“Tilt your face towards the camera,” Akanksha said, frowning at the photo.
I turned the other way and gave her my side profile. It looked thinner.
She reached over, held my face straight, and clicked anyway. “See how good we look together.”
I didn’t see it. I saw fat around my jaw. Akanksha looked pretty, as always.
“Why did you even like me?” I said. “Look at me. I’m embarrassed of the fat I’m carrying.”
She scrunched her brows. “You’re not that fat. And frankly, I don’t care even if you are.”
But clearly, she did.
“Look at that gym.” She pointed across the road. “Why don’t you try it?”
The next day I joined. Hired a personal trainer. Vowed to lose fifteen kilos.
* * *
Reality hit within a day. Every part of my body was screaming. My head wobbled. My stomach begged for more food.
“Sir, when are you coming to the gym?” my trainer called after two days.
“Sorry, Sir. The gym isn’t for me. Maybe I’ll try yoga.”
I tried yoga for a day. Quit within two. When my trainer called again, I decided to give the gym a real shot.
So I pushed through the pain. My muscles ached every morning. I went anyway.
My trainer told me not to check my weight for a month. My body needed time to adapt.
At the one-month mark, we checked. One kilogram.
“That’s all?” I threw my hands in the air. “After all that lifting, one kilogram?”
I stepped off and stepped on again. The number didn’t move. I shifted my feet, waited for it to settle, checked a third time. Same number, staring back at me like it had nothing better to do.
My trainer looked worried. He was about to lose a client. “It takes time to show results. We’ll add cardio this month.”
* * *
So I did. Treadmill, elliptical, cycling, everything the gym offered. I cut sugar. Cut fried food. Stopped eating out. Cut my portions again. Six days a week, weights and cardio both.
I stopped going out with friends because every place had food I couldn’t eat. I carried my own tiffin to the office. I stood at weddings holding a plate of salad while everyone else ate.
A month later, we checked. I was sure it would be four kilos. Maybe five.
It was one.
“You’ve lost inches. Weight loss takes time,” my trainer said.
I fired him that week.
* * *
I hired Allan instead. He made my goal his goal: diet charts, a personalised plan, daily follow-ups. Every session wrecked me. I kept going.
My body still wouldn’t shed more than half a kilo.
I didn’t blame Allan. He’d done everything right. Maybe the problem was the method, not the trainer.
So I started researching on my own. HIIT. Fat-burning cycling classes. Thirty-minute workouts that left me on the floor.
Nothing worked the way it was supposed to.
Some mornings I’d stand on the scale and feel my chest tighten before I even looked down. Some mornings I skipped it entirely, told myself I’d check tomorrow. Tomorrow gave me the same number.
A year and a half in, I’d lost three kilos. Just three.
I looked better. Everyone said so. Akanksha said it. My friends said I looked muscular now. But the scale doesn’t flatter you, and I knew what mine said.
* * *
Then the gym offered a free annual blood test. Allan pushed me to get it done. I took the report to a dietician.
“You’re pre-diabetic,” she said.
I sat in my car and didn’t turn the key. I kept staring at the report, like it might change. Two years of gym fees. Two years of measured rice and skipped rotis. Two years of showing up. And my body was heading somewhere worse, not better.
I went back and asked her to help.
She didn’t hand me a diet sheet. She rebuilt my whole day. Wake at six. Exercise first. Then follow the plan till night.
I was a late riser. This was the hardest thing anyone had asked of me yet.
“Change the life around the food,” she said. “Or the food won’t matter.”
For a moment I thought about throwing the plan away. Two years, and I wasn’t close.
“Some bodies just find it harder to lose weight,” my old trainer had told me once.
“You won’t even look good if you lose the weight,” my grandmother had said.
I didn’t want to believe either of them anymore.
* * *
I started. Six a.m. Every day before my mind could argue.
A month in, I checked my weight. Three and a half kilos.
I stepped off. Stepped on again. Same number. I stood there in the bathroom in the half-dark, looking at a scale that had told me the same thing for two years, and it was finally saying something different.
I didn’t tell anyone that day. I wanted to be sure.
The next month, another three and a half. The month after, I hit it. Seventy-one kilos. Fifteen down from where I began, two and a half years earlier.
Akanksha found out before I told her. She was taking a photo of us at her cousin’s wedding, and I realised halfway through that I hadn’t turned my face.
* * *
The gym asked me to speak to newer clients. My old trainer came. Allan came. So did the dietician.
“Diet is what did it,” she said, pointing at me.
“Training built the base,” Allan said. “What do you think?”
They both looked at me, waiting.
“Weight training works. Cardio works. Diet works.” I looked at the row of people just starting out, the way I once had. “But so does refusing to quit.”
Someone asked what I’d tell them, if they were starting today.
I thought about the scale. The same disappointing number, morning after morning, for two straight years. And me, standing on it anyway.
“Keep showing up,” I said. “Even on the days nothing’s moving. It’s moving. You just can’t see it yet.”
Quiet Clarity: Effort doesn’t show up on the day you make it. It shows up on the day it finally adds up.
Reflection: Where in your life are you doing the work but seeing no result yet? What would it take to keep going one more month?
Free YA Contemporary Reads
Genres: General Fiction / Contemporary Fiction, Romance / Sweet, and Young Adult
Unlocking Inner Peace
Genres: Non-Fiction, Non-Fiction / Health & Well Being, and Non-Fiction / Self-Help
