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?