Tond Reduction Contd . . .

Despite all my intentions I don’t think I haven’t written as much as I would have loved to. Guess my thoughts don’t flow as freely as they used to. Or perhaps my verbal abilities have overtaken my skills with the keyboard :D

The one thing that I want to sit down and think about is the increasing importance I have been giving to fitness in my life. I have always been a fitness retard. In fact during school days I couldn’t run for more than 100 meters without huffing and puffing. And now that I think of it I was larger than the kids of my age and if anything I felt pride looking at the size of my thunderous thighs ;)

Life was good and easy and then slowly things changed and I widened up L Then one fine day my mother’s love for me made me take notice. Over time I have made a few attempts at tond reduction with varying amounts of success (a euphemism).

Somehow guys in campus developed this craze for running and there was Hutchy who within a very short period started lost a considerable amount of girth. Inspired I joined the gang and within a few months I completed two 10 Km runs. The effort was disjointed and usually followed by gorging in the campus mess. So materially it had little impact on my girth. But the key highlight of that effort was that for the first time in my life I knew that I could do it.

In Coke, I tried to follow up. I had a few great guys to look up to. Wall was a very fit guy and during my internship he made me run a few times and it with him that I took up my first driving lessons ;) Also there was Doodles, who evolved from being the Tun Tun of the batch to being the Telugu superstar that he has now become ;) Overall apart from the intent to look fitter there was nothing much to write about my efforts.

The Reliance Retail period was the time of my greatest success. Its so happened that there were only 30 free company parking lots. If you weren’t amongst lucky few to arrive early you had to shell out 60 bucks and invest in time and effort to find parking alternatives. And fortunately for me there was this Pricey gym in the office complex. I figured that if I went to the gym then that meant assured parking and the savings would more than pay for the gym membership (Very crucial as both these costs were exorbitant for my living standards of those days ;)

The gym was absolutely awesome. Even in Singapore I am yet to come across something that made me feel the way Elemention did. The best part was the machines. You had to log into the machines and they recorded your data for each the activities and awarded you points which could be redeemed. Around 500000 points would have earned you free lifetime membership. I logged in about 15000 points in about 3 months and just looking at the points building up was very motivating. I didn’t lose much weight but physically it showed and when Anju returned from Japan she met up with a fitter and leaner Joey ;) Soon after I laboured through my first half marathon and I thought I could do no wrong.

Despite all the outward progress there were some serious flaws in my achievement. For one fitness hadn’t ingrained itself into my psyche. Gorging continued unabated and I thought that its something that I had to put my mind into and I would get results in no time. After all within 3 months I achieved it in Elemention.

How wrong I was. I was in Singapore, the land of the fitness freaks, with easy access to everything that you need to be fit. And when Anju met me again for her wedding she got a much larger version of me :( I had managed to gain 17 Kgs in two years. And I again took noticed and realised that something wasn’t quite right.

At that point I decided take stock and there were a few major thoughts in my mind:

1. I wanted to continue hogging.
2. Whatever I do had to fit into my lifestyle.
3. Measurement was key. The point thingie in elemention was an awesome motivator. Without that it would have become quite de-motivating as I hadn’t lost much weight. So the idea was that I need a very specific target to keep me focused on the activities and the tond reduction etc would follow.

Paulo Coelho is so very true when he said “When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.” First Vamsi my ex Boss in a casual conversation mentioned about a pedometer (a step counting device). Apparently a healthy lifestyle is taking at least 10000 steps a day. And to my utter horror I realised that on a weekday I was clocking around 1500 steps a day. The pedometer alarm meant that something had to be done and fast.

So off went the taxi rides to office and started taking the bus. That meant an extra 3000 steps a day. Then I tried having Subway lunches. The place was a bit distant from my office so that meant around 3-9000 steps depending on whether I got the bus to the subway. Eventually I started to prefer missing the bus. And if I missed the Subway or didn’t clock the counts I would just take a walk in the plant to rake up the count. An added advantage was that I saw a lot more than what I would have if I had just sat down in my cabin.

The other good thing was that I got in touch with amazing individuals who have figured the magic art of balancing work and life. There are quite a few in this category and in the course of time I will talk about a few. But today I want to remember Paggu Jain. Had it not been for his subtle hints, not so subtle badgering and downright blackmail I wouldn’t have been writing this post. This bugga on a very busy day wakes up at 5:30 am, goes for a jog and the reaches office by 7-7:30 am and the after a 12 hour workday comes back home to help wifey Gargu Jain cook some good home cooked food J

And as if that wasn’t enough he made me run. In the initial days he used to slow down for me, but it was good fun. Running time was when I would give life ke fundae and he would patiently listen. (For anyone who doesn’t appreciate that needs to sit down with me for a couple of hours ;) We devised a monitoring mechanism and I was to send him daily updates like what you see below L

Summary of Tond Reduction activities in 2010

140+ recorded hours of exercise in 2010 didn’t quite make me lose weight as I expected. And it was quite surprising as I had higher expectations given my 3 month Elemention experience. Had these numbers not been available I would have given up but somehow they helped continue and build up a routine. And the availability of this data led the question as to why I didn’t lose weight. And some googling and a meetings with a few fitness experts led to the following conclusions:

1. Diet has a greater impact on Body Weight loss than exercise. A fitness expert told me that for weight loss diet alone is twice as effective as exercises. If you want to lose weight you need to control your diet and if you want to sustain it then you need to exercise.
2. Once the body gets comfortable with an activity the incremental weight loss reduces. The exercise routine has to change to continually put the body under stress.
3. The exercise regime needs to have a fair mix of cardio and weight training.
4. Heavy & sustained exercises put some stress on unused muscles. If these areas (Eg Lower Back etc) strengthen enough then you could have sport injuries.
5. Sleep, Stress and metabolic rates are other factors that affect weight loss.

There were numerous funny incidents that makes my fitness story down right hilarious esp the Cross Trainer and the StanChart Run incidents. I will park those for a later date. But I want to end with a nice discussion I had with Paggu Jain. We were discussing what would happen if you discontinue your exercise regime. Very melodramatically in true Paggu style he retorted, “To all those who say that you will gain more kilos than what you started off with I ask WHY DISCONTINUE??”