‘Don’t lose your mind, lose your weight: Rujuta Diwekar’ – part II

This post is a different take on an earlier post “Don’t lose your mind, lose your weight: Rujuta Diwekar” (you can read it here : http://bit.ly/pa80lf ).

Beauty is not skin deep? “I want him/her to take a second look at me”. “I want to put up my best profile pic on Facebook/twitter”. Or, “oh quick, let me change this profile pic – its been 3 days but no one has liked it.” We’ve all been there. As much as we appreciate inner beauty we all love it when it comes in a nice package. There are many diet sheets out there that will make you lose weight quickly. We all want to do it fast. Heck, I went to Rujuta for that reason alone. I just needed to kick-start. But please, please do NOT fall for that trap. You can follow the Rujuta diet for two months – no harm in that. But please don’t make it a way of life. The diet she prescribes is fairly balanced but it is NOT sustainable. You can’t and SHOULDN’t be popping vitamin pills everyday. It is just not right. Think healthy. Think long-term. If you sit down and try jotting down the good stuff you eat and the bad stuff you eat, don’t you think you can do it? Don’t you know that you need to go for that walk or that gym or yoga class? Look inside you and you will find all the answers.

I promised a fellow commenter on this blog (See comments section on the ‘About Me’ post) that I’d put down some general do’s and don’t on healthy eating. So this is for you Aradhana (and for all those lovely people who take time out to read my rants here). I am sharing the stuff I do. I hope it helps :

Do’s:

- Eat one fruit everyday.

- Eat small meals throughout the day.

- Drink lots of water

- Include green vegetable in all main meals (lunch and dinner). This is one rule I never break. I eat salad if nothing else is available.

- Have a bowl of curd everyday. If, like me, you don’t like curd- make raita. (I make cucumber raita, dudhi raita, palak raita, mint raita, white gourd raita, yellow gourd raita). No, boondi raita doesn’t count If it is particularly hot, I drink buttermilk instead of curd. No salt, no sugar, no ice. Just water and curd.

- Reduce the intake of salt as much as possible. Slowly reduce the amount of salt you add in the cooking, you will get used to it. No table salt at all.

- Cook in olive oil. I know its expensive. So feel free to ignore this tip. For those who want to use it, do NOT use virgin olive oil. For cooking you can’t use virgin or extra virgin olive oil. Thats only for salads. If you are going to heat up the oil use regular Olive Oil. Remember the green bottle of Figaro? The one your mom oiled your hair with? Yup, you can use this for cooking. No the food taste doesn’t change if you use little oil to cook.

- You can also use Rice Bran Oil (I personally use Ricela). So what I do is I cook in Figaro and use Ricela for frying stuff. Once in a 4 months, I stop using Figaro and cook in Ricela for about a month.

- You have to have protein in your diet. Chicken curry, egg curry, paneer, dal, legumes (like rajma, chole, etc.) any one will do. But please cook in less oil. I often add pureed palak to the gravy. Try it for any of the above. It tastes awesome.

- Whenever you use Palak (Spinach) add a few methi leaves. It won’t taste bitter. The colour of the gravy changes to a dark green. It will add the much needed iron to the diet.

- Switch from white rice to brown rice. Brown rice takes time to cook, is sticky and tastes different but trust me, it tastes very good. I don’t like it for pulao though.

- Eat dinner as early as you can (the most difficult one)

- If you feel bloated, for two days just have lots of fruits, curd, salads and water. Add a slice of bread to give you the requisite carbs though.

- Bread – Buy multigrain only. Brown bread is different than wheat bread. Buy wheat bread not brown bread. The bakery will have it. Anjali Mukherjee brown bread is NOT wheat bread!

Can’t remember any more for now. Will put them in the comments section of this post as and when I remember. If you have tips, please share them with us. Looking forward to hearing from all of you. Btw, I have not added the Dont’s section here. I think we all know what we shouldn’t do

Here’s to sensible eating and life-long good habits!

mYm

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