If one of your new-year resolutions was to lose weight, then this article is for you.
I don’t know when it happened, but we have become a race of people who want more of everything else but less of us! Greet any girl today with a sunny “Hey how’re you?” and 98% of the times the response will be to tell you what they ate. “Don’t ask yaar…I ate half a gulab jamun last night…I feel soooo faaaaat”.
Then of course there are those diet jihadis who cut you out of their social circle if you so much as mention the “c” word. Know the one? “Carbs”. Some others have a curfew for food and manage to seal their lips post 7pm with more vigilance than our poor soldiers at the border. Calling people for dinner has become such a nightmare owing to the fact that everyone’s on some fad diet or the other. A menu of boiled water with a side of fresh air tends to get predictable after some point.
But who can blame them, considering the constant visual bombardment we get of what’s supposed to be the “perfect figure”. Cue in the coat hangers that grace the ramp and the stick insects that dance in exotic locations on celluloid. Heck, even the models selling jeans that are supposed to “show off your curves”, don’t have any! Male deo spray ads that show the entire female race rendered incapable of anything but mad raunchy sex, too seem to show their product attracting only females of certain vital statistics. Don’t fat girls have a sense of smell? I guess thin is in baby because fat got stuck in the door.
Affix the word “diet” or “low fat” to any snack and you can happily charge extra. A fact I’ve always found curious. Doesn’t “low fat” imply they put less of the good stuff in it? So shouldn’t it therefore cost less too? I guess the premium they charge is for selling hope in addition to the product. To me, a snack that says it’ll make you thin is like a bullet that says it’ll help you live.
Gratifyingly, the pressure to be physically perfect isn’t just on the fairer sex anymore. The men are equally afflicted. The elusive six-packabs are constantly dangled as a carrot by gyms to enhance male memberships. It blinds them so much, several mid-life crisis hit uncles tragically fail to see that spandex and their bodies were never meant to be. If you sense judgment in my tone here it is only because just this morning I had to endure the sight of an uncleji attempting lunges in cycling shorts that were trying desperately to stay on duty. Shudder!
However if one stretches optimism a bit, at least uncleji is trying. The sight of him sweating into his spandex is still better than another visual. That of a comb-over type, middle-aged man in white pulled up socks, long shorts and formal black belt buckled somewhere over his groin where it has settled under the weight of his paunch, hanging around the mall with full swagger and rating a girl as a 6 on 10 because her thighs are too thick. One aukat check and gym membership for you uncle!
So yes men, we welcome you to the cross-trainers and treadmills with wide hearts and wider grins. We love this equality in insecurity. For if things stay the course, the day is not far when our erstwhile hunters will be looking at themselves sideways in the mirror and asking “does my butt look big in this?”
*The Beginning*
Neeti Palta is a leading female comedian who brings a female perspective to the English comedy scene in India.