Talk the walk!

The morning rush is over. The kids have been sent off - to the school, to the park; the husband’s made his exit too. The homemaker breathes a sigh of relief. Some time to herself. The hub. That’s where she’s headed next.

“Why can’t I have a flat stomach?” was the question asked by a very flat-stomached Aishwarya Rai in an ad, some years back. “Will I ever have my pre-partum abdomen”? For the women at the hub, the gym, that’s the crucial question. The kilos you can manage to get off somehow or the other – by hook or by crook, by tread milling, by exercycling, by dieting, by self-delusion (ask my husband about the last one). But one thing you can’t do by all this and more is lose that jelly-belly.

After a few months of watching the scale, doing the sit-ups and measuring the waist, the housewives’ verdict is unanimous - despite what the ever-hopeful spouses would like them to believe. ‘The belly is here to stay’. Once you resign yourself to that hard (or soft) fact, things become much simpler. The gym becomes a pleasurable experience. You realize that the main purpose of coming to the gym is to communicate, to laugh, to breathe, to recover.

They say for the exercise to do you any good, you should be ‘in the zone’. To put it simply, exercise in such a way that you would choose not to have a conversation with the person next to you. You shouldn’t have so much breath to spare. I’m reminded of a friend who was recently told by a well-wisher that she should increase her walking speed on the treadmill. The friend replied, “But then I won’t be able to talk!” The women of the late morning workouts would rather talk than be in the zone. And if the trainer turns up the volume of the stereo, talk over it they will.

Of course, there are the utterly serious who work out utterly seriously and get serious results. The few, very few, who can win over such stubborn matter with minds of pure discipline; the envy and inspiration of the struggling post-partums; the bane of the husbands who are sick of listening to these women’s ‘super-human exploits’; the survivors, as the over-weight West would describe them.

The rest of us, mere mortals, exercise, eat more than we should, and hope that the calories lost will somehow outnumber those gained. Wishful thinking but as the poet Browning wrote:

 “Ah, but a (wo)man's reach should exceed (her) grasp, Or what's a heaven for?”