Confessions of a Fadster

September 14, 2007

Life is best enjoyed when it is lived as a series of fads. I am largely free of fashion fads involving clothes, interior decoration, home improvement, and cultural fads involving movies, theater, dance and art.

You need to be a visual person to be able to appreciate and adopt fashion and cultural fads. I have twenty-twenty vision once I wear my glasses, yet I do not consider myself a visual person. If I see two sets of clothes, or two sets of jewelry and am asked which one looks better, I aver that they both look the same. One set looks just as good to me as the other.

“Ninad is a politically correct creature”, my friends say. “He does not want to hurt others, so he hides his true feelings.” That may well be true some of the time, but it’s patently false when it comes to judging objects based on their looks. “Ninad does not like to be judgmental”, goes a worshipful and alternative refrain. That’s not true either. I judge objects for their utility and people for their behavior. I like to judge and to be judged publicly. The freedom to judge others and to publicly articulate that judgment is an important component of freedom.

My self-imposed moratorium on fads revels in the realm of culture and fashion. But the aversion to fads stops dead in its tracks when it comes to health, fitness and food. Until a few years ago, I looked askance at people who followed any kind of a fad, even if it was a food or fitness fad. “The fadsters aren’t smart enough to educate themselves better and are too fickle to follow a long-term regimen”, I would tell myself.

I, on the other hand was a smart and well-informed person. I would eat only those foods and do only those things whose popularity and utility were well-established and permanent. Evanescence was best restricted to the four seasons.

But slowly and imperceptibly, I got infected by the bug of fadishness over the years. I would start a new exercise routine, or start eating a healthy dish with great gusto, convinced that this was the wave of the future, and awash with the certainty that I would stick to it forever. But I would give up the habit a few weeks or months later, either because I would get bored of it, or because I would come across information that questioned its value. Well-informed as I considered myself to be, I had to drop the habit.

Coming to terms with my own fadishness was not quite the queen of coming-to-terms as accepting my homosexuality was, but it did force me to stop looking down upon fadsters. Self-hatred is no virtue, and fadishness is no vice.

Some fads are simply nine-day wonders that last for just three or four days. Others thrive for weeks or sputter for months. My newest fad is a fitness routine. I try to “do” four miles everyday. By “do” I mean I either walk the distance or combine jogging with walking. Each of us is advised to burn at least 2000 calories per week by doing exercise, apart from other regular physical activity. Walking or running a mile burns approximately 100 calories, so we are expected to walk about 20 miles per week to get health benefits.

If I manage to walk four miles everyday, I can notch 28 miles in a week, which is well above the bare minimum 20 miles. I have done it once so far, and I hope I am able to stick to this fad until it becomes second nature. At a height of 5’7”, I weigh just 118 lb (54 kg). If I walk without carrying any weight, I feel as if I’m carrying a light feather duster with me. So I often carry a 5-lb weight on my backpack when I walk. That goes towards maintaining the strength of my back muscles and keeps me from stooping like the hunchback of Notre Dame.

It is recommended that we do at least some aerobic exercise everyday, where we raise our heart rate and maintain it at a high level for at least twenty minutes or so. That’s my main reason for jogging. Jogging is also quicker than walking, so the exercise time passes quickly and is not as boring!

Here's a list of my daily exercise activities from the least preferred to the most:

1. Walk for at least four miles.
2. Walk for at least four miles with a 5-lb weight on my back.
3. Jog for two or more miles and walk the rest of the distance with weights.
4. Jog and walk in the morning and lift weights in the evening to build and maintain muscle strength.

I have been following this regimen for the past couple of weeks. It won’t be easy to stick to it once winter sets in, but I’ll try to be faithful to it. Focused devotion to a fad is the best shot at ridding the fad label from the behavior. Who wants fads, anyway?