Up until this week, I didn’t know that lumbering along at a fairly respectable 4.5km/hr for 1.3km only burned calories the equivalent of a 34.5g bag of Walkers ready salted potato crisps.

I blame my sister for that. She – all sharp mouthed, 5′-4″, verbal terrorist Edo woman  that she is  – decided that last Saturday was the day to put her foot down and insist that something had to be done about my burgeoning waistline. I couldn’t have guessed our little chat would segue into those matters, if I did I would have invented a network failure and hung up. She, the mistress of subterfuge, began by regaling me with our usual fare – stories about the nieces and cousins, about who was seeing whom and all the other mundanities – before mentioning that she had run into an old schoolmate of mine. Said schoolmate was this huge, built-like-a-wardrobe bully who terrorised us all those many years ago in primary school. We had a nickname for him, puff-puff, only used when he was out of earshot; given because he looked like a hurriedly fried, misshapen ball of puff puff.  I hadn’t seen him in years, but by my sister’s account he had morphed from puff-puff into a Fally Ipupa clone.

The inevitable follow up question then, was what I was doing about my own belly. Her premise was that old puff-puff had somehow found the strength and discipline to pull off a minor miracle in loosing his flab, therefore I had no excuse. In my humble opinion, I am perfectly fine, especially when my buddy O’s  near perfectly spherical agbada belle  is considered. But little MsRustGeek is having none of that.

So yours truly is making this first,  tentative foray into the murky world of daily treks walks, carefully scrutinizing food labels and scaling down on the cokes. One week in, it does look like something that could grow on me. It just sucks that all that walking only knocks off a wee bag of crisps.