The "eyes" of the beholder
The rains have arrived and you know what that means:
For us men the supreme satisfaction of being able to hunker down with a beer in front of the TV and watch the UEFA Euro 2008 AND the Wimbledon unhindered, because thanks to the rain nobody wants to “hit the beaches” anymore.
That same reason makes kids and teenagers hunch over their Playstations and Xboxes blissfully unaware of their spades, buckets and beach balls left outside floating away down the storm water drains.
So ladies I just know what you’re thinking: This leaves you with enough time to get in shape for the next season and show off that swimsuit! So get in there and start that diet and exercise programme you’ve been looking forward to all of last season, and shed those 5 kilos.
Remember the confidence with which you put on that new swimsuit you got from Rio the last time? How you ripped it off and spent the rest of the weekend in your closet, crying and eating chocolate chip ice cream straight from the container??
Well you’re not going to let that happen again. You’re going to become that supermodel or top Bollywood star by whose standards no woman is supposed to weigh more than her nail polish.
You’re saying that that you read somewhere that they do not want thin models in the industry any more. Femina also had models who were normal humans in a recent fashion spread!
You lamebrain! Don’t you know this is a ploy by the clothing designers to get millions of normal-sized women to go to the chic boutiques, trying to buy the clothes they saw in Femina and finding out that designers manufacture those clothes only for mutant aliens who wear size zero or lower. The 20 kilo salesgirl who comes in and leaves the boutique through the air-vent will haughtily tell you that they don’t have your size and maybe you should try across the road, at Maternity Dresses for Whales.
But let’s be practical, 5 kilos is not going to be the answer to getting you looking like these celebrities who are so impossibly slim. You will need a personal trainer as well. Someone to advise you on nutrition, give you pep talks, and haul you back on your leash whenever you try to weakly crawl to that 200 gram tin of soya nuggets that is the only food supply for the month in your fridge. Someone who will remind you, that the biggest meal of the day for those supermodels is toothpaste.
But you can’t afford a personal trainer, in which case you need willpower. Oops! You don’t have will power either, because you’re sitting there like a blob, allowing gazillions of cellulite particles to mate furiously in your thighs, spawning whole new colonies, and you’re reading this asinine article, instead of jogging to the gym.
So ladies! What CAN you do? Well, take the cue from us men, and learn the secret of OUR success.
Why are we so secure about our bodies that we do absolutely nothing, even given the fact that we go parading about the beaches in our underwear letting our bellies prove that we can create a whole other person from the spare tissue?
It’s simple really: We have no idea what we look like.
This is how a man’s mind works. Before stepping out on the sand, a 300 kilo, bow-legged, 5 foot guy with one eyebrow and more body hair than King Kong will put on a thong, look in the mirror, and with a smirk say, “Oh! Yeeeaaah!”
Notice the man looks at himself head-on in the mirror. We men never look at anything else but the front-view which is the most flattering.
But you women check your body from all angles. Front, Side and Back. Then you convince yourselves that the last two views consist almost entirely of a stomach and a butt. That’s where depression begins to manifest itself.
So study this technique ladies, and remember it. Never look sideways at yourself in the mirror. And when retreating, don’t turn around ... walk backwards.
