Treat me right

Has your body been shaped by Fiesta Ham this Holiday season? Has San Miguel beer offered you a free liver transplant for helping them meet their profit margins for Christmas? Have your fat deposits started earning interest?

If you have started getting anonymous phones calls for home liposuction service, then I strongly suggest you curl yourself up into a ball, and have yourself rolled on over to the doorstep of Institut Santre, a no-nonsense slimming salon for men. The salon is so no-nonsense that they dropped the silent E from Institut. 

I was honored when the Institut offered to help me withdraw my fat deposits since they are known to shape men with authority (as their tagline boldly proclaims) such as PLDT executive Butch Jimenez, STAR columnist Cito Beltran and Senator Chiz Escudero. In all modesty, I find myself in the same league as their endorsers. Although I do not know if being wanted by authorities is considered the same thing.

For those who consider exercise an evil conspiracy by fitness centers, slimming the Santre way thankfully requires no workouts, no crash diets, no pill-popping and no being chased around a room by an amorous male gorilla after your body has been rubbed with mashed banana. This was the lazy man’s Shangri-La for getting fit. And my wife thought that I would be an ideal couch potato for their treatments, especially after she had me uprooted from our couch. 

All shook up. My visit to Santre began with a full body analysis of my general health condition (or the lack thereof). Once the slimming consultant did some gentle poking around to find out if I had metal objects tucked away in any orifice, an electrode sensor was fastened to my right foot to measure my water distribution, muscle tone and body fat. The sensor measured these variables by zapping a current into my body through my foot and waiting to see how long it would take the current to make lakwatsa (travel) from one part of my body to the other. 

While I was hooked up to the machine, I grew quite paranoid thinking that the results would tell me that I was just a puddle of water, atrophied muscle and lard. Man, if those were indeed the results, then it would have rendered the yoga-sculpted, meat-and-seafood-free lifestyle I had grown accustomed to over the past five years as ineffectual as the government’s peace efforts with the MILF. 

After several minutes, the machine spat out the results. As the consultant pored over my readings, I crossed my fingers and held on firmly to my crotch (have you ever tried doing those two things at the same time?). “I don’t believe it!” the consultant said, raising her eyebrows. “You’ve got really nice numbers. Your muscle mass is really good, ha!”

“Huwow!” I loosened the grip on my crotch. “Wow, that’s the first time I have heard a woman say that about my mass without having to be paid for it.”

The consultant rolled her eyes and exhaled loudly. “The usual muscle tone for men is at 100. But you are at 123. You are over and beyond the muscle tone for a normal guy.”   

Aha! So twisting myself into various permutations of a human pretzel and wolfing down every possible recipe for tokwa was not a futile effort after all.        

“The usual fat mass for men is 25 percent.” the consultant shook her head. “But you only have 16 percentage fat mass in your body. Your fat is exactly where you need it.”

I grinned sheepishly. “My wife thinks so, too.”  

The consultant bit her lower lip and looked at her watch. “However, your fluid levels are slightly below normal.”

“That’s understandable, ma’am.” I shrugged my shoulders. “You saw naman my numbers for muscle mass and fat distribution. I’m pretty hot, so I burn up a lot of liquid.”

The consultant broke her ballpoint pen in half while writing her notes. “Mr. Ledesma, if only I had the proper authorization, I would shoot enough electricity through your body to fry your pink parts to a crisp if you try any more lines like that.” She grinned sheepishly. 

“And Mr. Ledesma,” she tapped her right shoe furiously on the floor. “Why did you take off all your clothes for this procedure when I only asked you to take off your right sock?”

“I was feeling the moment.”

Three seconds later, I realized that charred flesh smells very much like chicharon.

You don’t have to take your clothes off to have a good time. There was a more legitimate reason that I had to remove all of my clothes the second time around. Since my numbers seemed as credible as the administration’s economic forecast, they asked me if they could measure my vital statistics. 

According to the consultant, they needed my statistics for evaluation purposes — to see if my nigh-perfect body could still improve over the next several treatments. But I knew why they really needed my digits. I knew that they were secretly auditioning me for Mr. Institut Santre. And that was why they were quite thorough with their measurements. I was worried that if they measured any more of my body parts, they would need to secure my wife’s approval. “And don’t believe everything that you measure,” I said, waving my finger in the consultant’s face, “especially since it is very cold in here.”

But even the air conditioning could not hide the naked truth. “Mr. Ledesma” the consultant shook her head and crossed herself. “You have asymmetrical forearms. Your right arm is two inches larger in diameter than your left arm.” Damn. I thought I had gotten rid of any evidence that linked me to 32 years of heathen bachelorhood. I shook my head in fake astonishment.

“That’s not all, Mr. Ledesma,” the consultant quipped. “Your right leg is also larger in diameter than your left leg.” Um, I could probably explain this disparity away because of boredom and adolescent experimentation. “And, to top it all off,” the consultant said, lifting her glasses and resting them on her brow, “You have larger love handles on your left side than on your right side.” Oh, dear Lord, is nothing sacred anymore!? Even my bilbil is lopsided! That was too much for me to take. I don’t know how I will ever explain this in my next confession.   

The consultant smirked. “Don’t worry about it too much, Mr. Ledesma. Most everybody has uneven body parts. The dominance of one body part can depend on type of work or on bone structure or a misalignment of the spine.”

I breathed a sigh of relief. “Nevertheless,” the consultant added, “we will still inform your parish priest of your measurements.”  

Lymph is a highway? As a result of my grossly asymmetrical bilbil, the consultant advised me to undergo their Omnivital Lymphatic treatment. Apparently, the lymphatic system is like the EDSA of our bodies — it is not only a highway where fat-soluble vitamins are carried into our blood, but the lymphatic system also protects us from the terrorist attacks of foreign cells, microbes, bacteria and cheap Chinese knock-offs. For those of us who have become the barkada of excess fat and stress, our lymphatic systems resemble EDSA during Holiday traffic. This means that we feel easily tired, more prone to sickness and more sluggish than the Ombudsman is at resolving cases.  

So the Omnivital Lymphatic Treatment would be like the MMDA working to unclog my lymphatic system (minus the Bayani Fernando posters). This treatment can improve the cardiovascular circulation, accelerate metabolism and increase the breakdown of fatty tissues, which allows you to gorge (almost guiltlessly) on that leftover holiday lechon paksiw until your next lymphatic treatment.

Shock and awe. The first part of the treatment involved zapping the tasteful areas of my body with mild electric current to stimulate my lymph nodes to make sure they were in proper working order. And being the health buff that I am, I approved of anything that involved stimulation. Moreover, I am told that this type of electric stimulation is more effective at unclogging pores than sticking a wet finger in an electrical socket.    

The currents were set up to stimulate five areas of my anatomy where my lymph nodes had made kumpol kumpol: my feet, my legs, my arms, my neck, and my favorite area when nobody is looking, my groin. “Just be careful around that area,” I stressed. “If you remove any more barado (blockages) in that area than you reasonably should, my wife might have enough kids to field a basketball team with a deep bench.”

While my tasteful areas were getting intimate with electricity, a female massage therapist/amateur wrestler simultaneously performed a lymphatic acupressure massage targeting my stomach area. This massage involved repetitive stroking that even my wife would approve of: strokes that would improve digestion, strokes that would encourage regular bowel movements, strokes that would milk out my aesthetically displeasing fat deposits, and strokes that would help me contribute to the greenhouse gas effect.   

The electric company. And because we wanted to make Meralco even happier this holiday season, the final stage of the lymphatic treatment would require — you guessed it — electric stimulation! But this time around, the electricity would stimulate my muscles to contract and improve muscle tone. Hmm, I have always known stimulus to help me expand rather than contract, so this would be a novel experience for me.   

My chest and stomach area were wrapped in pads through which electricity would be spat into my system to simulate the actions of my muscles while exercising. This would be the equivalent of performing several hundred bench presses and sit-ups without the effort, without the pawis and without the ravaging eyes of a matrona spying on you to see if anything is making peek-a-boo from your runner’s shorts while you are working out in the gym (oh, the violation).   

The consultant also informed me that the electrical stimulation was “attenuated” so that my body could accept the electricity. Now, I am unsure as to what “attenuated” means, but if it means that you feel as if a thousand dwarf-sized Manny Pacquiaos were bashing you with uppercuts in five-second intervals over a 30-minute period, then I was being attenuated very well. 

So, after being analyzed, measured, mildly stimulated, kneaded into pizza dough and zapped again, was I coming back for more? Hell, yeah!! This lymphatic treatment has stimulated me in areas I never knew I had. Even in areas I didn’t want to have. And after being shot up with a gazillion or so volts over several treatments, I was certain that I had lost some weight or that I had turned into a superhero with electric powers.

But, more importantly, after a thousand or more rounds with that muscle-toning machine, I might eventually end up having a physique that resembles Brad Pitt’s. Or maybe Oscar de la Hoya’s. After the Pacquiao fight.

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For comments, suggestions or a pound of fat, please text PM POGI <text message> to 2948 for Globe, Smart and Sun subscribers. Or email me at to:ledesma.rj@gmail.com”  or visit www.rjledesma.net.

Insitut Santre is located at the second floor, 22 Jupiter corner Galaxy streets, Bel-Air Village, Makati City. Tel. 403-5599 or 0917-8195599.