When that sudden weight loss or weight gain becomes subject of speculation

 

the backyard

Sometimes we tend to become lethargic when we feel satisfied even for a minor accomplishment. Two years back, when I realized I was putting on weight, I embarked on rigorous exercises including long walks, cycling and hiking the back hills. I quickly lost the accumulated weight in a short time. See: https://paulkariuki.blogspot.com/2019/07/and-long-walk-made-difference.html

  Not very long in a social joint, while following an English Premier League match, a friend happened to drop by during the interval and we had a bit of catching up. Then he made some remarks to the effect that I was ‘feeding well’ as I seemed to be in a kind of ‘good health.’

  I didn’t pay much attention to the remarks, other than laugh them off. The other day, when my left eye began giving me that irritating itch, I took a mirror to have a good look at the eye. I’m the kind that rarely stares myself in a mirror, unless in a barbershop getting a shave or once in a blue moon. 

  I had to give a hard stare at the reflection that stared me back. The irritating eye momentarily forgotten, my attention was drawn to what was appearing like puffed up cheeks. Then I recalled the friend’s remark about ‘feeding well’ and realized he was inferring I was putting on weight. As I left the house, I made a conscious decision to check on weight while in town. 64 kilos!

  I realized that there was a layer of ‘blubber’ beginning to form around the girth section. This really got me concerned that I began making few diet adjustments like skipping that roast meat on the way home and at times a fried fish or two at a popular roadside shack.

  For two years, I recalled, I’d not visited the backyard hills and forest. It was time to revive this pastime especially the nature walks. That I love hiking hills is not in contention. Most of my languid poetry had been done while perched at the summits and looking at the surrounding areas and getting inspiration from observations of near and distant objects or geographical forms.

  It struck me as strange that each time I planned hiking the activity; I would suddenly get disinterested and find myself at social joints especially in the afternoons whenever it was an action packed EPL weekend. This procrastination observed for close to a month until the layer of the blubber began expanding and alarm bell rang in my head.

  Unable to take it anymore, I dedicated Saturday and Sundays for different outdoor exercises with Saturday seeing me cycling the black mamba for like ten kilometers one way making it a sweaty twenty kilometers to and fro. Sundays afternoons would see me ambling like a pack mule up the hill and getting lost in the dark eerie forest that is devoid of any big game other than few monkeys and an occasional porcupine here and there and a variety of coloured birds making merry in what was an otherwise perennial spring that is on last stages of death.

  So rigorous became the exercises that at one point, while on a walk, a neighbour braked his car abruptly next to me and asked if I was unwell going by the rate I was shedding weight.

  “Hope you aren’t ailing from AIDS,” he teased.

  I was of the mind of taking an offense but took this as a joke, hoped into his car and we had a hearty chat during which I appraised him on the exercises to allay his concerns and he gave a guffaw of laughter tapping his massive beer belly and wondering how long it would take to be ‘stalk thin’ as he described my appearance.

  “What is your current weight?” I asked him.

  “Something around 120 kilos,” he said.

  I teased him that, if he were to lay on top of a young brunette in a horizontal game, it’s likely the young lass would pass out long before he had fired his first shot but he brushed off the remark claiming he could ‘drive any engine of any size’ without much hindrances and fire up to three shots in a single gland to gland combat.

 “Don’t believe the crap that fat guys possesses a small gear that passes for karongo,” he said.

  After a month of exercising, it was time to take weight measures again. As I stood on the weighing scales, I noticed the numbers doing some kind of acrobatics as if unsure what final figure to read before settling on 57 kilos.

  The guy operating the scales recalled that like a month or two back I was heading towards 65 kilos and wondered how I had burned fats in so short a time.

  “Hope you’re not going to shed more weight to the extent the wind will sweep you off the street,” he said in a jocular voice.

  “Worry not. I’m shedding two more kilos,” I said.

  The funny thing about people is they’ll have an explanation to whatever they’ll observe of you. It came as no surprise that the new me was criticized with the weight loss attributed to my being seen with a barmaid who is said to be infected and on life sustaining drugs and who, claims had it, I was sleeping around with. Earlier weight gain was again attributed as a ‘fact’ that I was taking antiretroviral drugs!