Practice what you preach

Nothing makes you want to slap someone more than when they preach from on high. I used to be eminently slappable a few years ago, when I would save paper (a good thing), but lecture people about saving paper (not such a good thing). Shortly after going on about the precious trees, one of the recipients of my lectures came home and discovered a box of wooden matches in my kitchen. It was something I hadn't even thought about, and I realised that high ground is a shaky place indeed if your title is only 'Mr', and not 'St'

Why lecturers like me are so irritating is because you know they're not doing it to convert you, but to show how wholesome they are. Thus humbled, I set up a pile of recycled paper by the office printer, put up a gentle sign and left it at that. I don't know if the office actually used less paper, but at least none of my colleagues let fly.

This grounding puts me in a quandary when I see loved ones who are near sedentary, double chins growing by the day. It's not because I've become a rangy athlete, but precisely because I haven't. I'm not one of those otherworldly people who roll out of bed at 3am and run a marathon for breakfast. I'm closer to couch potato than celery stick in the shape department, and it wasn't that long ago that mastication was my only aerobic exercise.

This is why I have clear memories what it's like to go from sedentary to exercising at least three times week. I call it the "new normal"-when you redefine almost every aspect of what it feels like to be alive. Forget about the health benefits we have beaten into our heads over and over and over again. The energy benefits alone are worth every drop of sweat.

When the girl who was to be my wife told me gently one day that perhaps I ate too much KFC, I actually justified it, saying, "At least I walk there and back."

I pretended I was joking, but I really wasn't. "You'll feel much better if you exercise," she said, and I told her that I felt just fine, thank you. And then I started going to the pool three times a week, and realised that I hadn't felt fine at all. It was as if I'd been given a new life. And so converted (I still thank my wife for it), my life took a vague inverse of many of my peers. Facebook lets me see a frightening number of people hit by what my brother calls the "Heathrow Injection": the requisite 10kgs that most Indians (me included) put on when they first move abroad and are exposed to processed foods. Some escaped the first syringe and got the Marriage Injection instead. The few who are annoyingly fit, are mostly ones who've always been annoyingly fit.

But it's not weight that makes me want to preach. How can I, when I still sport a paunch? It's when I see ashen-faced fatigue at the end of the day, or bleary hours following an afternoon nap, or extreme efforts of will just to get up and find the remote, that I want to sing from the mountaintops that even the most modest amount of regular exercise cures all these ills. I should know. I'm the guy who'd sit staring at a piece of paper I'd just dropped, wishing I was a Jedi knight who could summon it without actually bending over to pick it up. It makes me wonder if, maybe, there are a few things worth being slapped over.

Gautam Raja is a journalist based in the US.