By Satiman Jamin

Legend has it that when faced with the challenge of untangling a complex tangle of knots by Gordias, Alexander the Great drew his sword and cut the knot. The legend gave rise to the term “cutting the Gordian Knot”, meaning to solve difficult problems by taking swift and decisive action.

Another term that describes difficult and paradoxical problems is Catch-22, usually used in situations where the solution to a problem is part of the problem. One of the often quoted examples of a Catch-22 situation is where fresh graduates were required to have previous experience for a job they were applying for. They have to get the job to have the experience but getting the job is impossible without the experience.

A couple of slipped discs on my lower backbone a few years ago left me with a bad back and the pain limited my activities, so I started to gain weight. The Covid 19 lockdowns did not help matters and fast forward to 2023, I found myself just a few grams below the 80 kilogramme mark.

Last month, just as I turned 53, the back pain returned with a vengeance. Standing up for more than a few minutes rapidly progresses from being a chore to a painful endeavour, so much so that I pray that the imam will not recite any long verses during Friday prayer. The pain persisted when I sat or lay down. I stopped writing because the constant pain made it impossible to gather my thoughts even to read, and that is after I took the doctor-prescribed painkillers.

It was then that I decided to fight the vicious cycle of bad back-weight gain-bad back. Walking was the first choice exercise as I thought I could combine it with my hobby of taking photos of birds and the beach near my house. Big mistake. My weight was around 54 kilogrammes for most of my adult life. The extra 26 kilogrammes that I had gained put a big strain on my back and the pain became worse. The backpack containing my camera did not help matters.

Just as the fasting month arrived, I switched to simple exercises like lifting my knee up as high as I could and throwing punches.

I also cut down my sugar intake. A few drops of Stevia (Stevia rebaudiana) extract replaced the sugar in my coffee. However, my stevia use lasted about a week as I could not get over the metallic taste.

Sugar is addictive and the stevia extract tastes nothing like sugar. Whenever I crave the sweetness of sugar, I chomped on a few slices of lemons. Very sweet lemons.

Well, that is not entirely true as there is no such thing as sweet lemons. Lemons are very sour but the miracle of another fruit enabled the sourest of lemons to taste sweet.

Even though the miracle fruit plant (Synsepalum dulcificum) in my garden is just about waist high, it has produced quite a lot of fruits this year. Maybe the hot sun and rainless weeks we have been having suited the plant, which is probable because it came from Africa. The thin edible rind of the fruit turns bright red as it ripens.

The first miracle fruit you eat will taste a bit sour but after the chemical miraculin has coated your tongue, it will taste sweet. And for the next 10 to 15 minutes, anything sour, including lemons, will taste sweet.

Please note that the miraculin in the miracle fruit does not change the acidic nature of lemons, so it is best to limit the number of sweet-tasting lemon slices one munch down.

When I was a kid I remember eating the kelembak or lemba fruit (Curculigo latifolia) to get the same effect. However, the kelembak fruit is more effective as it will make even plain water taste sweet. It also helps that the fruit itself tastes very sweet. The chemical that causes the taste-modifying effect of kelembak is called curculin.

It has been years since I last eaten the kelembak fruit. A quick search on the internet showed that the plant is available on a few online shops. Insyaallah I will order a few kelembak plants to accompany the miracle fruit plant in my garden.

As far as I know there are no sugar substitute products based on either miraculin or curculin. Apart from the health benefits of helping to reduce our sugar intake, a nice-tasting sugar substitute from miraculin or curculin can also bring economic dividends as the global sugar substitutes market is worth more than USD18 billion as in 2022.

As the fasting month nears its end, Alhamdulillah my back pain has subsided enough for me to write again as my waistline has become a wee bit smaller and my weight went down a few kilograms. There is still a long way to go before I reach my ideal weight but with the back pain almost gone I can now gingerly move towards more vigorous exercises.

I also still have much to catch up on in the writing front. I have the idea of a few good stories, way better than this one, in the train of thought that I lost when my back acted up.

Let see if I can catch that train for my next article.