It was a book that first introduced me to Gertrude Bell, the female equivalent of Lawrence of Arabia. I was all of 10 and the yellowing, ancient volume (101 Great Lives, it was called) that profiled a few world shifters left a deep impression on my idealistic, young mind.
I badly wanted to be her: My imagination fired at the thought of cavorting with camels and kings, shuttling between countries and homes, enjoying an “orgy of independence” as Bell’s half-sister once wrote.
I was going to become a female explorer, I decided. I would evade cannibals in Congo, adopt a platypus and dingo from Australia, ward off the progeny of Count Dracula in Transylvania with home-grown garlic, and have a wild, torrid affair with some Rodin-type French artist.
Then I embarked on my fitness journey and realised something — travelling made me fat. It began with those biannual trips to Kerala in school, fuelled by greasy snacks (pazham pori at Thrissur, uniappam at Kottayam, banana chips right through), courtesy the Indian Railways. Then there were the parathas and puris mum packed to carry along with us when we took the train to Mumbai, the buttery sandwiches grabbed at airports, the chakli and chiwda eaten in the car on a road trip, the wayside eateries that give you hot, cheap, if not very salubrious food.
Travelling does something to that button in your brain (an already malfunctioning one in my case) that tells you to stop eating. Like food eaten off someone else’s plate, what is consumed in another place doesn’t count.I ascribed to this school of thought all of last year, when I was lucky enough to have a job that allowed me to be a nomad of sorts, waltzing into different towns and cities and villages, every other week.
This was life, I thought, as I ate my way through them all: quaffing the contents of my hotel’s entire mini bar at Salem, eating a massive biryani dinner in Hyderabad, snacking on ghee-filled biscuits en route to Mangalore, sharing rum and pork at Coorg with a fellow reporter and Mysore masala dosas (in Mysore, yes) with my photographer.
Until I realised that my favourite jeans wouldn’t slide past my knees. I went into panic mode, running to a nutritionist who offered me a sage piece of advice, “You don’t have to make food the focus of every experience.” It took me all of six months to get into those jeans again, courtesy weight-lifting and a relatively clean diet.
And then I had to travel again, to the US, no less. The fattest nation in the world is that way for a reason: a single burger has more bad fat and carbs than what MyFitnessPal allows me to eat in an entire day.
I didn’t want to feel fat all over again, so I promised myself this — I would not eat anything that was not a fruit, vegetable or lean protein. Surprisingly (for me) I managed to stick to it, eating salad and dry roast chicken, while my companions supped on pizzas the size of a tea table, warm crumbly bread and pommes frites (French fries, by any name, they are still calorie bombs). Sure, I cheated — a smallish waffle for breakfast, an ice cream and one exorbitantly-priced bag of soggy popcorn. But for the most part, I was good.
And it worked. I returned two kilos lighter.
And though I’m not sure how long it will stay that way, I think I’m going back to my original plan of becoming a female explorer. I’ll just visit with my running shoes on.