Yes, it’s true! Abdominals decrease your appetite! It is not wishful thinking but wisdom grounded in sound physiological truths. When you eat, your stomach expands and presses against your-abdominal muscles giving you that ‘full’ feeling. As long as your abdominal muscles are slack, your tummy has ample scope to expand. The more you eat, the more it will bloat up.
But if your abdominal muscles are exercised, they are toned and taut. You eat a little and your expanding stomach is kept at bay by these mighty muscles. And immediately, you feel ‘full’.
In fact, it sets of a beautiful, health-giving chain reaction. Since you feel satisfied with less food, your fat-weight gets reduced. Also, it prevents you from eating a large meal at one sitting.
You may find yourself hungry again pretty soon. But that’s fine. Having several smaller meals (provided they are fat - and sugar-free) are healthier than having one large meal. Studies have shown that a person who eats a huge quantity at one sitting develops higher levels of cholesterol and triglycerides in his blood which later lead to heart diseases. But lesser quantities of food spread over the day, aid digestion, burn off quicker, maintain weight loss and keep cholesterol and triglycerides at normal levels.
So, you see, even here, aerobics and abdominals team up to tone down your appetite. With your AA-team working for you, you just won’t be able to stop yourself from getting slim and acquiring a flat tummy!
Dieting curbs your freedom
And that is precisely why we are writing this chapter. We want to share with you what we have discovered. It was a long, winding exploration that we set off on. We immersed ourselves in all the literature on health that we could lay our hands on. We read, we analyzed, we dissected and we continued to explore.
On the heels of all the information we gathered, came a slow realization like rays of light penetrating the shroud of darkness that dieting leaves us in. The most startling revelation was that how we could have been so blind all along! Of course, dieting cannot work because it is a temporary situation that we create! It’s common sense! It’s like treating your body like a sack of potatoes. Empty all the potatoes and you get a limp, thin gunny sack. Put back the potatoes and it burgeons back to its original size. It is not just disrespectful to your body, but impractical too.
To be slim and healthy and fit should be your birthright - you shouldn’t have to pay a price for, it. The price would be ridiculous. Imagine spending your entire life convincing yourself it is not healthy to eat this and that and that, counting calories like a miser counting his money, always living a pressurised existence - like a man lost in the desert seeing a shimmering mirage and never being able to reach out and touch It.
In all these petty abstractions, what happens to the free splint of a human being? Somehow the entire concept of dieting seemed to be wrong - it goes against the very spirit, the basic principles of health and happiness. Dieting puts you in a strait jacket. And here you are, a citizen of a great democracy, marching to the ballot box to vote without fear, to exercise your choice where to lead your country. While all along you are a slave to your calories, cowering in front of a chocolate cake! It goes against the grain.