The Fat Busting Diaries: Day 2

What with the situation in Mumbai, I did not feel like blogging about this yesterday. Very frankly, my heart is still not in it, but I did promise to record my personal Battle with the Bulge, so here it is, Day 2 at the Slimming Centre...

I was informed that the day-before had been a 'Zero Session'. At first I thought all that zapping and buzzing had yielded zero results, hence the name. But no, it was a 'freebie', a session to give me a taste of things to come. Yesterday's session, my treatment process started in earnest. The Buzzer, which is what I decided to call the machine (at first thought I'd use The Vibrator, but then I remembered that oops, a contraption by that name already exists!!) is for the weight-loss program. Yesterday, was the first session of my Thermoslim Therapy. For fun, I've decided to call it Ther-Ther. Also because it reminds me of this Bengali colloquialism, 'thhawl-thhawl', which loosely translated means, wibble-wobble, which unfunnily enough, is exactly what my tum-tum does.

So The Buzzer and the Ther-Ther were to be my fat-busting buddies.

The Sunny Chica was asking me about my Fat Book, which I didn't get. That made her considerably un-sunny. She weighed me and noted that I had GAINED .55 kgs over-night. Something in me just withered and died. I felt like somebody had whacked me in the face with last night's dinner-plate laden with home-made Chinese food! So she asked me to write down on a piece of paper, what my diet normally looks like on a day-to-day basis. Now I kid you not, but I actually am a very healthy eater. It's the evening round of namkeens that play my nemesis and of course my chocoholism, but I don't sin everyday. Normally it's lots of fruit, salad, milk, bowls of daal and roti-sabzi at night. I eat smart and I thought Sunny Chica would give me a pat on the back. Instead she looked at my sheet, nodded and said that she would give me a diet chart? WTF?!?

Seriously! WTF?!? If I had to go on a diet and exercise for an hour-a-day at home, WTF was I paying them for? I could have joined Talwaker's for the amount I paid them! This is why I am a gullible, stupid fool, ladies and gents. This is why I am the biggest sucker in all of Suckerdom! Probably the biggest sucker that ever existed!

I was made to go into the Ther-Ther room, where the day-before's nurse-like person measured, in excruciatingly embarrassing detail, the flab content of my stomach, hips and thighs. The Ther-Ther is supposed to be my salvation to inch-loss. As she was taking the measurements, I couldn't help but remember what the MIM had said the night before. "Inch-loss? All they're going to do is hold the measuring tape that much more tighter after your entire treatment is over and then present you with your 'successful ' results!" Maybe I was being paranoid, but it did seem to me that she was indeed holding the tape rather loosely. Sigh! I guess I'll find out eventually!

I was asked to "go to toilet" after which my Ther-Ther session began. My T-shirt was pulled up and tucked under my boobs, while my tracks were pulled down to mid-thigh region. She asked me to lie down on the bed and then she took out something that looked suspiciously like an iron, switched it on and started 'ironing' me with all her strength! What was she trying to do? Flatten my tummy into trimness? Squeeze the flab out of me? What? And what if somebody wanted this therapy for their butt? Oh! Spare me the nightmare!

Now, I noted that there was a buzzing of a different tempo happening where The Iron and my flab made contact. So, I an safely come to the conclusion that the buzz about all theses weight-loss centres is simply buzzings of different natures and at various speeds, tempos and vibrations. Very interesting!

She moved The Iron all over my stomach, which was bobbing up and down like a disgusting sea of flab. I watched the wibble and the wobble, the jiggle and the jaggle in morbid fascination. God! My stomach was so flabby and wobbly it wasn't even funny or pathetic...it was just shameful.

After half-an-hour of ironing, Nurse Strong-Arms (that's what I've decided to name her), massaged my tummy. She did everything from kneading the flab like dough to doing karate chops that bounced right off my stomach and hurtled towards her face. After that, she mixed some kind of paste, which looked like papier-mache and tons of glue, spread the goop all over my tummy, put a towel on it, covered me up and left the room. Since there was no TV in the Ther-Ther room, I dozed off for about 10-15 minutes. When I snapped out of my snooze, I felt a tightening about my stomach and at that moment, Nurse Strong-Arms walked in, peeled off the now-hardened goop and voila! A cast of my stomach! Did they expect me to take that home, put it in a glass box for all to see and admire? I hoped not.

Luckily, she threw it away asked me to adjust my clothes, "go to toilet", weigh myself and go to room number 3. Sunny Chica was there to supervise my jaunt on the scales and noted with tremendous glee and satisfaction that I had lost .35 kgs. She looked at me expectantly thinking that I was going to go all "Gee! OMG! Goodness Gracious! How wonderfully clever y'all are, to squeeze SOOOOO MUCH of my fatness out of me in just one hour! Imagine what two hours could do!?!" But no. Not me. How was I supposed to be sure that it was due to all the ironing-kneading-and-moulding and not because of my "going to toilet" twice that resulted in this 'miraculous' weight-loss? So I just gave a half-smile instead.

I then went to room 3, which was the same where The Buzzer resided. I found a giant-sized roll of cling-film and a pair of scissors there. Just how many wonders were in store for me? Nurse Strong-Arms came in, slapped some cream onto my stomach and wrapped my tummy in three rounds of plastic. I was then made to lie down on the bed, where they put a rubbery-like half-body suit on me and switched on the machine. The TV was also switched on for my benefit, So far so good. And then, things started to heat up a little bit. Then came the trickles of sweat. So I was right. I had indeed been wrapped up like a kathi roll so that I could be baked into a pool of melted fat. Looks like my microwave idea wasn't that far off the mark!!

As I sweated and hopefully some areas of my body melted, I felt that this wasn't so bad. It was like my tummy's personal sauna happening. After around 40 mins, an aide came in, switched off the giant-sized heating pad and unwrapped me. I wonder what the MIM would have made of it! ;p

After that, yes, another trip to the toilet, another trip to the scales and with the presentation of a diet chart by the now-unsmiling-and-dead-serious Sunny Chica, I was sent home, with a reminder of my appointment with the doctor in the evening.

Yes, come 5 p.m. and I was back in the place that seemed all set to become my second home over the next couple of weeks. The session was with a gynaecologist whom I recognised as somebody who practices in the same hospital where the boys' paediatrician practices. That was very reassuring, I have to tell you. He was nice and sweet and asked me lots of questions. He recommended that I get my hormone, thyroid and insulin levels checked, which didn't seem unreasonable at all and which I should have had done by now anyways. After all, it's been two years since the YO was born and that was the last time that I had any kind of testing done.

So, next week, I will be off somewhere to get myself poked with needles and Operation Blubber Be Gone will continue...