If you’re human, food forms a part of every aspect of your life. We eat to live, to celebrate, to commiserate, to soothe. We use food to fuel not only our bodies, but our emotions as well. We basically live to eat.

Then you wake up one day and you have two asses, three chins, creaky knees, and a bakery on your back…and a very shitty body image, in addition to the other emotional baggage life forces you to carry. And as nice as that ice-cream or chocolate cake tasted every time you took a bite, thinking that it would distract you from or take away whatever pain you were feeling, all you ended up doing was causing yourself more pain.

Food was very much an emotional panacea for me. Till this day, it is ridiculously easy for me to drown myself in a vat of mint choc-chip ice-cream. But…

“Challenges are what make life interesting. Overcoming them is what make life meaningful.”

I’m a few days shy of my 36th birthday, and I am in the best physical shape I’ve ever been in.

My fitness journey started about three years ago, when my sister persuaded me to join a Pilates class (I asked her if I could go with one evening to observe – the instructor made me participate, in the dress I was wearing that day). As challenging as it was initially, I got into it quicker than I thought I would.About a year or so after I joined Pilates, my colleague invited me to come try a fitness class that he conducts at our school, two evenings a week. By this time, I was wanting to add another form of exercise to my week.

Pilates was hard. Powerbox was on a whole other level for…

If I were asked to describe my 2018 using one word, that word would be “challenging”. There have been some unnecessary challenges along the way – some of them I could have done without – but for the first time in a long while, the connotation is not negative.

Not too long ago, I was diagnosed with a mild case of depression. Don’t worry, this is not going to be that kind of a post. But I feel that some background is needed to fully understand the part of my journey that I’m going to share over the next few posts.

I don’t think I will ever forget how I felt sitting in the waiting room before my first session. I had to talk myself out of leaving a few times before I went in and met my therapist. But I stayed, and what followed was an emotionally tumultuous four…