Lose your weight, not your mind!
3 min readMay 28, 2023
As promised in the previous article, I intend to recapitulate the broad essence and lay emphasis on the finer yet essential details of books that I find impactful in a sphere of my life
This article is an encapsulation of Rujuta Diwekar’s bestselling book “How to lose your weight and not your mind” which was gifted on my birthday by anushkabhave to nudge me toward a healthier, cognizant lifestyle. This article is a testament to the profound misconception and oblivion we have wrapped ourselves in, when it comes to diet and eating healthy. Needless to say, the arguments that I will make will directly conflict with the “facts” we currently know, but let me assure you, the winner would have been backed by common sense. You can guess now, can you? Let’s dive right in!
Chapter 1
- There is no such thing as going on/off diet. Let me explain. Eating correctly should be a lifelong commitment, and your diet is a shimmering reflection of the same. The result of going on/off any diet is never a persistent change and you know it.
- Punishing yourself by going on deprivation diets (low carb, high protein, and so on) or starvation is never going to work. You will manage to lose weight for a modicum time, but at the cost of your good health. All of this besides the fact, the lost weight will return back at twice the rate and double the magnitude.
- Do not go for diet plans that encourage deprivation or eating a single kind of food. This is an extension of the first two points.
- Exercise and Diet are always symbiotic and co-exist. Lack of exercise reduces neuromuscular control, while not eating in the morning or for long hours during the day reduces blood glucose levels. The combined effect makes the human body fragile and highly susceptible to injury or sickness.
- Any program which discourages you from exercising is worthless. The human body is designed for continuous activity. Giving the body a bare minimum of 30–45 mins of exercise for 3 days a week is potent for keeping it in good shape and condition. Moreover, the more people get committed to working out, the more they usually care about how to get the right nutrients to their body.
- Fat occupies a lot of volume on the body and weighs very little. Hence monitoring your weight is no indicator of fitness levels.
- Diets need to be personalized and customized to one’s fitness needs, climate, profession, exercise frequency, and so on. One size doesn’t fit all.
- Low-fat snacks like baked chaklis, fat-free chaklis, fat-free ice creams, and fibre biscuits are junk food coated with astute marketing strategies and misinformation. With the presumption that these food items are not unhealthy, we eat them without caution and nominal restraint. Consequently, these food items do more harm than good.
- Replacing sugar with an artificial sweetener is a big NO-NO. Regular use of sweeteners is associated with certain types of cancers, thyroid malfunction, memory loss, acidity, and obesity. A couple of teaspoons of sugar will not harm us as much as artificial sweeteners such as aspartame.
- Fruits contain antioxidants, and ideally, they should get oxidized in your body and not outside. Cutting fruits oxidizes these antioxidants before they reach our body, so the healthiest way of eating the fruits is consuming them whole.
- Fructose (sugar we get from fruits), when eaten on a full stomach, gets converted to triglycerides, a type of fat that circulates in our bloodstream and is responsible for heart diseases, insulin insensitivity, and so on. Moreover, our body is secular, it treats all fructose equally. If we connect all the dots, the nutrients in the fruits only work for us if we eat them as a meal by themselves, not as a dessert after dinner.
- There is no ‘safe food’ or ‘fattening food’. Everything that we eat judiciously, at the right time in the right quantity is good for us.
