It’s good to be a loser!

I mean it. When you lose years of extra physical baggage, it feels good to be a loser. Ask me. Within a few years of finishing college and joining the workplace, my skinny frame turned plump, before becoming dangerously shapeless. Dangerous because of the health concerns it posed, not because of how weird I appeared to those who had known me since childhood. Did I care, though? Hardly.

Whereas I felt the burden of my weight every time I climbed stairs or tried to get up from my squatting position, I didn’t have any image issues. In my view, there was precious little I could do to shed the ever accumulating pounds, so why even bother? Until the day my mother insisted I wear a sari. (Not me in that photo). I could well imagine the walking football I would appear if I did wear one. The more she insisted and the more I argued against that suggestion, the worse I felt. In the end, I was reduced to tears. I loved to wear saris, but couldn’t think of draping myself in one with the kind of weight I had. Something had to give. Something did.

With an online friend’s encouragement and guidance, I began walking every day. I also made simple changes to my diet, slept well, drank bottles of water and kept a journal to record my progress. Within months, I had entered the normal weight range. What started as a vanity exercise to get in shape for looking good in a sari became an indispensable habit. Now, I couldn’t let a day go by without my morning walk and other millions of away-from-the-computer-desk chores through the day.

Strangely, when I started seeing the fruits of my new regimen, I employed the same sense of discipline and commitment to my writing. I realized good habits can be infectious! Once you inculcate them in one aspect of your life, they tend to permeate other areas as well. What could be better? Once just a wannabe, I now consider myself a “real” writer–someone who writes every day, spends a chunk of the daily schedule to reading, and makes the effort to hone her craft.

Some changes can be life-changing. Oh, and losing, too, can be.