“Mirror Mirror on the wall who is the thinnest of them all”?
What caught my attention about this book was the image at the beginning of the 1st chapter with a fat girl staring into the mirror, to find a thin one. No matter how many times I do this exercise with myself, even I see the same…what others don’t see. It’s kind of amazing to find that we live in a distorted world, with a distorted view, yet we want everything & everybody to be PERFECT. Isn’t that bizarre?
If we look at this world there are basically 2 types of people- One who are trying to lose weight and the others who are trying to gain some. I often think this is how we balance the world. Who cares about going green and all… Bring these weighty issues under control and I guess we are good to go. Don’t you think so? Anyhow…nowadays there is too much noise around people trying to lose weight.. well ..it seems that their size gives them the additional stamina to crib about their problems. My question ->where are all those skinny people and when are they coming out with a book to describe their trials and tribulations? Would like to hear their viewpoint as well. Although the most clichéd answer that I have ever heard is “Get Married and you will gain weight!!!” Oh boy that’s easy.
Now let me pause here for a moment to congratulate Kalli Purie on coming out with her book “Confessions of a serial dieter” that is full of insights about what it feels to be inside the body of a fat person. An unabashed admission to what extent one is ready to go, in order to get that FAB-HOT body or just so to get acceptance amongst the larger set of audience who really don’t care about you or in this case to be there for your family without becoming a burden on them. It is definitely not easy. Right from the beginning, Kalli has painted the picture of a person who is absolutely fascinated by the pains & pleasures that one can derive only by being in an honest relationship, except that this one was with food.
All of us juggle multiple things in our lives including family, work, friends, ME-time, etc, but what we tend to forget is our lifetime relationship with our body & food. Eating is like a love-hate relationship. I love you..I hate you..I love you..I hate you. You are yo-yoing every time & you do bounce back with stronger emotions. You love those moments when you are with it, feel comforted by it, taste it, are able to forget your blues, but hate it immediately, the moment it has made friends your fat cells. You can’t live with it, yet you can’t live without it. A jealous lover, aren’t you?
Kalli has very carefully delineated every little stage of her life with food. The things that constantly change are her dieticians, her diets & the weighing machines. The things that remain constant are her ever increasing weight and her nose-diving confidence. What also doesn’t change is her appetite to find the right diet so that she can bring herself back to her correct weight. Can you experiment with 43 diets in a span of 40 years? Only an eternal optimist can do it.
I used to think that the world revolved around money & power. But have come to the sad realization that everything in this world revolves around size & weight. We have all gotten good at perfecting the task of delaying simple experiences till we become of the right size or weight or to say “When I become perfect”.
“Ohh… I will buy that dress when I become 2 sizes smaller” , “I will go to that beach once I am bikini fit”, “ I will go to that trip when I am 57.3 Kgs, nothing more- nothing less”, “I will take that photograph when I have a 24” waist”, “I will be marriageable only if I lose weight.” We have become an obsessed nation of weightlosers and weightgainers. Sadly our perceptions & opinions about someone whom we meet, also revolve around these parameters only. So who is setting these standards for us?
As kids, all of us wanted to believe that if others could do something, so could we. What we realized in the end was that we have been cheated. Cheated coz we don’t understand that our body types are different. But who is to tell a 10 year old about body type. Most of us have been chubby as kids at some point or the other. So what’s the big deal? I remember days when I could pile on massive amounts of samosas, kachoris, jalebis, cakes, coke, all in one day and get away with it without putting on an ounce of weight. GUILT FREE…. My age and my weight thereafter have shown that some games are to be played only when you are a child. A child’s play in every sense.
“I want only the best.” This is the demand of this generation. Be it in terms of clothes, education, jobs, spouses…We all want better things in life and once we have found it we seldom settle for anything less. The joy that a small rose bud could bring to you as a child, pales in front of what a bouquet of the most expensive orchids can do to you right now beCOZ you have seen better. Over the centuries of evolution, we humans have also found better things to wear, marry & eat. I have read somewhere that we basically have only 4 types of taste buds- Sweet, salty, sour and bitter. What ideally must have happened is we should have found better & healthier things to eat as well. But alas, this has been the opposite for most of us when it comes to food. Today we have access to the best of chocolate cakes loaded with sugar, along with that roadside chatwala who churns out the most delicious of chats. Now eating that raw vegetable and fruit on its own doesn’t seem so exciting does it? Coz we have tasted better & now our taste buds refuse to entertain anything lesser by its standards. Fascinating.. all things have brains of their own.
Honestly there is loads of weight wisdom out there & I am not in any mood to give you a sermon on the same. But why is that every time we find a new book, video, magazine on a new diet or exercise regime we run like a mad (wo) man to purchase it, try it, only to realize that its old wine in a new bottle? This is something that even I catch myself doing… but who is to say its right or wrong. The heart wants what it wants. Probably deep inside we feel that someday we might become the poster girls of these books/magazines & show the world how we constantly struggled to fit into the high standards of this PERFECT world, that we have imagined for ourselves. And when we don’t see our faces in the next issue of that book/health magazine, we always have our mirrors to go back to where you see the world exactly as it should be!
