Double Whammies Coming Up

In my chronic struggle with obesity, I have been yoyo-ing from being morbidly obese to being hideously fat. Either way, I’ve always been fat. This has been the case for the last 23 years, since I had my last normal BMI when I was in Grade 1. As far as I can remember, I was already heavier than a sack of rice since I was 8 years old. During that time, when kids my age were still being thrown around by their dads like little monkeys moving from one tree branch to another, I was already stuck on the ground, moping like a depressed Mommy King-Kong who can’t heave herself up to the lowest branch of a tree strong enough to carry a ton.

So when the well-meaning, health-conscious IM residents announced that they are holding a second season of the IM Biggest Loser contest, I was one of the first to sign up. Again. Last March, these residents, who, for some strange reasons, suddenly became staunch advocates of healthy lifestyles, launched the first season of IMBL with much fanfare, and I also enthusiastically joined in. After 3 weeks of gorging on Sibutramine, Metformin, and various diuretics, I had a bout of annoying premature ventricular contractions that paralyzed me for a day. So despite the loss of more than 5 kgs, I spent the next weeks regaining what I had lost, feasting on chicharon, lechon, and deep-fried galunggong over heaps of steaming rice during my leave. By the start of May, I was back to where I started – all four weeks of running along Roxas all the way to Mall of Asia, horrendous starvation, and ridiculously expensive weight-loss pharmacologic armamentarium – flushed down my Xenical-induced-lipid-laden-feces-stained toilet bowl.

Ugh! Yuck! I’m exaggerating of course. But you get the idea, don’t you? I’m fat! I’ve been fat for as long as I can remember. And I absolutely hate it!

I want to wear that bikini. I want to walk around PGH wearing nothing under my white coat except an ultra-short, spaghetti-strapped dress, uhm, negligee!

So I signed up. After my embarrassing stint with IMBL season 1, I’m trying my luck again in IMBL season 2. The pot money is almost three times that of IMBL 1, and the contestants are a gazillion times more competitive. There’s a huge chance that I wasted another one thousand bucks over a senseless competition I have no chance of winning. But who cares? I want that bikini!

One shouldn’t count thy chicks before thy eggs are hatched. But I have to lose all this fat to save my eggs, right?

And with a 26K pot, who knows what I can get if I win? Perhaps, I might actually come across a hot man for sale - and finally afford it.

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In five days, I’ll be having the time of my life.

(Enter David Cook singing “I’ll taste every moment and live it out loud, I know this is the time, this is the time of my life…”

And Carrie Underwood singing “A moment like this, some people wait a lifetime for a moment like this…”)

I can already imagine myself, all my overweight, clumsy self – up on a giant billboard over EDSA, all smiling and Sarah-Geronimo-like gorgeous. By Saturday, I’ll be a superstar, a stunning supermodel, I’ll be the queen of the world!

In five days, I’ll be flying down south. And when I step off the plane, there they will be, from opposite spectra of my life, both frozen in a single moment – the two men I adore, both dashing and debonair, impossibly straight and still single –and they are both so into me.

As my two best buddies, that is.

Huhuhu, what can an ordinary-looking nobody like me expect, of course. Sigh. Twice the dream, double the tragedy, and multiply the pain many times over. Ugh.

Move over, Kris Aquino, the drama is mine this time. Not!