I Obsessed Over My Weight & Landed In Trouble

“Nothing tastes as good as how skinny feels!”

Ummm...Have you tasted a Truffle cake? Or a Double Cheese pizza?

Life is hard when you are a foodie and, when your ‘appearance’ alone makes it obvious!

Let me introduce myself, before I take you through my journey in search of my skinny self. I'm a 24 year old who weighed 65 kgs and was 5.4 feet tall.

I was certainly on the chubbier side and just like any girl who's not “skinny”, I had my own set of struggles which included being mocked by my friends for my flabby tummy. My relatives telling me to lose weight at every family function and event. Not being able to wear trendy clothes and boys telling me you that I'm “cute” but never hot or attractive. Trust me, nothing irritates me more than the word “cute” now, and the list goes on.

At one point, I felt that my weight was weighing me down - everything wrong with my life was because of my weight. Literally and figuratively. I had some 100 or so failed diets where my motivation would be at it’s peak on the first day and by the end of the week, I was back to eating chips.

I often used to hear how amazing I would look if I lost weight and since I could no longer fit into my jeans, I found myself more motivated than usual this one time. So, with no concrete nutritional plan or personal training, I started off on my own. I starting working out 6 times a week for 1.5-2 hours and used a calorie counter app to keep a check on calorie intake. Two weeks into the diet, I got used to eating about 1200 calories a day and I had started believing that there was a skinny girl inside me and I was going to find her. It was going to be great, as long as I followed the routine!

A month into the diet, I found myself obsessing over calories - my tea went milkless and the food turned bland. My calorie intake was around 1000-1200 calories a day while, trying to working out to burn some extra 100-200 calories away. Slowly, I found myself cutting out a little more everyday -the portions started getting smaller and smaller. And it wasn't that I wasn't hungry, I was always hungry but I was obsessed - to eat less and consume lesser calories every day!

By the third month, when the result was there and visible and I had managed to lose weight for the first time in my life - the sense of achievement was amazing! But I did not stop there, and I reduced my consumption to the point that I started to starve myself. Consuming only around 500 calories, I kept losing weight and went around shopping and bought all the things that I dreamt of wearing. It was the best feeling ever!

But that’s where that feeling stopped and my obsession got worse by the day. There were days when I wouldn't eat above 250 calories - I started to sniff food, other times I would chew and spit it. I had only seen it in movies but it sure was effective.

The more weight I would lose, the more compliments would pour in! But it wouldn’t make me happy and It felt sickening to be liked only, for starving oneself. I felt that there was nothing more to me than this, and I didn’t feel half of the person that I was before! I was a walking zombie - tired, disinterested, and I was depressed. I looked great but I felt like sh*t!

The only thing that kept me going was literally, the magazine covers and the fashion world. I felt that if they can do it, why can’t I? Only that, reaching 43 kgs from 65 wasn't as easy as they made it look. It was when I fell unconscious at a friend’s place, I realised that I have to stop. My body went into hypoglycaemia - my Body Mass Index (BMI)* was lower than optimum, my immune was weak and I looked anaemic. I had an eating disorder and at this point, I went for counselling and stopped from falling deeper into it.

It wasn't easy at first to eat, but slowly I started to, and it took me 4 months to get back to an acceptable BMI. Thank god for that! I never got back to eating as much as I used to before, but at least I'm not starving myself. One thing that I learnt was to NOT believe what the magazines put out and to not idealise what is fake and unhealthy.

It is much more important to be healthy, than to achieve the society’s ‘ideal’ size and image. Now, I don't know about you but I can must tell you, that my Nutella shake sure tastes better than how skinny feels!

* BMI is a measure of body fat that is the ratio of the weight of the body in kilograms tothe square of its height in meters.