Baby Fat

Life is so strange. Its never what you want it to be and when it is, it does not last.

The trigger for today is the photo shared on the MGD Group of my batchmates at a birthday party. It looks like a picture of the time when we were in school. Everyone there is so fresh and simple and thin. And by thin I mean relatively thin, as at that age, any weight that we have had is just baby fat (despite us being in our teens). Our bodies are malleable and nothing is set in stone. It’s flexible, energetic, free, and soft. Compare those with today’s pics and they are all stretched, our faces, our clothes, our smiles, our hair and our jaw line. Man, that jaw line really expands over time, not something I had imagined would have happened. Anyway, so there we were, feeling fat in our teens when in fact we weren’t. We may have been pudgy, with some spillage of stomach over our pants’ tight waist line or our forearms fats dropping over our elbows, and yet we could do anything and become anything we want.

I gained weight when I went to college (age 18). First year, without any warning, my body started to expand. Being always on the thin side, it was a surprise for me and I started checking my food intake. Within no time, I lost all the extra fat that I had amassed, but I continued to check my weight. The same thing happened when I started working (age 25). The sedentary life had to have some impact after all, but this time around, when I finally realized that my panty line refused to disappear through my tight pants, I felt like I had no option but to start making a conscious effort to check my food, it dint help. I had to start exercising (very little) and substantially reduce my dinner intake. It took time, but I went back to the place I was before.

Its been more 10 years since then, and I am back to gaining some extra weight. Not a lot, but it took everything in my limited power - amping up the exercise (okay fine, starting the limited 5-10 minutes pretend exercise again) and back to checking my food intake. This time it took much longer to lose even this little extra that I gained and while I am there now, my body is reverting to the old days of letting go of all exercise and having some meetha.

It’s a cycle, I see that now. And yet, what I wanted to say was that it is okay if in your teens aren’t the ideal weight you want to be at (or your peers and family would want you to be at). It’ll never be. And yet, it will be okay this one time and maybe for that brief moment of time, it will be.

But just know, it wont last.