Working on a Six-pack

By the time I was getting discharged from JKUAT hospital where I was diagnosed with a mental illness in September or October 2008, I had gained a lot of weight. I put on excess weight due to eating and sleeping too much without doing any physical activity, something I have narrated before on this blog.

To be honest, my new look didn't sit well with me because I had hated being plump. I especially rued the pot belly I developed after gaining weight in the hospital. A pot belly like the one beer-loving men have. Or what my friend Ruth Wangire told me is called a one-pack.

It is that pot belly and flabby body I had that set me on the warpath of battling my weight. I tried all sorts of tricks to lose weight: dieting, fasting, exercising and putting pepper in my food. And in an effort to reduce my stomach size, I took deworming tablets and bought rollers for firming up my abdominal muscles.

Some of those tricks worked but sadly, I got stuck in a cycle of gaining weight again after lapsing back to a devil-may-care lifestyle. You know, a lifestyle characterized by eating and sleeping a bit excessively.

Just one and a half years ago, I was disappointed to notice I had gained the weight I worked so hard to lose. I wondered what could have led to my weight gain. Could it be the groundnuts I had been feasting on?

Convinced it was the groundnuts that caused my weight gain, I have been limiting the number of nuts I partake. My solution seemed to have worked given the weight I have lost since then. About two months ago while taking a shower, I noticed my pot belly was disappearing. How encouraging!

Now, I usually update my social media profile pics every six months: in June and in December. Last Thursday when I requested Dad to take a photo of me, it was like he knew I was going to upload it to my social media profiles. He warned me that people would think I was sick, for I was looking too thin.

Dad turned out to be right. After uploading the photo onto Facebook yesterday, two friends phoned me. One of them, Michael Njeru, informed me that I didn't look good in the photo. He kept urging me to eat more food, at one moment inquiring from me whether I suffer from any eating disorder such as bulimia.

When I finally logged on to Messenger and Facebook later on in the day, about nine hours after uploading the photo, I found out that several people had expressed similar concerns. They commented that I wasn't looking good and asked me whether I was really fine.

Those comments touched me deeply. It impressed me to note that while some people have a tendency to put me down, others do care about my welfare. I was truly touched.

Despite the concerns expressed by my friends, I am in a fine fettle. I don't have a cold or any of those minor illnesses that people catch every now and then. But I have gotten the message: I need to start eating more, which I will do.

As I plan to gormandize more food, my desire to stay lean and athletic remains undiminished. I would particularly like to develop a six-pack, the kind that my future wife will take pleasure in glancing at. So I will keep on exercising and stretching with rollers. That's all I am saying.

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RECOMMENDATION: If you've enjoyed the above story on my plan to get a six-pack, you might also enjoy another one on "Battling My Weight Again" which I wrote a couple of years ago. Just click on that link in blue to dive straight into the story.