COMMENT: DO OR DIET?

by Rabia Ahmed | InpaperMagzine   DAWN          09 October 2011

y

This is how you get closest to paradise on earth: Pick a Harry Potter book, any of the seven will do, find a nice squishy sofa, and bag the best side…next to the table and near the lamp. Then get yourself one of those chocolate brownies, add two scoops of ice cream with a generous squeeze of chocolate sauce, and don’t leave out the roasted almonds.


Take the book and ice cream and sink into that sofa. Finally, before you start eating and reading your way to paradise, and because smugness is one of the shortest cuts to Eden and excessive exercise isn’t compatible with this scenario, think of all your acquaintances who deny themselves such pleasures and say ‘tut tut!’

I normally hold up Mira (names have been changed to protect me) as an example for what not to do in almost every case… but Mira simply doesn’t do food, and never reads unless it’s Virginia Woolf, so there’s very little to discuss in her case… some folks are plain beyond redemption. Mind you she does need to know what Woolf herself said. ‘One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.’ And what is a brownie with ice cream and chocolate sauce but dining very well?
Woolf also said that she had ‘lost friends, some by death, others by sheer inability to cross the street.’ One might add ‘and by sheer inability to indulge themselves’, so let’s just let Mira go, for there’s always Naila, whose religion is not about fasting, but dieting. She believes that no one who fasts loses weight, leastwise not in her segment of the world. So Naila diets, which meant that when I first met her, she was whip thin on Atkin’s diet.

The world of diets is harsher than the one we live in where we live and eventually die of heart attacks, the plague, or political manoeuvrings. The dieting world on the other hand is peopled by those who fail to live at all because they’re on the Atkins diet, the cabbage soup diet, the Mediterranean Diet, the collagen protein diet, the American Longevity Diet (which probably doesn’t work in Iraq), and the Chasing Freedom Diet (which may have the most followers in Palestine). These are all genuine diets, look them up yourself.

But to return to Naila, she started the Atkins diet by eating mostly asparagus, broccoli and cheddar cheese. That none of these things is freely available in Pakistan suited Naila down to her crimson nail tips, because Naila loves anything so long as you can only get it in Pakistan by making an almighty fuss. Later when the diet called for whole grains, she got around that by calling it stone ground grain bread, and the rest of us simply called it naan.

Farah on the other hand decided to go for what was easily available, and she was on the cabbage soup diet for five whole days.

At the end of that period, her husband moved back with his mother and none of her friends would visit Farah. After a week of running the exhaust fan and keeping the windows open, Mr Farah returned home, and she reverted to her normal binge habits.
I’m not advocating binge eating by any means, but hey, look at it this way: life’s too short to make yourself needlessly miserable. As Erma Bombeck said, ‘Seize the moment. Remember all those women on the Titanic who waved off the dessert cart’. You thought she’d say the Titanic sank because they were overweight, didn’t you?

Admit it, you’re a masochist too!  Which diet are you on currently?


It’s important to eat well, especially when obesity is so widespread and yes that’s a dreadful pun and sadly someone else said it, not me. But really there’s no need to get carried away. There’s more than our fair share of heartache around and precious little we can do about it. So eat, drink and try to be merry, a bit of comfortable poundage never hurt anyone; just follow these guidelines:

Eat light: as soon as there’s light, start eating.
Eat as much as you want: but don’t always swallow.
Eat well: but never more than you can lift (Miss Piggy)

Seriously though, research shows that after crossing 40 or so, one puts on weight almost regardless of what you do. In fact, being too thin is courting osteoporosis at that age. The trick is not to put on too much. So you should: Eat a balanced diet, a bit less than before, and a bit slower than usual.

Avoid diets and losing huge amounts of weight.
Drink plenty of water.
Do regular and sensible amounts of aerobic and weight bearing exercises several times a week.
And if I may add this: look after your mind as well as your body. Go on, have some of that chocolate ice cream, and read all
about Hogwarts while you do it.