new gym freak adventure

In a last ditch effort to halt the ravages of time (also known as the ravages of eating and drinking and not having any physical activity whatsoever), you go with your cootie to sign up for a three month trial session at the friendly neighborhood (of Makati) gym. And have thus committed to three months of activities and experiences designed to break you down and slowly reduce you to a pile shame-faced ashes.

It starts on your first day, where the trainer they assign conducts a not-so-aptly named “fitness test”. Fitness test, shmitness test. More like a let’s-see-how-many-ways-we-can-emphasize-how-you-are-now-thirty-pounds-away-from-five-years-ago test, if you ask me. They measure you, and weigh you, and make you endure a step test where you alternately step up and down (and up and down) a platform and wish you could wipe the perky smile off the perky trainer’s face. They then consign you to thirty mindless but not painless minutes on an elliptical machine where on either side of you two sickeningly fit people are jogging effortlessly away while you pant and moan and pray to god the torture ends.

Then they make you do rounds at the weight things and make you wish for death fervently while you’re at it. Then they take your heart rate and tell you what the first few tests have managed to tell you already.

“You are a big fat tub of lard. Or, if you’re not one yet, YOU WILL BE.”

Then they stop the torture and then smile and say you have to do the same thing all over again the next day. And then you go meet your better half and tell him how they told you you’re sixteen pounds overweight. Cry.

But still you go, the next day and the one after that, hoping that it will pay off, that you will lose weight, that you will stop getting demoralized by the other, far more fit, gym people, and that the GOD DAMNED BEER WOULD STOP TAUNTING YOU, HAUNTING YOUR EVERY PAIN-FILLED MOMENT, AND STOP MAKING YOU DRINK LOTS OF IT.

Ditto food.

Especially food.