MY struggle to fight the excess body fat started since I laid eyes on the handsomest boy in our class way back in my high school freshman year. It was during that year that I began to feel concious of my figure and decided to try exercising to get a sexy figure. That crush lasted only for two months because I decided that I was too weak and unwilling to fight the urge to overeat and my crush weighed less than my craving for sweets.
I was not that fat because I can still see both my feet when I look down, trim my toenails without doing vast amounts of aerobic movements, scratch my stomach when I feel the need to without asking for assistance from anybody and fit in a seat in the theater or in a car easily but it would be a down and out lie if I say I do not envy the figures of models I see on glossy magazines and television.
I stayed at a boarding house in college with seven other boardmates whose favorite topics are boys, clothes and more boys. For the first part of the year they labeled me a snob because I wouldn’t join in their nightly chatter but I just stayed by myself reading most of the times.
We belonged to different worlds. I am a nocturnal being while they went to bed at 10 p.m. and woke up with the crack of dawn. Despite our differences, we share one thing in common — and that is the wistful but losing battle against the flab. But unlike me, they go jogging every morning when I consider sleep as the sweetest.
I finally gave in to the persistent requests of my boardmates to go jogging with them one day so that very night I retired to bed at 11 p.m. to be able to get a good start the following day. Geesh! What a calvary that was!
There I lay, listening to the rhythmic snoring of my boardmates through the thin walls of their respective rooms while counting sheep until my eyebrows felt strained.
I finally fell asleep sometime around 2 a.m. and have just drifted off to dreamland when Jean’s persistent knocking jolted me up.
“C’mon, lets go,” she shook me up.
“Uh, okay, I’ll give in to their whims just for once,” I decided. With half-closed eyes, I slipped on my jogging pants and groped my way down the stairs, miraculously reaching the foot without falling.
My boardmates breezed on while I painfully dragged one foot after the other, longing more than ever for the comforts of my bed. My body clock told me it was still midnight and I should have been in bed because who in his right mind would go out jogging at midnight?
When we reached the park, I sat down on a bench to collect my breath while my roommates jogged around. As soon as they were distracted, I headed straight for a bakery across the park, drawn by the wonderful smell of freshly-baked bread and bought P10 worth of pandesal.
I munched on the pandesal to wake up and before I knew it, I’ve already consumed everything. I went back to the plaza and made an alibi not to jog with my boardmates back to our boarding house. Instead, I boarded a trycicle back home and went right back to bed.
Sheer motivation finally came when a very sexy student boarded the vacant room next to mine. Wow, how I envied her fat-free figure. She wears body-hugging clothes and earns the admiration of all when she passes by.
Once again I dreamed that I could be like her by getting rid of my excess fats once and for all. This time, I prodded my boardmates to enrol in an earobics class.
For the first day, I groped my way towards slimness. With a few girls who shared the same goals with me (slim and wow-able bodies), we kicked and jogged and did all sorts of movements to wake up the dormant muscles under the direction of the instructress.
I thought that if I worked out a lot, the weight would come off faster but I was wrong. Towards evening I could hardly go up the stairs or move around because every muscle (I was not aware that I had so many before) started aching.
By the second day, aerobics attendance dropped by 30 percent but we still struggled on despite the pain. On the third day, I was forced to ‘resign’ because I could barely walk and couln’t even turn my head due to a stiff neck.
I got everybody’s attention in school when I went up the stairs going sideward and landed smack on my feet for the effort. I guess I just have to realize that I was not built with a sexy figure, live with my flabs (alias bilbil) and get used to them.