basketball do its evil bidding. The ball tripped me everytime I tried to dribble it, and dodged my hands and instead landed hard on my face or my head when I tried to catch it. I quit the game and till now, retain a phobia about balls (the bouncy kind).

After leaving the hostel, I started to lose weight. My stomach lost weight too, but it remained flabby. It never bothered me because, at least it didnt protrude. And then I watched Transformers. And Megan Fox bending over the hood of an open car engine. Like so.

Camera trick!

And that's when the "Get Fox-y belly and bend over while wearing decent but mid-riff showing shirts" project started. I googled ab-tightening exercises and skimmed Cosmo's fitness pages and I came up with a rigorous exercise regimen. It included names like "Ball Up" (which necessitated curling up like a ball and rolling back and forth), "Hand Pump" (pumping fists vigorously while elevating both head and legs mid-air) and other torturous movements with cutesy names. Some articles also suggested clenching stomach and butt muscles all the time to surreptitiously firm them up. So for about a week or two, I couldn't breath properly because clenching involves sucking and holding in air.

And oh, talking about breathing, it seemed that there was a "correct" way to breathe! I realised I had been breathing incorrectly all my life. Thank God I hadn't died of carbon monoxide poisoning or something. Some of the exercises also called for the use of dumbbells, and since I was too cheap to buy them, I filled two coke bottles with sand and improvised. The effect was negated somewhat by the fact that I drank up all the contents of the bottles before filling them with sand. And I changed bottles every two days.

After about a month or so, all I achieved was a raging appetite and sunken cheeks and super-muscular ankles and a permanent crick in my neck. Almost all the exercises required the elevation of the head and that strained my neck muscles so bad I almost had to wear a neck brace. 

Also, I lost weight rapidly after that- but only on my upper body. So I had a bony face, skinny arms and a flat chest. With a still-jiggly belly. Everyone said my bony face made me look older than I actually am, so I tried to regain my weight again. Oh vanity of vanities, what hell thou hath wrought!

Now my stomach has started to protrude a bit, so I've taken to wearing loose, flowy tops and I convince myself that Im a Boho-chic girl who's too cool to wear tight shirts. Goodbye all you decent but midriff-showing shirts. And on the occasions that I have to wear a tight shirt, I suck my gut in. Course, sitting's a different matter. It's impossible to suck in all that roll of fat when one sits, so I improvise. Like so- 

Hide behind purse, folded hands or table.