Posted on: Nov 01, '09
Me and Dieting
Dieting actually means eating food and we have a love affair for life. Currently this word is used erroneously which means controlled dieting and so now this word is synonymous with the meaning of controlled food intake. There is a separate breed of doctors who earn their bread and butter by giving advice to unwitting and ignorant folk how to eat their bread and butter. Of course this is much better than what the pathologist says to their patients with gratitude. They say your stool and urine is our bread and butter. Yummy.
I don’t really remember when I started eating solid food but from what my mother proudly said, I started eating my solid food as fried prawns and fish and mutton. I did the same with my daughter and she voraciously cooperated then. I had two brothers and my mother was very proud of our appetites. My parents had a unique way of waking us up in the morning. They would shake us crooning about limited delights waiting in the kitchen. They included cakes, cookies, sweets etc. Since we were aware of the competition, we would drag ourselves up and rush to the wash basin. It was a race to the kitchen table to the coy declaration of our parents, “Bones for the late comers.”
Then I always envied my elder brother who had nausea for the milk and hence he was the only one in the family besides our father who was allowed to drink tea instead of milk. I was forced to drink milk until I reached 11th standard which was S.Sc. The habit of drinking milk has left me always wanting to drink milk even when all my milk teeth were lost. I am the only member of my family even now who would eagerly drink milk whenever there was the opportunity. When I used to visit my grand parents at Kolhapur, who had many cows and buffaloes. I enjoyed drinking just squeezed milk warm and foamy early in the morning. Since my younger brother and I, both were crazy for milk, my grand parents had arranged with a neighboring farmer for goat’s milk. We would visit and drink just squeezed milk. This is much thicker than buffalo’s milk and has a really beautiful and creamy taste. The foam is also much thicker.
In my childhood my appetite was great and my mother was very proud of it. I have heard her bragging to a woman in our neighborhood that Subodh eats five chapattis. The chapatti then was big with oil fold before roasting. I don’t know whether it was due to my appetite or my preference towards exercising that I was the tallest and healthiest in our family. I even grew taller than my father who was five feet 10 inches tall. I grew to be 1.75 inches taller than he was and he was very proud of it. He also must have been very proud about my capacity to bear his regularly beating me without showing any improvement. I think. The time was of regular Curds and white butter and great quantities of Ghee in regular diet. I still love all these delicacies and eat them whenever I can and the maximum quantities available even to the risk of loosing my life so thinks my wife. She has not been reared on milk and curds and Ghee and can not understand my unceasing appetite for these necessities. I can not go ahead without giving proper tribute to the cream. In those days, the cream layer used to be very thick on the milk and I loved to lick the milk pot clean before it was washed. I loved chapattis in milk with sugar or Poha in milk with sugar with of course umpteen quantities of cream.
I loovvvve sweets and whenever possible, I either think of them or eat them in what ever quantities available. Now my misguided wife does not keep any sweets at home. She as well as my daughter does not enjoy them. So what I do now is, I go out, purchase them and eat on the spot. This way my sweet tooth is satisfied without hurting other’s feelings. I have often noticed that ignorant people blame the disorders like diabetes etc. on quantities of sweets eaten. Actually there is no connection between the two. In fact, I would dare say, that if the quantities of sweets are more in the regular diet, one would surely postpone the possibility of diabetes. Since, the organs or glands which are under regular stress develop better and work longer. And in the same way those organs or glands, which are unused or least used, deteriorate and disappear.
My introduction to Chat was due to my wife’s chat tooth. She relished it so I started eating whenever she opted for it. Out of all available chat I enjoy Pani Puri the most and am always on lookout for good and tasty Pani. Fortunately very near to our house very tasty pani puri is available and I relish it whenever possible. This, also being rocket fuel, keeps my stomach in good condition until next morning.
My mother used to store eggs in tins of rice and would climb on a small stool, reach up on the rack, open the tin and take out an egg. If I was not born in village and had not seen hens laying eggs, I would surely have thought that these tins produced the eggs. Then the eggs used to be Non Vegetarian and were laid by Indian Chickens. The chickens then used to be much costlier than mutton and we regularly ate mutton. Later on, the Leghorn chickens started laying the eggs without ever meeting the cock hence the vegetarian eggs without the embryo were born. In this case one can say without doubt that the chicken came before the egg. The ignorant folk still think that the chickens do not lay eggs without meeting the cock. This belief is false in case of Leghorn chickens. If the chicken has the privilege to meet the cock and spend some time with him, then the eggs are non vegetarian else they are vegetarian without embryo. Also it is not generally known that when the eggs are laid they are soft, they harden after some time.
Due to the cost difference between the chickens and mutton, I have enjoyed eating mutton and even now, when the costs have reversed and chickens are available for half the price of the mutton, I always prefer eating mutton whenever possible. Since I started my daughter’s solid food intake as fried prawns and Tandoori chicken, she loves chicken and still prefers it to mutton. My eager preference to the non vegetarian food is due to the inclusion of meat and fish in the regular diet when I grew up.
But now, since my wife being under false ideas of dieting does not let me eat proper diet. This is the only problem since earliest news of some of my relative’s demise due to heart failure. She is consistently after me to meet some dietitian. But since I know the tricks of their trade and believe it to be harmful to our body and digestive systems in the long run, it was a regular subject of friction between us until recently when I started dieting. She also does not want to hear why its harmful. Here is why I don’t want to use their tricks.
Our body has been pre-programmed to use correct system of digestion. To facilitate the digestion, our digestive system observes our food intake for a period of 7 to 15 days and designs a system to extract sufficient plus nourishment from the food. Even when the diet is reduced but not changed, this ingeniously super designed system extracts same amount of nourishment from reduced quantities of food.
The trick of their trade is to change the type of diet every 7 to 15 days and keep the system always studying and observing. The idea is to keep the system confused and not let it come to a design. So one will eat chapattis for one week then bread for another week and rice for third week and so on. This is the reason, even when the quantities of food are unbelievably more; the nourishment extracted is just or a little less than sufficient. This hampers the healthy growth of all organs and keeps the person leaner. Due to this, the body has no option but to turn to the stored food in fat and liver to keep the body healthy. After the fat is used, the sugar storage in the liver is drawn upon, depriving the body of energy required in emergencies. Also this deprives the body of injection of sugar in the blood at regular intervals. This also weakens the digestive system giving way to disorders like acidity etc.
Currently I have reduced my diet to two chapttis (they are half the size of my mother’s chapattis) and one subjee or Daal only. The problem is our festivals are so timed that all the efforts put in dieting are wiped out by a single festival making me healthy, more healthy and wise.
Tags: chat, sweets, diet, organs, glands
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