For 2012 I took up yoga. Not just any old yoga, but that hard-core Bikram one that is all the rage with food-deprived celebrities and ano-fashion magazine types (at least it was last year). Now that all the big girls (don’t worry, Mika thinks you’re beautiful) and old people have cottoned on, it’s a little less this season and a little more fat-camp-esque.
Essentially, for all of you who are still in the dark on this one, you spend an hour and a half – ninety bloody minutes; five thousand four hundred sodding seconds – in an uncomfortably hot room, in ridiculously uncomfortable positions, and looking and feeling…well, fucking uncomfortable. You’re not allowed to leave the room unless you’re about to die or if you vomit on the instructor (sorry, I mean the ‘Yogi’). This has actually happened in the past, to someone else thankfully – the vomit, not death. Not that death is off the cards – some days it feels like it’s the only way out.
They tell you that it’s going to be relaxing and that you will feel complete. It’s not. I don’t know about the stringy old baggage in the front row, but I do know that I speak for the majority of the girls in the back with the ‘bubbly personalities’, when I say that I absolutely did not sign up to find my Zen – unless, of course, it comes in a tight, toned body that I can call my own. Thirty classes are all it will take to become the elastic goddess you yearn to be, they tell you. Funny!
By the end of last week’s class (my fortieth), I felt so pummelled by life that I could hardly stand. I had spent an entire session trying to find my centre while an overweight German wheezed and groaned next to me. I was going to say that he perved on me as well but the harsh reality glaring back at me in the mirror would say otherwise. In fact, why do they even have mirrors in a pit of hell like that? No innocent mind should ever be inflicted with the image that was being reflected back at me.
For 2013…I’m giving it up and I want my money back.
