Dubai: The Dubai Municipality recently invited Ishi Khosla, a New Delhi-based clinical nutritionist and author of The Diet Doctor, to educate people on how to reduce weight without the usual pain and stress.
She released her book in Dubai as part of Dubai Municipality’s progamme to help residents learn about proper nutrition, create awareness about the dangers of being overweight, and how to get on the road to a fitter Dubai.
The municipality had offered gold coins to individuals who lost a certain amount of weight over a period of time. “We tried to convince people that their health is more valuable than gold,” said a Municipality official.
Khosla, an author, columnist and entrepreneur who runs a chain of health cafes in India, and who is the brains behind a health foods company called Whole Foods, is also the founder of the Celiac Society of Delhi and is listed among the 25 most powerful women in the country by the India Today Group of publications.
Health spoke to Khosla about her book, the best way to lose weight, the misconceptions about diets and how dangerous the obesity and diabetes epidemics are getting to be.
To begin with, Khosla is critical of the scourge of modern lifestyles. People are treating food as a fad, she says. “With the affluence people today enjoy, they can buy any amount of food and are eating more out of greed than for their real dietary needs.” Creating an awareness, she believes, is therefore crucial in these times. Something needs to be done urgently about this problem. In this regard, Dubai Municipality’s efforts are commendable, she says. “With awareness, you also create the motivation, because, most people do not like being controlled about what they eat.”
Crash diets
Crash diets that offer rapid weight loss are a short-lived approach, says Khosla. Though short-term goals are important, a sustained approach to weight loss is what is needed. It is important to control your food intake in the correct way.
On-and-off dieting, or yo-yo dieting as it is also called, is unhelpful as it not only does tremendous harm to the body, but equally frustratingly, the dieter soon regains the weight lost. The problem with crash diets, she says, is that they offer absolutely no guarantee that the lost weight will not return. The true approach to weight loss should be to never regain the shed weight. “Touching a goalpost in not enough in itself,” says Khosla. With yo-yo diets, it is much harder to lose weight as it keeps piling back again and again. Studies have shown that such kind of dieting also affects the immune system thereby increasing the risk of contracting serious diseases such as cancer.
The problem, according to her, is that people see weight loss as merely avoiding eating food and drinking plenty of water to fill themselves up. “This is a wrong approach. A balanced and a scientific diet is needed for a healthy life.”
Why people believe changing their lifestyle is difficult
When it comes to weight loss or trying to keep the pounds off, people follow a strange logic, believes Khosla. Some people, for instance, believe that staying off sweets for a day or two is ‘positive cheating’ which will help with weight loss. But such small-time trade-offs are anything but helpful. It is a misconception that you have to give up something to lose weight, she says.
The real goal, according to her, is to prevent the lost weight from returning. Merely losing weight is not the issue as many mistakenly believe. Irreversible weight loss can happen only with behaviour modifications, such as portion control. “Along with those, you also have to understand the principle of healthy eating. People do not understand the power of food. The saying, ‘You are what you eat’ is extremely meaningful,” Khosla says.
One of her most important findings is that giving the body optimum nutrients is key to weight maintenance. “Research, and my own clinical experience, shows that if you eat right and if the body gets the right nutrients, the volume of food you would like to eat goes down.”
As a result of this, the palate also undergoes a change in terms of its relationship with food. The cravings diminish, your body learns to live with what it needs and not what it desires. “There is a change in relationship with food,” Khosla explains. “The struggle is over, and the body does not ask for more food.”
It is a scientific fact that our brain is engineered to tell us when to stop eating under normal circumstances. But our constant greed for enjoying food as an indulgence has tinkered with that circuitry, as a result of which, our brain is not responding as it should. We have, effectively, destroyed that messaging system, says Khosla. She cites the example of babies, who not having turned into greedy adults, know when to stop eating. “Their brain signals work fine.”
Many of her clients, she says, once they conquer their bad dietary habits, wonder why they were eating so much earlier. “They never get tempted again and within weeks, are on an auto-mode to mindful eating,” she says.
The diabetes epidemic
Khosla believes that if people eat a healthy diet, the diabetes crisis can be controlled. “In the US, heart disease was cut down by half because of correct lifestyle changes. If the right messages are conveyed to people and the right methods are employed by them, we can perhaps even reverse the trend,” she believes.
The UAE is the fifth most obese country in the world. A significant portion of the population, 18.9 per cent, is diabetic and an even larger percentage is pre-diabetic, meaning that they will become diabetic in the future if lifestyle changes are not made.
The other serious condition, heart disease, has overtaken death by traffic accidents in the UAE. Hypertension and heart disease are the results of being obese and leading a sedentary lifestyle.
“Fighting metabolic diseases is almost like a war,” says Khosla. The casualty numbers are swelling and the economic costs borne by governments for treating these diseases is phenomenal. There is an urgent need to address this situation correctly.”
On obesity, Khosla says people will be surprised to know that it is not only due to a bad lifestyle, but that the ‘seeds’ of obesity are planted even before conception. “It depends on how the mother manages the pregnancy, whether she was over-nourished or was under-nourished. We can predict whether a baby will develop metabolic diseases such as diabetes or hypertension later in life.”
On food groups
The single most unarguable truth about food groups is that the more you avoid a certain food, the more it will tempt you in the long run. For example, if you ditch bread completely, one day, you will make a U-turn and eat it excessively.
If you give up something totally, you tend to gravitate towards it, Khosla believes.
“I always tell my patients to eat their favourite foods at least once a week. You must learn how to eat fast foods without letting it conflict with your goals. If you eat a burger, you must know what to eat before you eat the burger and then what to eat after,” she says.
To do that, one must learn to ‘decode’ the burger into food groups. “Recognise the food groups, the starches, proteins… That will empower you and when you eat smarter, you eat better.”
Balancing food groups in a sustainable way rather than going to extremes, and portion control, is the proper way to healthy eating.
