Don'T Lose Your Mind, Lose Your Weight

by Rujuta Diwekar

Eating right is about getting in touch with your body and sharpening your awareness of it. Eating immediately on rising puts us in touch with our body’s hunger signals. Instead of going through an afternoon slump we will start feeling hungry more often in the day.

The seated posture on the western toilet actually closes and constricts your eliminatory organs. Under pressure or stress, it’s almost impossible to feel ‘open to let go’. This then leads to the vicious cycle of laxatives, which further weakens your digestive system and washes off all the B vitamins from the large intestine. So all that you do is ‘create’ problems for yourself.

Western toilets and the discomfort they bring to the body have been identified as a contributor to constipation, colon cancers, and irritable bowel syndrome.

The traditional Indian shitting posture (actually this is exactly what everybody used before the advent of the commode, including Westerners), helps you relax the organs and encourages you to let go. This posture will also help you get rid of bloating. A clear stomach and a digestive system which wor...

to get comfortable in the Indian sitting posture you will need to workout regularly to keep those hips and legs strong and flexible and the joints lubricated. (It’s sad how inactivity has...

The problem here is that our stomach doesn’t understand that we have meetings, conferences, deadlines, presentations, fixed lunch hours, etc. And it is on a mission to remain true to its dharma. So it keeps secreting hydrochloric acid and keeps asking you to eat. But we are smarter than the stomach; the minute it sends us the signal to eat we either give it a tea, coffee, cigarette, mint, pan masala or chewing gum, etc (depending on our taste) and almost always choose not to eat, trying to stave off those hunger pangs as long as possible. The stomach may feel like a neglected child, but we have better things to do than feeding it.

When the hunger signal becomes unbearable we finally suffocate the stomach with so much food that we progressively work at weakening it; and therefore the hunger signals that it can send to our brain.

Eating frequent meals every 2 hours is not just better for our digestive system, but it...

you want to have a flat stomach, you will have to eat every 2 to max 2 ½ hours.

The idea of eating every 2 hours may sound ridiculous, but only if you are imagining the size of your meals right now and thinking ‘My god, if I eat like this 6 to 7 times in the day, I will look like an elephant.’

when you adopt the idea of eating frequently, often what drops first is the size of the meal. You will then find it impossible to eat that pizza by yourself. One piece and you will feel full; 2 chapatis for lunch at 2 pm when you just had something at noon is difficult too. So you may land up eating just 1 chapati at 2 pm and the next one at 4 pm.

When you eat every 2 hours a day, it’s a given that you will eat small. So the number of calories you consume at one time will be very small. When our body gets a regular dose of a small number of calories often, through the day, it feels reassured and loved. Eating is a way of loving our body and providing it with nourishment. Not eating for l...

When our body gets fewer calories at a time, they are utilised better and not stored as fat. Also, because the body is feeling reassured with a regular intake of calories and nutrients, it sees no reason to store body fat. The body loses fear of death due to starvation (which is instilled by a combination of prolonged gaps between meals and eating a lot at one time), and feels...

eating after every 2 hours will lead to A conducive environment in the body to burn fat Fewer calories converted to fat Less dependence on stimulants Smarter thinking, because the brain gets a regular flow of...

All we’re doing is taking our 3 main meals (breakfast, lunch and dinner), cutting the portions, and then adding some in between meals to these core meals. Let’s say that you start with fruit for meal 1. And you can have any traditional healthy meal for breakfast: upma, idli, dosa, puri bhaaji, aloo paratha. After that eat no more than 3 things for lunch: for example, roti + sabzi + dal OR rice + curd + sabzi, or any other combination you like (avoid meat if you’re working as this will slow you down) and reduce one thing from dinner. So keep dinner as just roti + sabzi OR dal + sabzi (here you can have your meat, your non-veg). For all the in between meals, eat only one thing at a time: peanuts, cheese, nuts, milk, yogurt, soy milk or whey protein shakes. These foods are wholesome and are higher in protein content, which we are always in danger of being deficient in. They stabilise blood sugar, help you think faster and support sedentary activities without getting converted to fat, importantly.

we work to feed our stomachs. We educate ourselves, put all our effort into making good money so that we and our loved ones can lead a secure and fulfilling life. The irony is that our stomach is left feeling insecure. It’s clueless about where, when and how its next meal will come. We may get driven in or drive big cars, have huge houses, designer clothes, LV bags and Jimmy Choo shoes, but we don’t pay the same attention to our stomach, which is collecting fat for survival and always stressed about its next meal. So make time and connect with your stomach. Food is the way to do it.

Eat more when you are more active and less when you are less active Always fine-tune your eating to your activity.

When you are in touch with your system, it will want more food when it is more active, and less food when it is not so active.

With the sunrise in the morning, the body’s metabolic rate picks up. Which means that sitting and reading in the morning is a bigger calorie burner than sitting and reading in the evenings.

The metabolic rate is higher in the morning than it is post sunset. So even the act of sitting will burn more calories. It goes without saying ...

We get fat only because we don’t give a damn about what the stomach needs, and load or unload it according to our convenience.

If deprivation of food is punishment then overeating is a crime.

Time is very important. Time once lost will never come back.

Lives can be saved by a few seconds, relationships can be mended if things are done on time, wounds are healed with time. Time is indeed precious and divine.

Time of the day and activity affect our calorie burning. Each one of us has a pattern to our day that we must make a wholehearted attempt to understand, if we wish to stay lean and fit for life.

Mornings lead to higher calorie burning in the body because nature designed us that way. It’s nature’s way of getting us ready.

Once we understand the pattern of our day, we can plan what to eat and how much.

A lot of foods have a tarnished reputation only because they have been routinely eaten at the wrong times.

because laddoos are dense in calories, if they are eaten with a meal or late at night, no prizes for guessing: they are converted to fats, and all the nutrients are wasted. The body cannot absorb nutrients on an overloaded stomach (post meal) or when it is slowing down (post sunset).

Cheese, pasta, paratha, peanuts, paneer, banana, mango, potato, rice, etc are misunderstood only because you have experienced them at the wrong time in your day. None of these foods are fattening. They are just dense in energy (calories) or fat (which as you read, you will understand is healthy and crucial for life itself). In fact, I will go to the extent of saying that no food is fattening. You have to just be smart enough to choose the right time to eat it.

We need to up our eating during high demand periods and cut down when relaxing.

the cells of our body become less sensitive to nutrition and calories if they have not been active.

when you are just chilling, the cells become dull, they don’t want anything (they’re in no mood to absorb nutrients and see no reason to make energy demands); so if you load your stomach at this time, it just gets converted to fat. But post activity (mental or physical) the cells are energy and nutrient deprived. This increases their sensitivity, which means that...

Look at your eating and activity pattern. If there is a disconnect or disproportion between your meal size and level of activity, you will be affected by the ‘not being up to it’ syndrome. It’s also called a sub clinical deficiency (well documented condition again), which means that you are not sick but lack optimal health.

simple way to get rid of this ‘don’t know what’s happening to me ya’ feeling is to eat more when your cells are more sensitive (which is when activity is higher, in the earlier part of the day) and eat less when less active. In the ideal world we should have finished having our 2 main meals by 11 am, especially if we have a weight issue.

Finish your last meal at least 2 hours prior to sleeping.

The best thing to do is to eat a healthier or fuller meal by 6 to 6.30 pm in the evening, and then eat really light by 8 to 8.30 pm.

digesting food is a calorie burner and work for the body. In the night, cells are naturally not very sensitive to energy or nutrients as they don’t really need much so if you overload your stomach most of it will get wasted or converted to fat. You may eat the healthiest of food but the body has to be in a mood to digest and absorb nutrients from it.

A good quality, restful and peaceful sleep is the backbone to losing fat.

Without peaceful sleep, your hormones or your lean tissue will not be able to support fat burning.

In the night, when we sleep, our system or the body’s intelligence should feel free to do what it is supposed to do: repair wear and tear and rejuvenate. If at this time the stomach is overloaded, the body is torn between two things. Our body’s recovery system takes a beating and the food doesn’t get broken down, digested and absorbed properly. End result: you wake up feeling not just tired and weary (recovery process hampered), but also with a bloated stomach, swollen face, acidity, burping (digestion hampered); generally feeling heavy and dull, instead of fresh and light.

you look at your current lifestyle, reducing the size of dinner and having it early may (and rightly so) sound like an impossible proposition. Eating the last meal 2 hours before bedtime is crucial for long term health, change in body composition (increase in muscle and bone weight, decrease in fat weight), that glowing complexion