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Slips don’t lie

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You know you shouldn’t. And yet, three days into your new diet, you are wiping the crumbs of a very crumbly cupcake off your face. Oops! You had no choice, you reason with yourself, because it was your best friend’s birthday, and, well, one couldn’t hurt, right?
Right. Small slips rarely have any great calorific impact ­ so long as you are able to quickly burn it off. But left unattended, many `slips’ can pile on as calories before you even realise it. It takes 3,500 un-burned calories to gain a pound of weight, and the more slips you have without doing anything about it, the more the calories go unburned, and in turn, the more weight you gain.

But this is not about setting sail on a guilt trip. The larger point of this article is to understand what derails your intentions to eat healthy. And you’d be surprised at how innocuous it may be.

CAN’T SAY `NO’ TO AUNTIE

Social pressure is one of the key reasons our diets fail time and time again. Without realising it, that loving bua or neighbour or host, who is pushing you to eat her laddoos -because she equates food with love -is setting back your efforts to lose weight. And while she may definitely have your best intentions at heart, it’s important to gently let people know that it is not compatible with your health plan at the moment. If they genuinely love you, they will respectfully withdraw. Be strong. The more you say No, the more people will understand.

ARE YOU DIETING?

So many people don’t want to look like they are dieting on social occasions. They would actually eat stuff they never usually eat. While it could come from being self-conscious about dieting, the fact is that it’s more   important to think about what you want. Don’t worry so much about what people think: even if you do incur comments initially, these will slowly slide to a stop as people find other things to talk about.

THE HOLIDAY FROM HEALTH

A lot of people, who go on vacation, seem to take a holiday from healthy eating too. There’s no point working hard to shed the kilos before you leave only to find yourself back to square one on your return. Most cuisines have healthy, low-fat options. Enjoy your holiday but don’t make food a part of the vacation experience. Sightsee, shop, walk around and spend quality time with your loved ones: there are other ways to enjoy your time off.

PACK SAYS `LOW-FAT’

One of sneakiest detailers to any healthy diet can sometimes be something you least ex pect: foods marked `low-fat’. Low fat doesn’t always mean low calorie. It’s also important to be vigilant about the other ingredients that go into low-fat products. Sometimes manufacturers add sugar to add to the taste -which adds to the calorie count -or sometimes eating double of something which has 50% less fat, pretty much amounts to same level of fat being consumed. It’s definitely something worth thinking about.
Enjoy your new lifestyle but whatever you do, be aware of what causes you to get off the healthy eating wagon. Because slips, after a point, don’t lie.

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MIND OVER PLATTER

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In the ultimate battle of the bulge lies the ultimate roadblock ­ your mind. How you think about weight loss is as important, if not more, than eating healthy, exercising and counting those calories. Unless there’s a medical reason for it, weight loss rarely happens by accident ­ it’s a strategy, a deliberate set of actions designed to attain a particular goal. And every goal starts in your mind. Based on my work with thousands of clients, here are two of the biggest mind blocks that come between you and a thinner you.

THE THIN MINDSET

Don’t get me wrong: I am not talking about wanting to be thin; that’s a separate conversation entirely.When I refer to The Thin Mindset, I am simply talking of how people track their weight loss progress.I’ll tell you what I mean: Kartik was a 34-year-old banker, who had lost 16 kilos but had a goal of losing 20. Despite following my programme, he had reached -as weight loss sometimes does -a plateau; and the weighing scale was taking a bit of time to dip further. He came in one afternoon saying, “I am doing everything right but I’ve lost just a kilo this entire month. I still have three to go.“ Now, here’s someone who lost a whopping 16 kilos but because of his `Thin Mindset’, instead of focusing on how far he’d come, he was obsessed with how far he had to go. When you have a Thin Mindset, you tend to compare your progress against the end goal. So if you have 30 kilos to lose, and you lose 5, you don’t think `I am five kilos thinner’, you think, I have 25 kilos to go, and it’s a long way.

There’s a tendency to measure your progress against the end result (which is imaginary) instead of the current result (which is real). Celebrate every single bit of weight you lose. Instead of focusing on being thin, celebrate being thinner than you were a few weeks before. Replace the Thin Mindset with the Thinner Mindset and make that your focus when you are trying to shed those kilos. Because no matter how you look at it, losing is losing.

THE ALL OR NOTHING MINDSET

It usually starts with a muffin. Or a few peanuts. And suddenly, 30 minutes later, you have scarfed down a bar of chocolate, a bag of chips and a thick chocolate milk shake. And you don’t even know how it happened. The `All or Nothing’ mindset is the feeling that since the diet has been `broken’, you may as well give up for the day, start again tomorrow, and eat everything in your path right now because `it doesn’t count’. Well, it does. Every little thing you eat counts.

Let’s look at it this way. You have a set of six beautiful tea cups. You broke one by accident. What do you do?
Do you break the other five be cause you have broken one? No, right? The `All or Nothing’ mindset is like shattering all six cups because you broke one.

Instead, salvage the damage.

There’s no need to pile on 2,000 extra calories because you’ve slipped. Slipping is human and no one is perfect. Accept your little imperfections, and learn to move on from them.

It’s one of the best things you could do for yourself and your body.

 

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YOUR TRAVEL MENU

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The chance to sample different cuisines from different parts of the world can be as exciting as seeing the Eiffel Tower or the Northern Lights. But nobody wants to come back from a vacation all happy and then cry about not fitting into their clothes. Sometimes, you can’t tell what’s on a menu in a foreign country. Here’s a guide to choose better.

ITALIAN

 

Order these: Minestrone soup, chicken masala, grilled white meats (like chicken or fish), leafy salads, pasta (in tomato or marinara sauce with little olive oil and no cheese), cappuccino with skimmed milk and fruit sorbets (with no added flavours or syrups).

Skip these: Caeser salad, pasta in alfredo or bolognese sauces (or anything in a white sauce), lasanga, ravioli, cannelloni, fried calamari or anything fried, gelato, tiramisu, anything in `parmigiana’ (it’s loaded with cheese).

CHINESE

Order these: Chicken prawn vegetable suimai, seafood or vegetable cheung fun, prawn chicken vegetable dim sum, steamed bread or mushroom chicken bun, tom yum soup, wanton soup, chicken vegetable noodle soup, steamed rice, soft stewed rice with vegetables, soft stewed noodles, steamed prawns in lemon sauce, steamed fish in soya, ginger and spring onions, chicken prawn exotic vegetables in hunan or oyster sauces.

Skip these: Fried wantons, steamed dim sum in chilli oil, Peking duck, pork bun, salt and pepper fried chilli prawns, fried chilli chicken, sesame prawn toast, Szechwan chicken, chicken fish vegetarian manchurian, spare ribs, kung pao chicken potato, chowmein, lomein, anything with the word `golden’ or `crispy’ in it as that means it is fried.

JAPANESE

 

Order these: Sushi ­ especially nigiri sushi (rice and seaweed) made with cooked crabs, salmon, bass, yellowtail, tuna, squid, scrambled eggs, tofu or vegetables, sashimi, maki rolls (raw salmon, tuna, squid or prawn) with no cheese, miso soup, oshinko, steamed edamame, teppanyaki dishes (prepared with no oil), sukiyaki dishes (cooked at the table and you can supervise the oil content), okonomiyaki pizza, broiled sea bass (or any fishseafood) with soya or ginger sauce, ocha or green tea, soba noodles.

Skip these: Tempura, dragon rolls, chicken teriyaki, yakitori, fried dumpling or gyoza, ramen noodles, breaded chicken katsu, green asparagus tempura or sautéed with soya butter, foie gras teppanyaki, sake.

MEDITERRANEAN

Order these: Baba ghanoush (without extra olive oil), hummus, tzatziki, Greek salad and horiatiki salads (with reduced feta cheese and dressing on the side), souvlaki, dolmades, keftedes (baked, not fried).

Skip these: Moussaka, pastitsio, spanakopita, deep fried calamari, tiropita, falafels, red pepper feta, saganaki cheese, gyro platter, baklava, baklava cheesecake.

Carry nuts and fresh fruit with you wherever you go, and steal in quick snack breaks which will help keep your blood sugar stable and make you less prone to stuffing yourself with sugary pies. And stay hydrated: the hunger and thirst centres in your brains are so closely located next to each other, sometimes you crave food when all you want is water.

 

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