"If only you'd lose weight you'd look so pretty." My mother's soft voice chided me on a long distance call and had me grinning. I knew this was coming when I sent her a recent picture of me with the kids at Lal Baugh. The reason why I don't like having my snaps taken is because it’s a cruel reminder what can happen to a woman’s body after having more than one kid and that the world like the camera lenses can be cruel in their astute judgment of your sagging overweight body.

Fat, overweight, auntyji... so many terms float around to describe the woman's girth if it is more than 30 inches. Women with kids tend to get nostalgic about their pre-pregnancy girlie figures when everything was on the upside, perky breasts and tight buttocks but post pregnancy comes the gut (there is no glory to go with these sorts of female guts), the wobbly thighs, the scars, rounded butt and the drooping breasts.

Having gone through the cycle of dieting and exercising more times than I care to remember and letting my self esteem be attached to the weighing machine I realized that the yo-yo ride brought me closer to hating myself.

When I got pregnant with my babies my first thoughts weren’t – Yippie!! I'm gonna be a mother but more like - Jeez, how fat will I get?

And, fat I did get. The babies were born healthy but the mother would have given the Walrus a run for his money.

My youngest is going to be two years old this July and I have still a whole lot of inches to go before I can get back to my size 10 jeans.

A lot of things need to be sacrificed. I would have to end my love affair with food, sugar in particular, change my music from Lou Barlow to Justin Timberlake to increase my pace on the elliptical machine and become a kitchen Nazi and browbeat my maid to stop making spicy oily food.

The weight loss is important but not to look like a twenty year old (for that I’d have to go to Thailand for tummy tucks, breast implants etc) but for health reasons. Being in my early thirties my metabolism rate has gone beyond being slow, it's crawling! Every little nibble of cake, Tiger biscuits or rice finds its way to my ass and sticks!

By the time I’ll be in my forties I could be ridden with heart problems, joint aches, diabetes and god knows what else. We can't stop aging but can definitely try to keep our bodies younger by eating healthy food and trying to beat a sedentary lifestyle.

There was a time when my mom would have got a earful for saying what she said but this time round I told her that I would lose weight for health reasons and for sexy clothes but not for the damn world.

Incidentally, there is a big hoopla going on about the Nivea 'love your black booty' ad that has thrown the net world in a tizzy where Nivea has come up with a lotion for us overweight women.

Gulp! A lotion for fat women is as bad as promoting a fairness cream to a dark skinned person. Neither work but while in the latter case one is urged to accept their inherited characteristics, in former situation one would consider the buyer to be a self denying gullible looser!

Self image and self esteem has nothing to do with weight issues. We all cannot be Paris Hiltons or Shipla Shettys but we can lead healthy lives and that is what should really matter.