Die(t) another Day

Whoever said all good things in life are immoral, illegal or fattening knew his onions, cheese and chips! When thin is in and you find yourself on the wrong side of the weighing scale, you know its time for you to give up all those fattening good things this world has to offer. It’s not nice to wake up one morning only to find that your favourite pair of jeans refusing to go all around your waist! It was decided then and there that I needed to lose weight, I could not go up another size!

But my busy-lazy life leaves with no room for exercise (but plenty for this excuse), so I wonder what could be done to lose weight and lose it fast, without hurting my peace-loving limbs too much? So I thought I’d go for one of these fad diets everybody and his fat uncle keep talking about. After all, desperate times call for desperate measures. So I did a massive research (Google is God!) and while the green board in my room was full of diet dos and don’ts the next day, I imagined my depleting kitchen shelf frowning at the crowded piece of wood with envy.

So I went in for the seven-day diet or as it is popularly know the GM diet. As the name suggests it lasts for seven days and you have a different diet plan for all the different days – you eat only fruits the first day, vegetables the next and from then on you follow different combinations of foods that are allowed. You might think this is a diet equivalent of binging, but mind you, a lot many things are forbidden. And getting through this diet will need a lot of will power especially if all your friends insist on having a potato chips and vada pav theme party every weekend.

You are advised to have 8 whole glasses of water or more. I ate watermelons and oranges and had a lot of water with them. Suddenly, the ‘most desired’ place in my house was the loo. Also, it gave me a bad cold. Into day one and I was already looking for excuses to get out. The next day was vegetables – boiled and raw. I got through it just fine but I never knew vegetables actually taste like that in their original form. Thank God for all the spices and curries!

I stuck to the diet nonetheless with my cold in tow. The next two days where you were allowed to eat all the vegetables and fruits was fine because I’d got used to eating ghass-phoos by now. The next day required me to have several glasses of milk and eat up to 5-6 bananas. I don’t know why, but this infantine diet reminded me of my childhood and I kept calling my mom every two hours that day.

The fifth day was the hardest – the American version of it includes red meat but the Indian version asks you to eat a bowl full of rice and tomatoes the whole day! So my tastebuds had to unwillingly lift their many years-long ban on tomatoes. But after 5-6 of them, my tongue revolted violently like a young brat who’s let loose after being tied up for too long. I began to binge on whatever I could get my hands on and the diet ended. While I did manage to pull off a couple of kilos in the 5 day ordeal but the binging and celebrating made me gain back all I had lost in no time!

One fad diet down, I was not ready to give up. Next up on my list was the famous Atkins diet, the book was written in the seventies but the diet gained popularity recently with several Hollywood celebrities endorsing it. Like most fad diets this one requires you to give up a particular food group and now carbohydrates were made enemy number one. I liked the fact that I could eat all the paneer and all the meat that I wanted, as long as I don’t have carbohydrates - that meant avoiding bread, cereals, pasta and potato - the deal sounded good enough. So I feasted on paneer and meat – chicken, eggs, steaks, mutton kebabs. A few days into the diet and I did not notice any considerable weight loss but my body sure did respond to the over – indulgence by breaking out in boils. I had a harvest of pimples on my face. For it to clear up I had to refrain from eating meat for several weeks!

I lost all hope and almost gave up trying fad diets when I came across the chocolate diet. The name got me and I was sold, later I was delighted to find that it included pasta and popcorn. This sounded like the tastiest diet ever! But when I took a closer look, I found out that you could eat only a limited amount of chocolate, pasta and popcorn and that it did not let me have any coffee at all! Me without coffee would be a nightmare for both me and the people around me. So in spite of looking promising, I gave up trying this.

I even came across a few liquid diets that included drinking a particular version of chicken soup and cabbage soup all day? I’m sure it lands you in a soup! There were other diets like the Hollywood diet where you have to buy an expensive bottle of juice that is made up of various ingredients and you have to keep consuming it all day. I am sure it’s very light on the tummy but very heavy on your pocket! So I’m not going to try it. Another diet expected me to live off aloe-vera juice. But it’s a plant, not even a fruit! So there’s another one crossed out!

Then there are other curious looking diets like the instant noodles diet where you consume just that. I wonder if you lose weight here by getting sick by consuming too much maida! The other diets include the grape fruit diet which I am not going to bother trying (I wish they had a fermented grape diet instead, if you know what I mean).

Now that I’ve tried and failed at many of these diets I decided to consult a few nutritionists. Dr Anjali Mukherjee who said “people who are on fad diets for a long time need different kinds of diets to correct their eating patterns. Fad diets do not offer permanent solutions. They generally encourage people to go off one particular food group. This will be harmful in the long run and a person’s body can get overtly toxic. Mono-diets can even lead to many deficiencies and when stopped can even lead to weight gain. The only way to lose weight would be to understand your body chemistry, address all the deficiencies and taking the right amounts of vitamins and minerals that are needed for your body.” Oh man, I wish I’d visited her before I experimented with these fads! I’m worried my body is a bag of toxins by now. De-toxification diet, anyone?

For Nerdorina...

She’s a kurta clad, jhola swinging socialist who ridicules the selfish tendencies of bourgeoisie like me; she gets high on her ideals, philosophy and some other stuff (occasionally). She is tech-challenged and I’m the net savvy smart wit who writes detailed posts on my blog making fun of her goof ups.
Our conversations are not very friendly either. They are usually debates, which morph into fights by the end of the day. And people always ask for an encore. Our fights are laced with witticisms and profanities but are entertaining nonetheless to the onlooker, who might think we’re sworn enemies by the end of it all. We actually used to draw a small but dedicated crowd, which eagerly awaited our fights at Savera, a small restaurant near our college.
We’re like chalk and cheese. But curiously, chalk and cheese sometimes do get along like a house on fire, like we figured. And in the process are generated some crackling noises, bright sparks and unlikely moments of epiphany! If they made a movie about us they should call it when psycho met crazy.
Some relationships stretch longer than their designated expiry dates, I guess. We don’t call each other much, we don’t tell each other everything but find out everything about each other. She hugs everyone but I don’t let her hug me and run away the minute she threatens to hug me.
We piss each other off most of the time but we still look forward to meeting each other and having a whine fest with some fun thrown in. She sings, I croak along and that’s “rock and roll” for us. The music always played on as we talked about life and philosophy and grew up together. Without our conscious efforts and knowledge, these moments kept stringing themselves together to form an intriguing yet memorable chain of experiences, that people call friendship.
Our unconventional relationship is like a rock song that is sung out of tune but lingers on like smoke that hangs down heavily on the room. We have been the best of friends and the worst of friends. It’s now that we are in the danger of drifting apart, as we hit the fork in the road, that I realise how in spite of all it’s eccentricities, our bonding was special.
I wonder if the expiry date is finally here. Nothing lasts forever. There is no ‘forever’. She and I could be just a cherished memory that will silently fade away. But then, we do have the here and now today, so let the music play!
(Edited by Renu, the woman has a magic touch, she turned something depressing into something hopeful)

Remember the Snow Queen?

When its one in the morning and you cry for something as silly as not getting your daily fix of chocolates, you know that there is something terribly wrong with you. You wonder when things got so complex that you can’t really pin-point what’s bothering you. When did you get so fucked up? Or better still, how not to be fucked-up? How do you be happy like the people around you, people with their juicy snippets of gossip or their witty (or so they think) attempts at small talk, how do they do it?

The world seems different when you’re in your twenties; you see the world as it is; what’s real and what’s not suddenly dawns on you. Your dreams seem unrealistic; you abandon hope; and stop believing and you are stripped of all romantic notions that kept you going, not so long ago.

The rose-tinted glasses blow up in your face and a shard of it gets into your eye; its acts as an anti-body to all thoughts romantic; all hope; all faith. Remember the Snow Queen? At least the boy had someone who saved him; all he had to do was - feel and cry. That released the glass from the prison of his eye. That’s a fairy tale, in reality, no amount of crying gets that metaphoric glass out; nor does any alcohol or anything stronger if you like.

Maybe, the glass that seems so alien was always a part of us.