I get excited when it’s Ramzan. It means I can get to lose all the weight I want, all the fat I put up in the last year. Well, hopefully so. All the food I will not eat, and the starving I will get to do, oh, it is going to make me skinny. Or, at least lose a few pounds. For people like me, it seems a very good refuge.

I have a very bad habit of binge eating. It’s like I have nothing to kill my boredom with but food. And, being able to cook all the pasta I like with all the cheese, it is very hard to resist making my tummy happy. It’s just so much fun. Naturally, I gain a muffin top which I try hard to get rid of, by twenty minutes max on the treadmill at the gym. I can barely breathe if I work out more. But it doesn’t help much. I get fat, but slower had I been exercising more.

So, you see, Ramzan seems like a perfect time to get in shape.

Except that it is not.

I drink a lot of water at iftars and fill my tummy to the brim, which my tummy hurriedly sends off to my kidneys to process so it can be free after maghrib, and go back to its non-bloated form.

And, while I try to stay away from the dining table, I think, I starve myself all day, at least I deserve a light snack. A biscuit, maybe? Or, a chunk of samosa?

But when the first bite of that scrumptious samosa hits my mouth, I lose it. I get lost in the magic of the crispy cover, and the mouth-watering filling, and by the time I am out of my trance, I have eaten six samosas, half a dish of lasagna and drunk a litre of coke.

That is all between maghrib and tarawih. After tarawih, I spend my time chewing on and off till sehri. But hey, I am not having anything in sehri; that should count to some weight loss, no?

Every afternoon I wake up with a plan to hit the skip rope and the treadmill after maghrib, eat as less as humanly possible, and eat effectively, but come iftar time and I cave in.

How does one not turn towards the swooshing sound of coke being poured? And noodles, my childhood best friends, how do I ignore them? Also, have you seen how tempting the samosa wrap looks in its beautiful dusky beauty?

So, I give in to their silent calls. And, since all is fair in love and war, I think I’ll slow down on this war against calories and spread some love. This way, I end up gaining weight instead of losing it. Guilt can wait till I go back to sleep.