Buckled in and tearing along the runway at Heathrow, I grinned contentedly to myself as I pondered the benefits of my imminent new life in Abu Dhabi. With fears of a mid-taxi meltdown behind me, I flicked through the in-flight magazine and sipped on a diet Coke. My big adventure was off to an excellent start, I decided. At least it was until, somewhere over Eastern Europe, the portly, balding gentleman sitting next to me decided to strike up a conversation.
‘Looking forward to the Abu Dhabi stone?’ he said, gesturing with a forkful of brown meat at the modest but very-definitely there paunch spilling over my seatbelt. ‘Excuse me?’ I returned, gazing at my own tray of nondescript, gravy-soaked mulch.
‘The Abu Dhabi stone.’ He tried again with a waggle of his fork, my baffled expression unflinching.
‘You know, the weight everyone picks up when they move to the Middle East. A brunch here, a shawarma there – it soon adds up. It’s unavoidable, buddy.’
‘Thanks for the heads-up,’ came my stupidly confident reply. ‘But I’m actually taking this opportunity to lose some weight. I’ll be down to 12 stone by Christmas.’
He paused for a moment, carefully taking in the words before turning away in hysterics and shoving the gristly lump into his guffawing face.
Slipping my headphones back on, I did my best to look cool. But inside, I was panicking. This hadn’t factored into my plan at all. Just 10 minutes previously I’d been happily daydreaming of lazy days by the pool, bikini-clad attendants rubbing tanning oil into my firm, bronzed abs and feeding me dates as I flicked through the latest copy of Men’s Health. Maybe one of the girls would swoon. After all, how difficult can it be to stay trim in a city where alcohol is considerably more difficult to come by than in my native London? Where sports classes and gyms are everywhere? And where the deep-fried doner remains mercifully uninvented? Very, as it turns out.
It hadn’t helped that I’d arrived in the city right at the start of Ramadan, with PR companies lining up to feed me iftar buffets that could easily send my shirt buttons pinging across the room until I resembled some sort of lake-dwelling mammal draped in a gingham tarpaulin. Worse still, in the constant mid-40s heat of the August sun, I soon noticed how a usually trivial, incidental exercise like a 15-minute walk to the supermarket became reclassified as an Olympic-grade undertaking of truly foolish proportions. I tried this once during my first week in the capital, and on my way was treated to constant beeping from bemused motorists, who’d probably assumed I’d gotten on the wrong flight to Amsterdam and was ambling around in search of the Anne Frank museum. Worse still, when I finally limped into air-conditioned salvation, I resembled a man who’d been dunked in a pond and pelted with tomatoes, such was the extent of my perspiration and sunburn. Needless to say, I caught a taxi back. Chomping on a cooling, calorific Mars ice cream as I went.
Now, a month in, I’ve gradually come to terms with the Abu Dhabi stone. Though hitting the gym five times a week, I’ve accepted that the best I can hope for is cancelling out the penalties of renouncing pedestrianism and eating like a heart-broken teenage girl. Depressingly enough, the new target is to remain only slightly fat.
So, 12 stone by Christmas? Not likely. But at least I’ll not have to worry about turkey sandwiches and roast potatoes as I pound away pointlessly on the treadmill.
