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There is no such thing as going ‘on’ or ‘off’ your diet. Eating correctly has to be a lifelong commitment, and the diet should be a reflection of this.
For diets to work they have to be personalised.
all food is good. All foods contain nutrients which have their own role to play in our body. We need all kinds of nutrients, like carbs, proteins, fats, vitamins and minerals, and depriving us of even one of them will create an imbalance in our system.
there is no bravery attached to weight loss. You can achieve it just by falling sick.
Dieting or eating correctly, is a process, a learning tool, to go within. And when we see or experience that glimpse of reality within ourselves, it will (has to) reflect in our physical body.
your diet has to be a representation of what you will be eating your entire life. It has to remain true to your genes, your likes and dislikes, your work life, your level of activity, and only then does it have a good chance of working.
A diet has to achieve much more than weight loss. Weight loss, or rather fat loss, is just one of the many wonderful side effects of changing your lifestyle.
Dieting that has only weight loss as its primary goal is a failure even before you go on it. It’s like some boot camp you go to, kill yourself at, and come back thinner.
detox, like all other extreme diets, is a sham. At the end of these diets (they inevitably end) people’s bodies and minds age and their metabolic rate is lower than ever before.
Everything that is herbal is not necessarily safe. Nicotine and marijuana are herbal too. Regular users can vouch for their ‘health benefits’!
it’s about knowing that the product you are using is safe for you. And you can know that only by going to the right professional and of course making sure that all your questions (however small or stupid) are answered in layman’s language, with compassion and patience. Tip: carry a list of your questions and a pen or pencil with you. Tick off all questions as they get answered. Do not accept ‘because I am telling you’ as an explanation.
Where is the bravery in losing weight? People with diarrhoea lose weight. So do people with jaundice, malaria, TB, not to mention cancer and AIDS. In fact the bigger the disease the faster the weight loss.
we think that weight loss will make us happy, but we feel only frustrated and older (not wiser) at the end of yet another extreme diet, it comes with a heightened sense of victimisation and betrayal.
Being on a diet might help you lose weight, but without exercise we lose our muscles and bone density. And loss of bone density and muscle is ageing. The human body is designed for continuous activity.
The body works on one basic principle: use it or lose it. Humans were born with a tail remember? We lost our tail because we never used it.
just because I use my body regularly doesn’t mean I should abuse it. So, exercise is a part of adopting a better lifestyle but it is NOT an alternative to eating right. In fact the more people get committed to working out, the more they usually care about how to get the right nutrients to their body.
When you start eating healthy and exercising regularly, you will initially see a drop in your body fat but not as much in your weight.
Fat occupies a lot of volume on the body and weighs very little. Muscle, is denser, so it occupies much less space but will weigh a lot. (Compare fat to 1 kilo cotton and muscle to 1 kilo iron. Can you see what I am saying?
higher the amount of lean body weight you carry, the greater your fat burning capacity.
never, ever ‘just try’ diets that your over-enthu friends, clients, etc swear by. It may have worked for them (I doubt it though), but it’s not necessary that it will work for you.
Low fat snacks like baked chaklis, fat free ice creams, fibre loaded biscuits, etc are nothing but junk food coated with misinformation and some sharp marketing brain trying to sell them to a gullible audience which will bite onto anything that’s fat free.
if you have just 1 or 2 chaklis or 1 or 2 cream biscuits once or twice a week, this won’t get in the way of your losing weight. But eating this fat free or sugar free junk daily surely hampers your process of weight loss.
If you must eat chakli or chips make them at home and fry them. You will use good oil and eat your goodies hot, so they will taste better and also be nutritious. Since this is a long process you will land up doing this may be once a fortnight or once a month.
the only way to lose body fat is to eat right and at the right time, and to exercise regularly?
it was discovered that fructose (the sugar we get from fruits) gets converted to triglycerides (especially when eaten on a full stomach), a type of fat which circulates in our blood stream. High levels of triglycerides are responsible for heart disease, insulin insensitivity and of course lead to bigger fat cells.
fructose (the sugar we get from fruits) gets converted to triglycerides
So eat your fruit, but don’t think that it’s safer than eating a dessert. Its nutrients only work for us if we eat it at as a meal by itself: as a morning meal or after exercise, and not as a dessert after dinner.
about fruits or soy or some other miracle food, one thing is for sure: if there are reports glorifying it today, in a couple of years there will be reports of it harming you.
there is really nothing like ‘safe food’ or ‘fattening food’. Everything that you eat judiciously, at the right time and in the right quantity, is good for you.
The reality is that for permanent changes in your body and to stay lean all your life (or even bikini-ready), you have to make sure that you never ‘go’ on a diet. Get the diet to grow on you instead.
modify your lifestyle, ie eat right, exercise and think right about yourself.
modifying your lifestyle is like being in a loving and committed relationship (it might get boring sometimes, but it’s the key to your mental and physical wellbeing).
adopting a healthy lifestyle is not as difficult as staying loyal in a marriage or loving your partner for a lifetime. It’s much more difficult because it means unconditional love and acceptance of your own self and of your body.
The heart that we owe our life to cannot possibly attack us. But we definitely attack it with our habits, eating, lack of activity and exercise, etc. And then like the case of ulta chor kotwal ko daante, we call it heart attack.)
Loading the stomach when it has no capacity to digest is criminal. It’s a human rights violation.
Our lifestyles, where we eat nothing until evening and then start loading our stomachs for dinner, are just wrong.
If you eat at a time when there are hardly any digestive juices being secreted, when the stomach has lost its power of digestion, when there is no prana (life force) in the stomach and when the mind is distracted, how can you expect food to get digested properly?
if your overeating stops you won’t need any digestion aid.
overeating is the cause of all diseases. Overeating can be defined as eating more than the body’s ability to digest at that point of time.
your digestive fire should be active and efficient. You can keep the fire active through a disciplined lifestyle, regular exercise and optimistic attitude.
basic problem today is that our digestive capacity (or fire) is diminishing and our consumption is increasing.
The only way to avoid these diet accidents is by learning to observe our feelings and accepting them.
Food, or the act of eating, is the most primitive form of comfort, but we need to understand that food is about providing nourishment to the body and not about overcoming boredom or stale relationships.
The biggest lesson that we have to learn is to stop eating before reaching the overeating threshold.
The overeating threshold is different for different people. And even in the same person it changes with age, stress, exercise, time of the day, season, etc.
The stomach is actually the size of 2 palms. The food it can take at a time is the amount that fits in your 2 palms.
By constantly eating beyond our capacity, however, we stretch the stomach and take in more food than it can digest.
advocate small, frequent meals. Give the stomach a dose of what it needs. When it’s finished digesting, give it some more.
Savour every bit of what you eat, slowly and mindfully, and you will naturally find your threshold. All you need to train yourself to do, is to be attentive to your stomach.
eating is a process of internalisation. If eating employs one of our sensory organs, the tongue, shouldn’t the other senses support this essential process?
