Worth your weight in gold

Crossing 50 is a quite a milestone for most. Even more so if you are Rohit Sharma. All over Instagram, one can see posts by people celebrating their 50th birthdays by posts with cheesy titles like “Fab 50”, “Fantastic 50 and to 50 more” etc. Most of these will carry equally corny photos of champagne being popped open or an oversized cake with a giant candle being blown out. Incidentally, does anyone know what happens to the birthday candles? After you blow them out, they pretty much seem to lie flat and stealthily crawl out to a parallel universe never to be seen again. The next birthday, you end up buying one all over again.  They are like the exercise treadmills of the birthday industry….to be used only once in the year.

However, one thing no one talks about the 50th birthday on social media, is the downside of turning 50. Gold is the element associated with 50 but it should be Uranium which in its natural form is heavy, unstable and expected to shed weight because that what you are. I assume of course that you have led a normal urban life. By normal urban life, I mean working a job which has you making presentations no one remembers, suffering daily traffic that has the mobility of a UNESCO World heritage site and adopting Haagen-Dazs and Netflix legally as children. If so, you are almost certain to be outside of the ideal range on at least 2 of the key parameters, BMI, cholesterol, BP and blood sugar. Kind of difficult to talk about that on Insta. 

9 out of 10 fifty-year-olds will be told to lose weight as a first step at a medical checkup as per a statistic released by “National Institute of Selective Statistics with Dubious Origins”. 

Doctor : “You are 85 kgs. Your desired weight is 69”

Me :  “At 69 Kgs, I would have no desire”

Losing weight for most people is a struggle because it involves subjecting yourself to increasing levels of unease, discomfort and then pain. Pretty much like watching “Gladiator 2”. I too went through this rite of passage. I was helped in this journey by a young Australian dude called Harrison, who ate dumbbells for breakfast and had muscles so dense that they could not even do an X ray on him. He set me up on a regime of diet, weights and walking, a torture matched only by the corporate webinars during COVID. 

“Raul….”, he twanged. He never pronounced the “H” in my name. Not sure why. Perhaps it had carbs. 

“Raul… remember you cannot out train a bad diet. We need to fix your diet”. 

Of course, when he said “We” it was meant to be interpreted as “You lousy piece of shit”. By fixing diet, he meant that my normal diet did not have enough proteins, fiber and had a surplus of what was called “fun”. So, if I could strip out all sugar, salt, carbs and oil from my diet, I could not only live longer but also become miserable enough to want to die earlier. He gave me a calorie limit and an app in which to dutifully log everything I ate, so my entries looked like

Morning      : Black coffee : 30 cal, Apple : 50 cal

Lunch         : Steamed quinoa 100 cal, Boiled kale soup : 120 cal

Dinner          : Chicken Tikka, Chocolate milkshake, 1 tub Haagen-                            Dazs, Lamb Biryani : 1900 cal

This was of course only one part of the regime. The other part was strength training. Apparently, you need to build muscle to burn more fat. Unless you are a professional underwear model, chances are you will need to go to the gym and lift weights. Dumbbells, pulley weights, barbells, kettle balls etc. Heavy slabs, discs, spheres of iron which were given birth with little purpose but to torment you. Like Algebra but with more iron. Harrison had a clear idea of what a good routine was. It had to have a steadily increasing load till my muscles failed and walked off my body to cry themselves to sleep in the bathroom. 

The last component of this regime was walking. Every day one has to take 10000 steps. Of course, that is in an ideal setting, i.e. like on a nudist beach or during a pub crawl but one should realistically attempt at least 8000 steps if one is serious. Anything less than that is not funny.  It can indeed seem like a challenge to walk 8000 steps daily. This is a result of our modern lifestyles where we have become reliant on machines to do all tasks involving manual labour. e.g. I recently bought a robot vacuum cleaner which can not only sweep all the dust under the carpet but also scroll TikTok videos in the storeroom while bumming a cigarette. So, you have to make sure you clock those 8000 steps. There might be of course days when you may not be able to hit the target, in which case tie the smartwatch to your dog and throw a ball around. This can be fun as well as healthy.

I am glad to say that so far, the regime change has shown promising results in terms of weight loss. I have lost ….my will to live and hopefully my weight will follow soon.