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Since young, I wasn't a very active person. I loved to eat snacks, those that contained oh-so-lovely fats, carbohydrates, and salt. My mother always encouraged me to eat healthy snacks snacks like celery sticks and biscuits. I shushed these "encouragements" aside. They were of no importance to me. To me, eating is a way of enjoying life. Simply feeling the hot food in your mouth, with your tongue tasting the food is it sweet, sour, or salty? and crushing the lifeless food with your large molars and indulging in what nutritionists proclaim as "guilty treats" almost everyday IS living. Nothing could have felt better than savoring food. Exercise? Is getting all sweaty and tired fun at all? I didn't think so.

Until one day, I felt a tinge of bitterness behind my throat. I wasn't eating anything at that moment what I felt was a sense of guilt. As I went out with my friends, my teenage hormones ramped into action, and I felt a sense of self-pity when I looked at my friends' tanned, slim, and well-built bodies. Back at home, I looked at myself in the mirror and buried myself in my tears. My body was in a terrible shape.

It was with great determination when I set myself a goal that day to get slim and fit. I realized that I didn't want to look fat and ugly. I wanted to have a kind of glow, a kind of glow that athletes have, one that simply shines, and one that is simply beautiful.

One of the easiest ways to get slim, I realized, is to get jogging. The word "jogging" immediately brought my mind to the expensive GPS watch my mother had gave me for my birthday something that symbolizes my mother's desire for me to get slim. I still recall the moment my mother's face a face filled with joy and hope lit up when I told her that I was going for a short jog.

Even at the moment I was tying my shoelaces, I felt a sense of reluctance. Should I go at all? I could be staying at home, in the comfort of my air-conditioned room, playing the latest on-line games. At the next instant, my mind floated to the scene where I looked at myself in the mirror. It instantly eradicated all traces of any excuses of not to exercise. I had to run.

I decided to run for about fifteen minutes to test out my stamina. I recall the moment I started to move my feet, I felt a sense of liberation, a sense of jubilation of me getting closer to my goal. As I moved to the beat of the music in my iPod, I took in the sights around me fellow joggers who were running opposite me, elderly taking a stroll, mothers

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