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DIWALI DETOX

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Weight gain is a little like that small pile of unattended laundry on your chair. Left alone, it’ll just stay there and pile up day after day. If you think you’ve gained weight during Diwali, don’t panic. But deal with it before the fat starts to accumulate.

DON’T STARVE…

That’s the fundamental lesson you need to remember. Don’t deprive your body of nutrition by starving yourself with drastic diets. Instead of losing fat, starvation ensures your body loses muscle. Muscle loss leads to more fat storage, which is why you always gain the weight you lose right after a crash diet. Food is the only thing that fuels your body and is your friend ­ not your enemy.

…EAT SMART

Eat simple and smart during your detox phase. Shore up on simple proteins like sprouts and egg whites.Have 4-5 servings of fruit per day (100 gm of fruit per time), and eat and drink your veggies prepared without much oil, or as juice. But whatever you do, don’t forget to break up your meals into smaller ones. Eat every two hours. Like walking or running, digestion also burns calories and eating smaller meals frequently means that your body keeps burning, burning, burning.

…BUT DON’T LOSE THE OIL

Don’t cut oil out entirely because you’d be depriving your body of essential fatty acids. The lack of fatty acids dries up your skin, apart from other adverse effects. In this detox phase, include one teaspoon of oil in your cooking through the day.

STEP UP THE EXERCISE

Get to know your treadmill a little better. In addition to eating right, one hour of explosive exercise is what you need. You can walk, run, cycle, go on the elliptical but whatever you do, don’t forget cardio during this phase. Sweat it off.

SLEEP

Catch up on your sleep. Your body needs food, water and sleep for effective functioning. And fat burning and metabolising food is a part of its functioning. Studies have shown the strong link between weight gain and sleep deprivation. Snooze to lose.DRINK In this phase, drink about three to four litres of water. You could also mix it up by including other beneficial hydrants like coconut water, chaas and nimbu pani. Hydrate, hydrate, hydrate.

How much detox you need depends on how much you have abused your body. If you have binged for four days, detox for the same amount or a week, and so on.

But don’t overdo it, and trust your body during this process.

The body is magical. It will know what to do.

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RETAINING WATER? DRINK MORE, BLOAT LESS

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Ever wondered why you feel bloated and puffy, as though you have gained inches overnight? Do you find that your rings are suddenly too tight on your fingers? Or that just gently pressing your skin leaves dents? And even your shoes don’t seem to fit? These could be symptoms of oedema or water retention.
Most of us retain water, but within normal parameters. Women are more prone to water retention because it is a symptom of Premenstrual Syndrome (PMS).However, water retention could also be a symptom of kidney disease or heart, liver or thyroid malfunction. So, if you feel you have bloated too much, get yourself checked.
HOW TO DEAL WITH EXCESS WATER RETENTION

DRINK MORE TO LOSE MORE. To significantly reduce the amount of water being retained by your body ­ drink more water. It’s a bit of a contradiction. Here’s what happens… the more water you drink, the more your body will flush out. This is one of the most effective ways to combat water retention. Ten or 12 glasses a day ought to do the trick.

EAT SMART. Diets low in sodium (avoid table salt, pickle, papad, cheese, butter or processed food), and high in potassium (bananas, peaches, plums, musk melons, raisins) help maintain correct electrolyte balance within the body, preventing puffiness. Diuretic fruits (cranberries, vitamin C-rich oranges, limes and other citrus fruits) along with diuretic vegetables (cucumber, lettuce, celery, tomatoes, cabbage, carrots and peppers) help maintain the correct osmolarity within your cells, preventing them from retaining excess water. Some studies show that vita min B6 tablets (pyridoxine) and primrose oil capsules have the same benefits.

CUT BACK TO LOSE MORE. Additionally, avoiding alcohol and caffeinated beverages, anti-in flammatory drugs and oral contraceptives also help reduce water retention in the body.

GET OUT, GET MOVING. Exercise works wonders. Also, avoid standing for long periods, don’t wear tight clothes and keep your legs raised as and when you can to avoid discomfort.

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RAINY SEASON WEIGHT LOSS CHECKLIST

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It’s raining buckets. You theatrically sigh in pretend lament as your heart secretly does cartwheels ­ no exercise today! For those of you who find it hard to reign in the urge to skip rained-out workouts, I’ve got bad news.I am going to suggest ways to lose weight, eat smart and exercise within the four walls of your home. Don’t hate me.It’s all for your own good.
Unless you have a home gym or a place of exercise that doesn’t involve some travel, there will be days where you genuinely won’t be able to make it. But I find that a lot of people use this season as a pretext to get off the health track entirely. Why gain when it rains? Look at it this way: a healthy monsoon means that when the party season rolls around, you are looking smoking hot. Instead of taking a rain check this season, take in the rain checklist instead…

 

FOR FOOD

You don’t have to plough slippery streets and negotiate overflowing gutters to get to a nutritionist. Online meal plans as well as online home delivery options abound. Nutritionists have also started online programmes so, after preliminary health checks and blood tests, the meal plan gets delivered straight to your inbox.

If you aren’t going to a nutritionist, do your research online and carefully choose diets that consist of about 25 per cent protein, 10 per cent (good) fats like MUFA, PUFA and Omega-3 and 65 per cent carbs (which includes fruits, vegetables, breads, pastas and the like). Needless to say, your carb intake needs to tip in favour of healthy fruits and vegetables. Check with your doctor that the diet ensures weightloss or maintenance (whatever your aim), and will not affect your general health. Also, don’t forget to monitor your oil and sugar content during the programme: depending on your lipid profile, 2-4 teaspoons of oil a day is all you need to ensure that your low-cal food has both fat and flavour. I’d also advise you to break up any diet you take into smaller meals and eat every two hours. The process of digestion burns calories and smaller meals help keep your body in the digestion mode for longer.

One of the most fun parts about going online though is tracking your progress -there are tons of weight tracker apps out there. But be honest to yourself.

FOR COMFORT FOOD

There’s something about the monsoon that heightens the senses and the food cravings with it. Avoid common comfort food traps. While bhujiyas and pakoras are standard monsoon comfort fare, other healthier options also work. Corn-on-the-cob or bhutta is a brilliant and incredibly healthy masala-filled option. Corn-in-a-cup also works. Boiled black chanas, piping hot idlis with yummy sambhar, masala rava idlis, hot masala chai (without tons of sugar), hot soups, boiled peanuts, kebabs, chicken tikka (with low oil), grilled vegetables, dosas, neer dosas, uttapams and upma -all have the ability to satisfy your craving for something fried in the rains.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

FOR EXERCISE

If you can’t make it for a walk or the gym, you’d be surprised with the kind of workouts DVDs can give you. These may even go one step further, providing that missing bit of variation to your workouts, leading you to exercise mus cles that may not have been active in your regular workouts. Or just climb stairs or jump rope: both are amazingly simple ways to get your heart rate pumping just enough to lose weight.

So there you have it. The no-excuses guide to monsoon fitness. And a no-holds-barred solution to looking your best during the monsoon months.

 

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DIET PLAN FOR WEIGHT LOSS

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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?

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