celebrity nutritionist

Today you can do everything from shopping to watching the latest movies to booking your next holiday without leaving the comforts of your couch. It’s no surprise that a large part of the health and fitness industry has also moved online, providing us with a range of convenient ways to lose weight. These include fitness trackers to track our daily steps; online food diaries, which monitor our daily calorie intake; exercise programs, which delivers a variety of weight loss videos; and online chat apps that allow us to connect with doctors over video consultations.

Needless to say, many of these tools do require us to move off that couch, but they also give us that much needed motivation to lose weight and make doing so a lot more fun! The FitBit fitness tracker, for example, is a wearable with blinking dots that keep increasing as we reach closer to completing the number of steps we’ve set as our daily goal—cross the finish line and the bracelet vibrates in approval. The Nike+ Running app, on the other hand, allows you to compete with people in your network and from around the world and even allows friends to support you by sending in-run cheers. Food diary MyFitnessPal can be customized to suit your specific dietary restrictions or nutritionist’s requirements, and online consultation apps allow you the comfort level of chatting with a doctor from home even when you’re travelling outside the country.

Nourish Genie, one of the new entrants in the online health and wellness arena, attempts to take all these components—community, motivation to lose weight, customization, and remote access to a nutritionist—and fit it into one streamlined package.

The brainchild of nutritionist Pooja Makhija, these online portal offers an easy onboarding process. First you subscribe by entering your details and choosing a plan suited to your health goals; options include weight gain and weight loss packages, pregnancy diet plans, lactation diets, plans for PCOS as well as plans for diabetes, weight maintenance, and muscle training. Next you upload your medical history, followed by your blood reports to your personal dashboard or to the Nourish Genie App, and…you’re done! The portal delivers customized diet menus and easy diet plans for the month to your inbox, and gives you access to an online food diary, as well as trackers to map your food and water intake, exercise, and food quota. Chat forums let you speak with others in the community, trade weight loss tricks, share which was the best diet for your weight loss, or even just vent if you’re feeling frustrated. And, of course, you can sign up for live video chats with Pooja Makhija and receive further motivation and guidance.

An MSc. in Food Science and Nutrition, Pooja Makhija is committed to providing her clients with easy diet plans and the best diet for their individual weight loss needs. Her weight loss packages and weight loss videos espouse a nutrition philosophy that embraces the nourishing aspects of food. Through Nourish Genie, Pooja aims to introduce this philosophy to clients world over.

Don’t feel like getting off that couch just yet? Don’t worry. Stay seated, log onto www.nourishgenie.com, check out the portal, and you may just find yourself naturally inspired to get moving!

Celebrity nutritionist and founder of www.nourishgenie.com, nudges weight loss in the right direction.

Food is meant to be a good, beautiful, nourishing thing. It gives us strength to do things we love. So why is it that when it comes to losing weight, food becomes bad, like the enemy? Like it’s wrong somehow or that dieters don’t ‘deserve’ to eat? I see so many cases where instead of using nurturing foods, people punish the body with little, tasteless or no food at all in a bid to undo years of unhealthy eating in a matter of weeks or months.

But it cannot be done.

You cannot undo habits overnight that have lead you to gain weight over years. Starvation/fad diets or what I like to call weight loss by punishment, is usually not sustainable and restrictive diets are oftentimes the quickest to see their results negated as the body limps back to pre-diet weight. All that hullabaloo for nothing.

Or is it nothing? Starvation tricks the body into thinking that it is not getting any food. Your body begins to desperately hang on to the first meal you eat, and stores it as fat. Starvation – or low-calorie/fad diets – also make your body lose muscle, and the only thing that muscle loss is accompanied by is fat storage. In other words, even if you starve yourself, the only thing you eventually gain from the attempt is weight. So all that hullabaloo is not for nothing, it’s for something.

No matter how shiny the package or tempting the ad, there is no reason to subscribe to diet food or foods because all foods are essentially diet food, barring a few like red meat. The fat content of food greatly depends on how it is made. If eaten in moderation and cooked with little oil, potatoes are brilliantly healthy. French fries, not so much. As long as you control for sugar and oil, there are very few foods that are off the table.

Second, fat is good. In fact, it’s very good. In fact, it’s so good for you that it is one of the five nutrients – the other four being protein, carbs, vitamins and minerals – your body needs for its daily survival. Fats compose of about 10% of your total calorie intake. Daily. And while a low-fat diet plan is good for you, no-fat diet plans are bad. Fats are needed for the brain, for the body’s daily functioning, for the skin, among other vital functions. A good low-fat diet plan consists of healthy fats like nuts, seeds, healthy oils like olive oil. If you’re confused about where to get good fat-moderated diets, you could ask a nutritionist, or go online (where there are scores of free diets available) or even find one on customized online diet portals like www.nourishgenie.com.

The point, of course, of any good diet plan is that it should make you feel good, both physiologically and psychologically, and leave you energized and happy.

A good diet plan enables you to healthily indulge in all kinds of foods like rice, mangoes, pasta, noodles, popcorn and more, and won’t make you wistfully stare at your family as they eat ‘normal’ food, because you should always eat together. Eating meals together with friends and family not only gets you closer to them, it takes you closer to your better self too. And that’s really the whole point, isn’t it?

A GUIDE TO ONLINE WEIGHT LOSS

Nourish Genie, one of the new entrants in the online health and wellness arena, attempts to take all these components—community, motivation to lose weight, customization, and remote access to a nutritionist—and fit it into one streamlined package.

DIET PLAN FOR WEIGHT LOSS