Kiran Yadav
There’s something remarkably candid about the title of the book, Women & The Weight Loss Tamasha. Anyone who has ever tried losing weight, or anyone who has ever seen someone trying to lose weight, would agree it is indeed, a tamasha. Majority of the Indian women, seemingly so, want to be ?size zero.? Interestingly, overweight women who harbour the ?size zero? ambition also happen to excel in the art of camouflaging it in deep denial. That?s part of the tamasha yes. Rujuta Diwekar, the author, is referring to the entire paraphernalia associated with women and weight loss?not just the misplaced fetish for ?size zero,? but overarchingly, the entire concept of dieting to lose weight. That?s exactly what made her earlier book, Don?t Lose Your Mind, Lose Your Weight, fly off the shelves?hungrily picked up by those who (desperately) wanted to know how-on-earth Kareena Kapoor achieved ?size zero.? And, they were in for a surprise. Here was a book that didn?t ask them to diet. It rather pleaded them to eat! Shocking it was to most, but with an endorsement by none other than Kareena Kapoor herself, it managed to be convincing enough to be tried.
Her four cardinal principles of eating right became the new mantra: Eat something within the first 10-15 minutes of getting up; Eat every two hours; Eat more when you are active and less when you are not; and finish your last meal at least two hours prior to sleeping. This book then is an extension of her last work: talking about the misinformation surrounding teenage, post-marriage weight gain, preparing for pregnancy and then motherhood, the curse of hypothyroid, polycystic ovary syndrome, menopause and diabetes that we bring upon ourselves, etc. Each section also has four strategies to help the reader cope up with the problem by making simple lifestyle changes. It?s replete with real-life diet analysis and activity recalls. What makes the book stand out, apart from its content, is the conversational tone in which Diwekar has written it, quite unlike most books of its genre that have a preachy, sermonising, long-drawn tone. Having dealt with scores of women trying to lose weight, Diwekar, knows well where exactly the problem lies. She knows how women tend to ignore themselves to make time for everything else. How they need the weighing scale to validate they are on track, while suppressing the voice of their gut and intuition. How they want the nutritionist to tell them how much they should exactly eat.
?The agenda is to stay tuned to your stomach and fearlessly eat what it requires. So, on a day when you feel like one roti, eat one; when you feel like five, eat five; when you feel like half, eat half. Just make sure that you are not crossing the overheating threshold…? She suggests following the rule of ?Uno,? the card game where you have to say ?Uno? when you just have one card left, failing which you will have to pick up another card, hampering your own chances to win. ?When there is a little bit of space left in your stomach, it says ?Uno.? If you are alert enough to hear that, you put a full stop to your game of eating… Now the stomach will say ?Uno? at different times during different phases…it also depends on your stress …Women should never, ever standardise their meal size. We are hormonally vibrant, and it?s perfectly normal to feel more on some days and less on other days.? For sweets and desserts, it?s the ?sweet visa.? The number of times you eat a dessert in the year should be controlled like the H1 visa, she says. ?The visa to eat sweet must be handed over only to worthy ocassions. ?So bad mood and feel like a pastry won?t count as worthy, but ?first salary? or anything that?s meaningful in your life gets the visa.?
Those are just a few of the take-aways from the book. Talking of book titles, heard of The 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman by Timothy Ferriss? Yes, that?s the title and well, it made its debut at No. 1 on the hard-cover advice list on.