Weight and watch

“You need to put on a little weight,” a cousin told me recently. I nodded. He was not the first one to tell me that.

A little after my son turned six months, I lost all the extra kilos I had piled on during my pregnancy. Even as I thought this must be about it, my son ensured that I lost the extra stuff and more. That left me with much lesser flesh on my person than ever.

Till late in my life, I did not know what watching weight meant. I thought it was done only by those in the show business or at the most by a few friends, who I anyways thought were crazy. Most importantly, I did not have much weight to lose in the first place leaving my mother wondering where all the food I gobbled was going.

Then I moved out of my parents’ house and started living on my own.

I thought I was doing fine till a colleague commented, “You seem to be in an expansion mode.”

I was shaken out of my sweet reverie. Rest is history, as all those who know me might say.

I now watch every morsel of food I eat. Fried stuff makes me cringe, sweets make me feel sinful and I have started using terms like ‘brown rice’ and ‘multigrain bread’.

It’s not only food that I watch, I even watch the timings. I avoid rich food late in the day. Some might think I am a loony, but if I do feel like eating, I eat dessert with breakfast because that’s the time the digestive system is at its best (I can cite facts like these also now)

Sundays are the only days I let myself indulge (There was a time when the word ‘indulge’ did not exist in my dictionary)

My family thinks I could do with some weight. Only sometimes when I do feel like binging, I take their words seriously (that makes me feel a little less guilty).

And then of course there’s my son who seems to have taken on the onus of keeping me ‘maintained’ by making me run around all day long.

People exclaim, “You don’t look like the mother of one.”

I tell them I look like this because I AM the mother of one!