I'm Fat

I’ve been considered underweight for basically my whole life. I’ve heard the usual jokes… ‘omg, I thought you were a lamppost’ or ‘careful, the wind is really strong today… you might want to hold on to something before you get blown away’…

So what I’ve been doing for the past one year is I’ve been going to a gym. I’ve got lots of time to burn in Penang, so might as well use the time to ‘buff up’. After almost a year of ‘pumping iron’, I’ve gained a total of… wait for it… 4kg! Bloody hell!!

I’m now a whopping 56kg. But because I’m freakishly tall (5’10” – ok, so I’m just normally tall), my BMI (Body Mass Index) puts me at ‘underweight’. That’s still good for me considering the fact that when I was in university, my weight was 47kg, putting me under the ‘anorexic’ category.

Anyway, my one year membership at the gym in Penang was up, and I decided not to continue there. After all, I may be transferred back to KL soon (yeay!). So there was no point in continuing the gym membership there.

Now, I could always just stop going to the gym and exercise at home. But, knowing me, the only exercise I’ll ever get is getting into my car and getting out of it. So, I started to look for gyms in KL. There’s one in Sunway Giza (Kota Damansara), which is pretty close to home. It’s scheduled to open end of May, so gives me enough time to get back to KL. Being the semi-health freak that I am, I joined the gym.

As usual, they’ll have a session with the personal trainer where he’ll measure everything about you which would be helpful in lowering your self esteem and convince you to buy personal training packages. I pretty much knew where I stood. Underweight… blah blah blah… need to eat more… blah blah blah… need to gain a lot of weight… blah blah blah… 36 sessions at a cost of a million bucks… blah blah blah…

So I played along. But then I found out something really scary about my body. I have 18% body fat! Excellent for me would be around 14%... good at 16%... I was at ‘acceptable’!

A couple of things came to mind. Firstly, I thought I would be at the ‘5% - did you just come from Somalia?’ category. Second of all, where was my body hiding this fat? I’ve got a little bit around my waist area, and that’s it. Skeletons in doctor’s offices laugh at me! I hate admit it, but sometimes I do feel like flying off when there’s a strong wind. Where is this invisible fat!?

The trainer, who has a degree in sports sciences, told me this is the case for some people… you eat and you eat because you’re extremely thin, and then one day you get clogged arteries and have high cholesterol. I’m pretty sure he stopped short of ‘and if you don’t do anything about it, you will die’. What a bummer…

But there’s good news… I still can eat anything I want… only catch is, I’ve got to exercise. So the plan is for me to take in around 4000 kCal everyday, then burn 2000 of it and turn it into lean muscle… sounds easy, right? Well, if I can be a fat-skinny guy, then this would a cinch.