My Pound of Flesh- A story of a big girl
Sweat trickled like water from a leaking pipe down my body and my breath kept coming like someone on the verge of a heart attack.
The question you might ask is, what caused this? Well, after coming out from a period of being depressed, I was about to go back to being depressed again due to my weight.
I weighed about 132 pounds before I suffered from depression, and just when I thought I have managed to put my life together again, I was weighing 179 pounds.
I hated looking at the mirror, it was like my life had suddenly become a horror movie. All my beautiful dresses could no longer fit me, shopping for my size was like being in a Jumanji game (catch my drift?).
To make matters worse, friends who hadn’t seen me in a while did not help issues. The most annoying thing about hanging with friends was the fact that every topic being discussed would somehow divert to the issue of my weight.
For example, we could be talking about how big Tyler Perry’s new studio was and an idiot would compare my weight to the studio (which by the way has nothing to do with the topic).
So, I decided to take the bull by its horn, made a decision that every morning by 5 am, I would run around the neighborhood for thirty minutes.
The first day, you should have seen me breathing like a pregnant woman about to give birth, my heart felt like it was about to pop out of my rib cage. I helplessly dragged my tired feet back home, the first person to see me was my immediate younger sister, Laura, whose weight was miraculously constant no matter how many calories went into her body (she and my dad were of the same breed).
She, being her usual self, laughed at my silly and haggard look as I plopped on a sofa. “Get me a glass of water” I managed to tell her.
She looked at me like I was a clown in a circus show and burst into laughter again. I could only roll my eyes and curse her in my mind, no one told me losing weight could be this complicated. It should be put in the same category as training to be an assassin.
The next day, took a run again thinking well, this should be easier than the previous day. The first ten minutes proved me wrong, I was close to hyperventilating. I just had to give up and drag myself back home again.
After deciding that dying from a burst heart valve isn’t one of the ways I plan to leave planet earth, I browsed other options that didn’t include running, and lo and behold, I stumbled upon slimming tea.
Slimming tea for those who don’t know what it is, is a tea supposedly said to do the same thing as a workout would do.
Well, in my case it didn’t do its required job (wouldn’t blame it, chocolate was just too delicious to resist!), it just meant I just had to drink a tea that tasted like how sadness would taste if it was a drink.
To make matters worse, it was expensive, the price of a slimming tea would get me either two brand new bags or six-inch killer heels (weight is temporary, drip is eternal). Let’s just say, operation weight loss is a loss.
Nevertheless, I wasn’t giving up. My eureka moment finally came in the form of an aunt who had also gone through what I was going through.
She revealed her sacred secret on how she lost twenty pounds in two weeks without having to go through the stress of a workout.
Now, that was music to my ears and I happily danced my way to my house to go prepare the portion that would restore my chubby body back to its original size.
I took some cash, paid a visit to the market, and bought ginger(lots of it), Garlic, cloves, and some lemons. Let me say this, if sliming tea was sadness, The potion I made was worse. It tasted like what the original taste of chloroquine would have tasted like, bitter, gross, and depressing. But as long as it would give me back my former shape, I was ready to drink gutter water if I had to.
So, a week passed and I was on a scale nervously anticipating a result, and boom, I was weighing 174 pounds. I was like what?
So I lost a whole 5 pounds in just a week, that had to be the best news I had heard in a while. I couldn’t stop jubilating all over the place, and of course, Laura stared at me like I had gone bonkers. I shed tears of joy and decided if drinking a potion that shouldn’t be fed to animals could make me lose that much in just a week, why shouldn’t I just continue.
But this time, I upped my dosage, you know, to fasten the weight loss process. And so did I but you know when you try to play smart with the universe and it backfires? In my case, it did more than that. I was in my room on a beautiful morning, trying to dress up for an outing when I felt the world moving in slow-motion, and then, everything went dark.
When I opened my eyes later, I found Laura looking down on me, I took note of my surrounding to find out that I was in a hospital. “What happened?” I asked her. “so you didn’t die, after all?” she replied. No, I didn’t, you nutcase. After being forced to take different excruciating tests (I hate hospitals by the way), the doctor revealed my fainting spell was caused by excess intake of ginger and garlic. Let’s just say, that was the end of me drinking my miracle portion and my weight loss program in general.
Am I ever going to get back to my former size? That question, I don’t know the answer to. But maybe someday, when I can resist drowning myself in junk food and stop postponing registering in a gym, who knows, I might get to win the war against carbs and finally fit into a body-hugging gown without having to be so conscious about folds and flabs.
Note: This article was posted on Qwenu.com in 2019, thought to re-release it here.
