I resisted. I resisted for over thirty years. I looked away, disputed the facts, disregarded the signs, covered the mirrors, and negated the truth. But then it hit me straight in the face. It didn't come out of nowhere, it wasn't like a thunderbolt on a sunny day, it crept up on me slowly slowly, until, not so long ago, I gave in to it.
I gave in to the fact that I'm growing older, everything is heading south, my metabolism is showing me the middle finger, and unless I do something about it, I am going to have to change my wardrobe to incorporate more flannel and less silk, more linen and less clingy cotton, more sweat pants and less hot pants....you get the picture.
I finally admitted that fat had comfortably set up house on my hips, that Twistees had replaced my triceps, and that my jeans were not mysteriously shrinking. But my resistance to the truth wore off gradually. At first I started relegating a few garments to the back of the wardrobe - ‘they're old anyway' I told myself. ‘Who wants to see a thirty year old in shorts?' After that I recurred to my mother's motto - ‘It's useless dear, you can't beat your genes!'
Not too long after, a voice kept telling me to start working out. I kept hearing it all the time, and it would hear no reason. I kept telling it that I just don't have the time, and I don't have the energy, but it replied back saying ‘you always have time to go out to dinner, to party and to watch reruns of ‘Two & a Half Men' on TV. You have the time to get your silly hair done, to work out the Sunday crosswords and even to contemplate taking up a hobby.' I told you it would hear no reason, so I finally I took the bull by the horns and joined a gym to make the voices stop.
The first couple of months were torture. Every muscle, every joint, every nerve was crying out for me to stop. After one particular aerobics class, even my hair was hurting. I walked with a limp, I held on to banisters (with both hands), I grumbled and moaned, I whinged and whined, but I kept going. I said goodbye to my blow-dried look, I invested in every muscle spray, ointment and gel on the shelves, and persisted in my quest to kill myself on the treadmill or the bike.
To say that I saw the weight shed off would be an overstatement. I only lost a kilo in three weeks of absolute torture, and the seams of my clothes are still stressed out. But something else happened. At one point, the pain eased off. It started with my toes when my jogging shoes stopped rubbing against them like a metal grinder. The tiny bones in my feet felt like they had calcified and didn't feel like broken glass anymore.
Eventually the relief crawled up my calves, and what used to feel like a stone bursting out of my skin returned to its natural lustre. Slowly but surely, the pain subsided and went all the way up to my ear lobes - yes even those were hurting at one point. Although I still squirm at the idea of spoiling my perfect hairdo, I have now started to look forward to my next work out.
Having said that, I'm still not sure that this is the most effective way of maintaining a good physique. Let's face it; if you're like me, and your efforts are entirely vanity-based, then there are possibly more effective and much easier ways to look good.
Let's take the so called middle age spread for instance. It's a fact that every 5 years we will add on a couple of inches (if lucky) around that area. You can slow down the build-up with rigorous exercise and a regimental diet, but chances are that no matter what you do, it will happen anyway. The result is usually that you end up looking like a box with no delineation between your breasts, your waist and your hips. The easiest and quickest solution (for women) is to enlarge our breasts, because once we regain the same breast to waist ratio, the overall effect is the same as loosing that impossible belly fat.
My other quandary is hair. As I said I had to entirely give up on my blow-dried look because no matter where and how I exercise, my hair always end up as wet as a fish's wet bits. But the thing is this - whenever I blow dry my hair, people notice and pay me compliments, or at least pass sarcastic cheeky ones, whilst to date, no one has yet noticed that I've lost so much as a morsel.
So, although my body has stopped complaining (so loudly), I have not yet come to a point where I'd rather exercise than read a newspaper. But I will resist the couch potato temptation for as long as I can resist this flagellation. They say that as hard as it is to start exercising, it's usually harder to stop, so I'm desperately waiting for the day that my aerobics instructor is not shouting ‘don't you even think about stopping you.....!'