flour power + some news
HAYWARD, CA —
when i lost my first five pounds in what felt like ever i ran to the kitchen.
naturally.
i gripped a sealed bag of flour — which weighed five pounds — and smiled with disbelief. i physically felt the weight of changing. my weight, changing.
jump 3 months, and many HIIT workouts later, and there were 2 more bags of flour to clutch quietly. add 6 months after that, and a love for yellow daal, and i had 9 bags of flour to my name.
but somewhere in between the pride and personal wins, my flour power moment got complicated. more later, but first my voice + reads:
my voice: listen to our first swing at a mini podcast series. once a week, we’ll unpack the story behind one of our stories. this week it was about IPOs with sophia.
etc: personally, reporter’s notebook-esque pieces always strike me because i can nerd out. but after conversations at dinners and just with friends i realize how much simple things like “off the record” and “where not to try to contact a journalist” are not common knowledge. hopefully this sheds light on diligence, process, and empathy.
learning lesson: lifting a podcast off the ground, even if it’s a mini one, requires a certain level of comfort with anxiety. what i’ve learned, though, is that leading with anxiety manifests itself in really subtle, and really big ways. tldr; what’s ahead is delegation and compartmentalization.
unorganized tab time:
anyways,
losing weight meant i was met with proud flexes from my mother, the “you look great!” compliments from my politically correct classmates once i returned to BU campus that fall, and of course, the disbelief from aunties.
if you’re not on the brown train, let me give you some context: everyone is an aunty, whether it is your actual family or the nosey neighbor. calling someone an aunty, in the indian culture, is a sign of respect. and, listen close here, with a majority of your aunties, it’s worth taking a note or two from your politically correct classmates.
so at one of the annual family parties, filled with crispy samosas, store-bought paneer that they’ll lie about being homemade and chicken they can prove was homemade by the empty cream cartridges in the trash can - i was avoiding the oily, fatty messy by having some water by the fridge.
a particularly buzzed aunty stumbled over to me.
with all smiles, she looked up and down my body. and then did that again. and again. and smiled proudly to say: “no one really thought you could do it, we’re so glad you saw the light.”
this is what they don’t tell you about weight loss: you will be forced to articulate, explain, qualify, and ultimately make outward a deeply personal decision (for me, one that was rooted in shame i’ve had since first grade) in a flip way. on the go.
on the street walking to class
while you have your headphones in
while at work in the kitchen
at a party in your own home
it is easy to read this and immediately think i’m complaining about compliments (go away!). but what i hope comes across is that a “flour power moment” - an intimate win that was with yourself -- can feel too deep to have people casually ask. you’re allowed to embrace it whole heartedly, and you’re allowed to demand word choice.
my relationship with weight has been such a process, one innately tied to my culture, and one that i’ve never really written about publicly before. but here’s a “fast forward 2 years” note to end on:
since moving to san francisco, i’ve gained about ten pounds. i’m also going home in about a month, to a new jersey ridden with the holidays and greetings by the same aunties as above. i’ve thought about going low carb completely, taking out drinking, and gymming before work then heading hot yoga after.
i settled on something else.
to eating pasta anyways,
N
