White noise

September 29th, 2024

I want muscles, lots of them. The kind of quads that makes men wary before approaching you on the street or even better, simply put them off altogether.

The problem is that right now, I look like the love child of a potato, a teddy bear and a sausage. I'm gagged, blindfolded and at the back of someone's trunk on the other side of wherever muscles are.

This maniac obsession with muscles started last week. If you are anything like me, the next thing you do after picking an interest in something is five hundred internet searches (on average). The more I type it in a search box, the more solid the plan becomes or the more obsessed I get. Anyhow, potato potatho.

The blessing and curse in this is that when you type something enough times into a search box, it becomes your algorithm. My Instagram feed currently looks like my hobbies include eating spinach, lifting weights and counting calories. Reorganising the content you consume to align with your future goals sounds like a fun healthy hack but it really isn't.

Whoever said you can learn anything on the Internet has probably never tried fitnesstok. After a while of searching stuff like ‘calorie counting’ ‘calorie-deficit Nigerian meals’ ‘Where to buy a skipping rope in Akure’, fitnesstok took over my algorithm or rather, weight-lossTok (that doesn't sound right) but to be honest there's a very thin line between one and the other.

I had a plan; since the gym is out of the question for now, walk for an hour everyday, compress all the bread you eat till all the calories have died and exited the squeezed bread, drink water like you're about to perform an ultrasound five times every day and put leaf inside your rice before you eat it.

Sounds easy? Right. At first the algorithm makeover was a slight infusion, fascinating videos here and there; a white man making ‘cheap’ calorie-deficit meals with 4k penne pasta and 87k cheese, a stunning woman making leg-day jokes that I will soon relate to and gym couples doing disgusting Internet PDA (proud hater). I started taking down tips – helpful tips like how to kidnap a gym bro from his natural habitat.

But fun ended when the algorithm switched from slight infusion to a full immersion. I started seeing things like calisthenics and body recomposition beside skipping, running marathons and strength training. The first video will tell you that running is the best way to get fit. The second will say that running is a terrible idea as it will make you hungrier. The next one will recommend intermittent fasting and the one after will outrightly recommend starvation. The next time you open tiktok, the first video will tell you to light incense and burn the fat in your body away.

At some point I had absolutely no idea what I was planning in my notes app again. Everybody's opinion is different. Mind you they are all speaking in sciency-take-me-serious language.

Call me crazy but everybody talking somehow manages to make a modicum of sense (minus the burn incense and eat your abula babe). Different opinions aren't even the problem, the problem is that the next person takes a shit on the last person's opinion before they give you their own opinion.

After a full week of subjecting myself to that, my motivation has gone down the drain and I'm not looking for long-term fitness goals again. I want the ten-days abs workout I was promised. I want to be like all these muscly people and I want it now. The initial plan has become redundant and there are holes in everything else I try to make.

‘Home work-outs are useless’

‘You don't need equipment to work out’

‘Have you tried asking Buddha to reduce your stomach?’

Who is actually telling the truth? And please don't tell me three truths can co-exist. After watching five people trying to convince me to try five different things to get fit this evening, I just gave up and went to eat the cake that has been looking at me since friday. My stomach is just big, I did not offend anybody.

And then I got angry because I put so much green pepper in the fridge that the cake smells like green pepper. I'm eating junk that doesn't even taste like junk.

You know how humans are either endomorph, mesomorph, ectomorph or whatever my PHE teacher said. As our bodies are different, we are all wired differently. Some of us have more bull than human in their DNA and some of us run out of steam faster than these new generation tiny red steam irons that don't hold a candle to the twelve year old Phillips in my house. But as a general rule, no matter how much grit you have, your environment matters — a lot. I'm not saying it's a defining factor but it matters a lot. If you let it, it will chew through your grit.

No matter how self-aware you are, the things, people and places you surround yourself with will seep into your subconscious. It is much easier to poison your own mind than you think. See how one week on fitnesstok has sent me back into the arms of cake? Too much ‘advice’ really just winds up becoming white noise.

Sometimes the reason you keep failing is because you are talking to all the wrong people, listening to all the wrong things and trying to reach for the stars while standing in a pit of quicksand.

In other words, delete Tiktok today and talk to someone that actually knows what they are doing.

‘Meal plan and fitness course link in bio’ in every caption makes a lot things make a lot of sense. The only sensible piece of advice I've come out with this week as regards this fitness thing is to hire a personal trainer.

*laughs in poverty.

In Basketmouth's words: I can't kill myself. Otumokpor no dey work for everybody. Anyway, if you see me outside, I'm not pregnant. That's just how my stomach looks.

Goodluck to all of you fitness folks.

*bites into my cake without guilt.

Love/hate (eyes green with envy),

Gbemi.