| Of having cakes and eating them too | Send to a friend |
| Saturday, 21 January 2012 11:04 |
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Worse than that perhaps, I’m a ‘follower’ and quite blindly so. The vast majority of the people I ‘follow’ on Twitter, I have never met. Many of them live in a different continent. Some of them are celebrities. Others are reality ‘stars’ who don’t deserve to be celebrated. But every so often, one of them offers up a genuine pearl of wisdom, something with the potential to change your life forever. As it happens, recently I received just this kind of offering. I was lying on the couch watching a fitness DVD, memorising the kicks and jabs for future reference. Halfway through I was exhausted, so I decided to go on Twitter – much less strenuous. And the first tweet I read was this: “My head says go to gym, my heart says eat more cake.” If there’s another statement that so effectively captures the nature of the battle between good and evil, I don’t know what it is. Just the other day, I was at pains to explain my curious eating habits – more accurately, non-eating habits - to my colleagues. I understand why they would be perplexed, given my proportions. They quickly dismissed my standard “watching my weight” response as nonsense. African women presumably, don’t do such things – watching it go where? Well, in my case, watching it just like a child might watch a balloon inflate. No reasonable woman wants to be skinny and I have been known to be reasonable on occasion. But on the fat side, no one wants to look as if they haven’t lost their baby weight when they’ve never even had a baby. Even being from a tribe that determines the value of a woman based on the expanse of her hips, I will never settle comfortably into excessive folds of flesh. I will settle, you understand, just never comfortably. Something which is peculiarly feminine, because my head does say “go to the gym” but I’ve never been. And my heart? My heart is heavy, not just with disappointment, but with cake too. The journey from heart to head is not an easy one, made bearable only by the fast food outlets along the way. The mind games are gruelling. The emotions demanding. So much work, I’m telling you, and no reward - if you don’t count the extra pounds. I’m beginning to think it might be easier just to hit the treadmill and take that noble path paved with blood, sweat and tears. Then again, I’m also beginning to experience how lovely it is to have one’s cakes and eat them too. It’s no wonder it doesn’t happen too often. Love and light, Julie This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites           |
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