The Waistline Saga

I used to have a waistline of 24 inches. Five years later, it shot up to 30 inches. Now less than another year later, it’s already 32 inches. I tried fitting into my clothes which I could wear before with ease but now made me feel suffocated. After another period of denial, I finally learned to accept that the waistline increase was here to stay. I obliged our househelp to order blouses and shirts and pairs of jeans (a whole set of new wardrobe really) from her Natasha and Sundance catalogs. It was a very expensive decision, as I bought several items that would last me two years. (I have since regretted that as I kept on seeing my clothes on several other people who had done the same thing. But that’s another story.)

I find it funny that my neighbors are more concerned about my girth than I am. This day alone, a total of four neighbors commented on my looking “very healthy” or “very rounded”, just like they did the previous times when I last bumped into them. My kid brother told me just this evening that somebody from the sarisari store near our chapel told him to tell me “na mag-reduce daw ako” (that I should have my weight reduced). I remember my Ninang, who is a next-door neighbor, exclaimed with a matching pair of raised eyebrows when she saw me, “Naku wala ka nang bewang!” (Gosh, you have no more waistline!) I am not alarmed about my fast weight gain, but I mourn the loss (or gain?) of my waistline so I was a bit stung by that remark. 

Go figure. My weight problem is becoming not only my own. It’s like the next thing I should expect is my weight on the agenda of the next homeowners’ meeting. Good thing I am not getting offended… yet.

And it’s the same thing at home. My mother constantly reminds me to do something about my widening girth. She sees these obese people on TV documentaries and remarks “Sana hindi ka umabot sa ganyan” (I hope you don’t become as large as that). She even suggested once or twice that I save up for a liposuction. I waited for a punchline but none came.

Just eight months ago, my body looked passably ok. That was when I went home after resigning from work abroad. People were surprised to see me looking so “fit”, considering I was a bit “chunky” already when I left almost seven months earlier. One even made a remark that I looked like a star Honestly, I did not notice that I got thinner, well except for my pants eventually requiring a belt in order for them to stay up. It beats me why I lost much weight. For one thing, I never became hungry. All those months, I would usually eat greasy viands for lunch and dinner from hawker centers; sometimes my housemate would serve us two to three dishes with generous helpings of rice while we watched TFC. I actually thought I was gaining more weight. Now I wonder where all those food went? The only exercise I did was my everyday walk to and from office: I was forced to walk for 15 minutes from the MRT to the office, and another 15 minutes for the same route back on evenings. Maybe that was it. Or that my breakfast consisted only of Indocafe coffee and Marks and Spencer choco digestives. Or that I thought I was constantly under stress.

Now that I’m back in the PI, I am doing my work at home so my (forced) fitness regimen is already non-existent. Here is a summary of my daily routine:

• I wake up at 2pm then open my Thinkpad.
• While my emails are downloading and apps are opening, I eat lunch then take a bath afterwards.
• While surfing the net or doing my assigned tasks (usually just surfing the net hehe), I have a bottle of iced tea and either a sweet pastry or really salty chips to keep me company while my eyes are glued on my monitor.
• Then I eat dinner which I try to accomplish by consuming only a small amount of rice.
• I call it a day at around 4-5am. Sometimes if I’m still awake by 6 or 7am, I eat breakfast with my kid brother who’s about to go to school before I hit the bed.

So you can see the amount of exercise I get daily which I would like to call My 8-Step Fitness Routine: walking from bed to work table (8 steps), from work table to dining table (8 steps), from dining table to bathroom (8 steps) and then the same thing backwards. No wonder it was easy for me to grow horizontally.

I am no-good at exercise. A few years ago, TG and I once jogged around the Marikina Sports Center oval for exactly one hour. It should have been a good start for us, but then we had Big Mac meal afterwards. So it was never repeated–we just went straight to eating a Big Mac. Two weeks ago, I resolved to walk on treadmill for 20 minutes (at least with three 10-minute rest periods within). That resolve lasted for a good two days. I try doing crunches and calisthenics, but I’m just so bored doing them I usually end up doing only 2-3 repetitions. I don’t think membership to a fitness club will help me either. Just thinking about leaving the house makes me tired already.

I know I have to stop the expansion of my waistline. I know I need to do something about my weight. I know, I know, I just hope that eventually (and I hope soon), I will have the patience to actually work on it.