badayi: Magic Bullet

Take a look at this chart.

It’s taken from my Gaining Game. It plots body weight in pounds over a two-year period. On the face of it, the weight seems stable. But charts can be deceptive. After closely looking at the numbers, I concluded it was an uphill battle to keep the trend line straight. The line stubbornly wants to tilt up. That’s where I left things in Gaining Game, a story about weight gain in adulthood.

But the story continues. Here’s what happened next.

I tried different ways to keep the weight steady. But astonishingly, no matter what I did, things got worse. This updated chart plots weight through October 2018, adding close to four more years of data.

That’s roughly a five-pound gain over the period! During a few weeks in August 2016, I erased the entire gain and got back to where I was in the chart’s beginning, February 2013. That victory didn’t last. The weight shot right back up, and as you can see, kept reaching higher peaks. The times it dipped were typically during a trip to India, where, with aging parents at home, food wasn’t a priority. Come to think of it, it never was. Exercise, though, was plenty, supplied by morning runs, evening walks, and hiking trips.

Ah! The morning runs in Kerala, or at least in Thrissur. It has a special charm, and not just because people give that quizzical look. “Aare pedichu avo odanne,” commented a group of ladies when they saw me (Who’s he afraid of?). Decked out in their best and on the way to the temple, they couldn’t pass up an opportunity to get a dig in early. I don’t blame them entirely: to combat the morning smog precipitated by the previous evening’s rampant trash burning, I was wearing a surgical mask.

How's it going?
(Photo Credit: manoramaonline.com Sept 6, 2019)

The real problem though is not people but stray dogs. They congregate early in the day around chosen spots along the jogging route, eyeing passers-by with a bored look. That is if you are walking. If you are running, the reception is somewhat different, depending on what the leader of the pack does. What he does though is unpredictable. He might ignore you, in which case the rest of the pack goes back to the dog mode of business as usual. But then he just might decide to test your mettle by launching and wildly barking, in which case the rest of the group follows suit, competitively. Things can get hairy, and as every kid knows, running faster makes it worse. I tried many tricks to tame this menace—from brandishing a can of Mace to whipping out a folding knife. What worked best was waving a simple stick picked up from the wayside. Suddenly the leader retreats, others look as if, “Hey, we were just kidding around,” and all is quiet.

An even greater danger is posed by the growing crop of dog owners with dogs considerably stronger than them, if not larger. If you encounter such duo with the canine controlling the proceedings, it is best to beat a safe retreat and find another route for your jogging routine. I was forced to abandon a favorite route that took me by the way of a nursing college when, one fine morning, a vicious looking German Shepherd decided to step out from his front yard, towing a frail 70-ish owner who was desperately trying to hold the beast back. I don’t know what was behind their disagreement, but upon sighting me running in their direction, the dog’s ferocity multiplied by orders of magnitude. No folding knife or stick was going to save me from this peril if the dog broke free, as seemed imminent. Luckily for me, there was a side road that provided safe passage. But I walked, didn’t run the rest of the way back.

If dogs don’t disrupt your morning run, garbage dumps sure will. You might be on a lush trail that snakes along the paddies or on a tree-lined street with newly minted homes on either side. No matter. The dumps appear for no reason other than someone threw garbage there first, which quickly begets similar behavior from others, and just like that this ill-fated spot turns into a de facto dumping ground. The stench can be unbearable, not to mention toxic, which is another reason to have a medical-grade mask handy, albeit risking wanton remarks from professedly pious ladies.

Get that mask out!

If you can get used to the canine distractions, smelly byways, and lung clogging smog, the morning runs are a great way to keep your gut where it belongs while taking in the views of the village waking up to life. It certainly helped me arrest the creeping weight gain I was experiencing in America, at least temporarily. But the weight shot up within a couple of weeks after I got back. I could never pin down the reason why.

Yet, there must be a way, so the science says. And as a firm believer, I had to try other steps. I cut rice, a dinner staple, by half. It was tough in the beginning but became an easy habit later. Halved sugar with substitutes. Reduced eating out. Became a spectator and not a partaker at office functions replete with dense pastries.

To no avail. No raksha.

But the next step I took changed everything.

What solved the problem? Salad. As in fresh-cut broccoli, cauliflower, tomato, onion, celery, spinach, black olives, and any mixed greens you can get your hands on. No dressings please. A dash of lemon juice and ground pepper would do just fine.

Yeah, it’s wild.

But, back in America, I have had difficulty in convincing others of the grit involved in habituating this step. To them, salad is just not, how shall I put it, macho. I was at this restaurant with a group from work, which invariably means sitting stretching your vertebrae as far as it will concede to get to at least shoulder level to the six-footers. Things got even more uncomfortable when the menu came, filled with suggestions of beef cuts, prime ribs, and pork chops, with pictures to prove the enormity of their portions. Hidden out on the back page was Mediterranean salad, my only option. Oh boy!

I swallowed my pride and ordered the salad anyhow. But then I remembered the ace up my sleeve. As everyone relaxed with the first round of beers, I waited for the right opportunity. Someone showed pictures of their kids’ baseball games. That was good enough. I whipped out my phone and casually started watching a video.

“What’s that?” the very pleasant lady seated next to me asked. I handed her the phone, rewinding the video back to the beginning.

“Wow! Is that you Jay?” she exclaimed. She flashed the screen to the others across the table. “Hey, Jay chops wood! You pack a mean punch in there.”

And I am, like, “What did you think?”

Now, look at what happened since October 2018 after I started the salad routine.