Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Slim Chances of Success


I must have fallen in love with food sometime during my sojourn in the cradle when I was weaned from breast milk to porridge. For, my mother recalls from my infancy the throaty gurgle of delight I used to emit with wild jabbing of the tiny limbs into air whenever I heard the clink of the cereal bowl. It was indeed love at first bite.

The love grew in tandem with my body mass and somewhere along the line a battle royale broke out between muscles and fat which the latter won by a decisive margin. And the middle-age corpulence made a munificient contribution to the rotundity.

By then my paunch jutted out, like the solitary rock on a cliff face, to an extent that prompted my colleagues to vehemently demand a handicap in their favor at the veterans sprint event, allegedly because my midriff touched the tape approximately 0.723 seconds before I reached the finishing line.

But it was when my friends subjected me to a campaign of innuendoes to the effect that my abdominal folds, following the law of gravity, would soon set out on an earthbound journey reaching up to my knees thereby rendering briefs and trousers superfluous, that I was finally shamed into embarking on a ‘load shedding’ iternary.

In my scheme of things, dieting was no different from a footloose stud trying to practice celibacy amidst a bevy of seductive nymphets. By implication, the success of my gastronomic chastity hinged on steering clear of all the sensory stimuli that whetted the craving for the chow, while I remained short rations.

Accordingly, I took abstemious measures such as skipping all enticing ads of junk food in the media. A total ban on all talk of food was clamped at home. Chomps, slurps, crunches and burps were declared taboo at the dinner table. Though I could shed 10Kg in six months, there were moments of hiccup. For instance, one night I dreamt of devouring my favorite onion pakoras and woke up with a start to find a corner of my blanket missing!

Things didn’t remain hunky dory for long. A newly opened eatery adjacent to my house threw a spanner in the works. The tantalizing aroma of food coupled with periodic shouts of pizza or sphagetti wafted through my window and bombarded my sensory organs weakening my resolve day after day. Slowly but surely, I was reverting to abyss of gluttony.

Just when I smelt victory at the “battle of the bugle”, I met my waterloo.
Clipart Courtesy: http://jdeq.typepad.com

No comments: