Table for one

Eating out alone has its pleasures – but it’s not the only activity you can enjoy on your own

I’ve lost count of the number of people who look at my pityingly when I say that I often head out to lunch – and sometimes even dinner (shock! horror!) alone. Don’t you have any friends, you sad little loser, their eyes seem to say. Does your husband not love you enough to have a meal with you? Why can’t you manage to rustle up even one lunch companion from among the dozens of people you know? 

Of course, they don’t say any of this aloud. Instead their ‘concern’ is expressed in any one of the following ways. Don’t I feel embarrassed and exposed eating a meal on my own? How can it be any fun going out to eat without having someone to share the experience with you? Don’t you miss having someone to talk to you while you are eating? And so on and on and on.

Well, the truth is while I enjoy eating out with my husband (and do so all the time) and have great fun doing my ‘ladies who lunch’ thing with my girlfriends, I also really, really enjoy taking myself out for a meal ever so often. Sometimes, I take along a book that I am currently immersed in, and bury my nose in it as I make my way through starter, main course and coffee. Sometimes I spend my time surfing on the Internet. And then, there are times when I don’t put any barriers between me and the world and simply indulge in one of my favourite pastimes: people-watching.

In fact, I love people-watching while eating so much that I even have my own phrase for it. I call it ‘catching the cabaret’, and as a speculative exercise there is no beating it. Is the teenage couple seated to the left of me breaking up or is it just another regular fight in a volatile relationship? That middle-aged couple seated next to the window? Are they eating in companionable silence because they have been married so long that they have nothing left to say to one another? That group of loud young men having a largely liquid lunch? How many of them will leave the table sober? And why is it that the decibel level of a kitty party group is always higher than that of any other?

But while eating out on my own is a fun thing to do, so too are a whole host of other activities.

Shopping, for one. Most of my friends enjoy going out shopping in a group so that they can have the benefit of other people’s opinions on the things they try one. And they have a point: you can’t really ask a shop attendant, “does my bum look big in this,” and expect an honest answer. But frankly, if you feel impelled to ask that question, then take it from me, your bum does look big in it. As far as I am concerned, my eye is the only one that matters when I go shopping.

I am also one of those people who find browsing in shops and window-shopping a complete waste of time. My modus operandi when I go shopping is to make a list of what I want, make a beeline for it, make my choice, pay up and head home. Spending hours looking at merchandise I am never going to buy – which is what inevitably happens while shopping with a group – is my idea of hell. So, solo shopping trips are what work best for me.

The same goes with exercise, whether it is a yoga or Pilates session or a walk in the park. With both yoga and Pilates I prefer to set my own pace, rather than try to slow down or speed up to keep up with a group of people. And when I am out for a walk, I like the idea of spending some time in contemplative silence or just listening to my own thoughts rather than chattering away with a friend or two.

I also find solitude restorative when I am in the kitchen so cooking, for me, is always a solo activity. After spending the whole day with people, there is something therapeutic about finding yourself alone in front of the stove at the end of the day. There is a certain meditative quality to mindlessly chopping vegetables, stirring a curry or a risotto, or even getting ingredients together to bung into the oven. Turn on some music, pour yourself a glass of wine, and suddenly cooking seems like fun rather than just another chore to get through.

The one thing I haven’t tried my hand at yet is watching a movie alone, though those who do so swear by it. There is no distracting chat from those accompanying you, and nobody steals your popcorn after refusing to order their own. But somehow I don’t think this would work for me. For one thing, a cinema hall is always full of people, even if you have ventured out alone. And for another, these people are always doing annoying things like taking phone calls, or texting or even chatting to one another. So watching a movie in a hall can never truly be a solitary activity.

Which perhaps explains why I have become such a fan of streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, which give you the movie experience in the privacy of your home and the comfort of your sofa, where you can binge away to your heart’s content. And where the popcorn is far, far cheaper.

  

Take a walk

Trust me on this, it will do you much good; and not just by way of exercise

This is the only time of the year when it is a pleasure to take a walk in the park. The worst of the winter in over (in those parts that do, in fact, have a winter) and the searing heat of the summer lies in the hazy distance. There is a cool breeze wafting, the sun radiates its mild benevolence on all, the flowers bloom without the slightest sense of modesty, and the smell of roasting peanuts comes rolling in from around the corner.

How can you not enjoy a walk through the park when the whole universe is conspiring to please you at every turn?

Well, as you may have guessed by now, I can and I do enjoy it tremendously. I try and keep my afternoons free so that I can ramble through Lodhi Garden, taking care to stay away from the jogging track with its aggressive, Lycra-clad bullies who take particular pleasure in shoving slower souls like me off the path. Instead, I veer off on to the smaller pathways, some of them enclosed by bamboo trees, some bound by flowering beds, and yet others bordered by a quietly sparkling lake, where ducks and geese majestically paddle away, scarcely disturbing the calm surface of the water.

I turn my phone on silent and slip it into my pocket. For the next hour or so, I don't want to hear from anyone. I don't need music blaring through my earphones. I don't care for the distraction of my Twitter timeline or my Facebook feed. I don't want to take pictures that I can later post on Instagram.

This is my quiet time. A time when I need to hear myself think. And I find that I never think quite so clearly as when I am taking a walk.

This is the time when I work out the kinks in the plot of the novel I am halfway through writing. This is when I think of the topic of my next column. This is when I plan the menu if I am having people over for dinner. This is when I think of the cutting responses I should have used in the argument I had with a friend last night (I know, I know, it's too late, but even so...).

But most of all, I use this time to simply let my mind wander where it will. If it chooses to go back and examine a childhood memory, I follow it right there. If it wants to puzzle over why dog owners never pick up after their pooches, I allow it to do so. If it feels like ruminating over the book I've just finished reading, I let it. If it wants to examine the meaning of life, then I indulge it.

And I can tell that my mind really needs this because at the end of my perambulation I find myself feeling much lighter, more energised, and far less stressed than I was before I began my walk. And it's not just the physical exercise that makes me feel better about myself, it is also the mental stimulation.

It now turns out that I am far from being the only one who feels this way. A recent article in the New York Times detailed a University of Birmingham study that examined if people did feel better after a walk. The subjects were divided into two groups, one of whom walked for half an hour in their lunch break (they could pace themselves as they saw fit; going as slow or fast as they liked) while the other didn't. Those who did walk were asked to rate their state of mind afterwards on a specially designed app. At the end of 10 weeks, the first group had significantly higher rates of mental and physical satisfaction than the group that didn't walk. They felt better about themselves, were less stressed, felt more equipped to deal with problems and were far less overwhelmed by life.

After 10 weeks, the second group -- which had, until then, served as the control group -- was asked to walk during their lunch break as well. And -- you guessed right! -- they started feeling better about themselves as well after taking a half-hour lunchtime stroll. They felt refreshed, rejuvenated and ready on take on the world (I paraphrase, of course, but that was the gist of it).

Frankly, I am not surprised. My own experience has told me over the years that going for a walk leads to a sense of well-being that has nothing to do with aerobic exercise itself. A walk is much more than that.

For me, it is a period of quiet reflection, a time to switch off and spend time with myself. For others, who treat it as a communal activity, it may be a time to bond with friends, exchange gossip, or just a laugh or two. And then, there are those who treat it as an opportunity to listen to the latest music or even listen to an audio book, something that they don't otherwise have time for in their fractious lives.

But whatever the motivation, there is no denying that taking a stroll, no matter how gentle, is good for your general well being. So, what are you waiting for? Go on. Take a walk. You can always thank me later.

Let them eat cake!

Teach your kids to treat food as a fun friend – not a mortal enemy

“No,” she said, turning away from the chocolate cake being sliced up to celebrate a friend’s birthday. “I can’t eat cake. I will get too fat.” She stopped for a second, looking stricken. “I think I already am,” she said sadly.

I would probably have thought nothing of this – my friends tend to say this sort of stuff every time we eat out – except that this young lady was all of six. Yes, six years old, and already full of self-loathing for her body and weighed down with an unhealthy relationship with food. And this, despite the fact that she was not in the slightest bit chubby (let alone fat). 

All of us present turned accusingly – as you do – towards her mother, unspoken rebukes all too apparent on our faces. She turned a bright red and stammered, “I really don’t know where she gets this from. I have never told her that she is fat. Or that she can’t eat cake.”

And you know what? I believe her. Knowing her as I do, I am pretty darn sure that she could never be so insensitive as to say such things to her daughter. And yet, that is the message that her daughter has picked up from her. 

Sometimes it’s really not about what you actually tell your children. It’s about how you behave around them. It’s about non-verbal clues that they pick up from hanging around you at the dinner table. When Mummy sticks to salad and soup for dinner because she has put on weight that tells her daughter two things. One, that it is not A Good Thing to put on weight. Fat is bad. Thin is good. And two, that food is the enemy. 

You probably know girls like this as well (yes, for some reason, it is mostly girls who fall prey to body dysmorphia). Children who have internalized the message that fat is bad and that – as Kate Moss so famously said – nothing tastes as good as skinny feels. 

How could they not? We live in a world that venerates skinniness as some sort of divine attribute. The media are awash with airbrushed picture-perfect images of thin women showing off their washboard stomachs and toned behinds. Film actresses and other female celebrities are routinely slagged off when they put on a few kilos, even if it is after a baby. 

Remember the bad press Aishwarya Rai Bachchan got when she arrived in Cannes carrying a bit of post-pregnancy weight? And the praise showered on her when she did her Cannes call last year, looking like her old svelte self? That is the kind of size-ist nonsense that passes off for media commentary these days.

There really is no way to protect our children from this stuff. It is all around them all the time. But to counteract that it falls upon mothers, much more so than fathers, to send out some positive messages. Because like it or not, girls are more at risk, and it’s their mothers they look to as they try to navigate the world.

So, for all the mothers of young girls out there, who want their daughters to grow up with a positive body image rather than eating disorders, here are some do’s and don’ts. 

• Don’t fetishize food. Don’t get into fad diets in which you give up entire food groups claiming an intolerance or a food allergy. The message you pass on your child is that food is the enemy.
• Instead, teach your daughter to treat food as a fun friend. Get her to help you in the kitchen, giving her age-appropriate tasks. Teach her how to lay the table. Make the dinner table a place of family conversation, laughter and the happiness of eating together; not a minefield which may blow up in your face if you end up mixing proteins and carbohydrates (no, I don’t know what that’s all about either). 
• Serve up healthy food by all means but don’t restrict your menu to exclude all ‘treats’. That just turns them into forbidden fruit, which – as we all know – becomes all the more attractive for being verboten. It makes much better sense to serve up the odd sugary treat or French fries so that they seem like just another food choice.
• If you must obsess about your weight, don’t do it within her earshot. She doesn’t need to know that you were ten kilos lighter before you had her. And how hard it is to get your pre-baby figure back. She thinks you look perfect anyway. Don’t tell her any different.
• Don’t compliment other women by saying how much weight they have lost or how thin they look. The subliminal messaging that goes through to your daughter is that losing weight is what matters. That you can never look good unless you are thin. And that starving yourself to achieve that goal is perfectly okay.
• Don’t ever use the word ‘diet’ within her hearing, even if you append it with the politically correct ‘healthy’. If you must, use the phrase ‘healthy eating’. Or better still, ‘healthy lifestyle’ which involves eating well, and getting enough exercise.
• Do tell her how lovely she looks. But never make it contingent on how much she weighs. Beauty does not lie in a particular shape or size; as the old saying goes, it lies in the eye of the beholder.

The world is fat

The truth is that we all struggle with our weight, one time or another

How do you react when someone you meet after a long time tells you, “Wow, you’ve lost a lot of weight!” Do you gobble up the compliment as if it were a piece of cake and respond with a graceful “Thank you”? Or do you stick on a fake smile as you wonder silently about just how fat you were to begin with?

I have to confess that I find myself squarely in the second category. The moment someone asks, “You’ve lost some weight, haven’t you?” I find myself cringing inwardly about just how overweight I must have looked before. And it doesn’t help that the scales have told me that morning that I am exactly the same weight I was a month ago. The compliments are probably down to clever tailoring or the brilliant use of black as a camouflaging agent rather than any real loss of weight.

Ah, weight! It’s been the bane of my existence for too long now.

Which is rather ironic considering that I was a wiry child, a thin teenager and a slim young adult – all of it managed without the slightest bit of effort. Growing up in a Punjabi household meant that my day began with paranthas soaked in ghee, the packed school lunch was white-bread sandwiches slathered with butter and jam, evening snacks were pakoras or samosas, and dinner meant copious quantities of rice and curry, with potato chips to provide texture.

The motto of our home kitchen was: when in doubt, deep-fry. And yet, despite a diet that seemed to consist entirely of trans-fats – and no exercise whatsoever – I never put on even a scintilla of weight.

And then, suddenly, it all changed. I turned 30 and it was as if the switch to my metabolism was turned off as well. Now, every parantha found its way to the extra tyre rapidly building up around my waist, every samosa settled down comfortably on my hips, even as the white butter and cream went straight to my thickening upper arms.

Ever since then, it’s been a slippery slope down the road to porkiness. And it’s not as if I haven’t tried every trick in the book to get back the slim, lissom self of my twenties. I’ve pounded the treadmill, rocked the cross-trainer, signed up for Pilates, tried my hand at yoga, hired a personal trainer. I’ve joined slimming centres, gone to personal dieticians, tried every fad diet in the world in the world and then some.

Sure, the weight goes off – though, with every passing year, it takes longer and longer to melt away. And then, once I get off the diet or slack off on the exercise, it comes creeping back on until I’m right back where I started.

Given how the diet industry is flourishing and getting bigger every day (ironic or what?) I’m guessing that this is probably how it is for every woman – and most men – who are on the wrong side of 35. We go on a diet, we lose weight, we lose our minds, we go off the diets, we put on weight...and thus the vicious cycle goes on and on.

Sounds familiar? I bet it does. We’ve all been there, done that, and have the stretch marks to prove it. Kalli Purie, however, has done one better. She has written what she calls a ‘weight-loss memoir’ to chronicle her path to skinniness. In her new book, Confessions Of A Serial Dieter, she recounts the 43 diets and workouts that took her from 100 kilos to 60.

I have to confess that I’m not really one for diet books. I invariably end up resenting the po-faced advice that dieticians keep dishing out in their best holier-than-thou manner. Especially since it’s so clear that not one of them has had a decent meal in years – or even has the slightest interest in good food. Not to mention the fact that they’ve never been fat themselves – and so couldn’t possibly know what it feels like.

Kalli is nothing like that. She is very much a regular woman – a wife, a mother, a professional – who loves her dark chocolate and her rajma-chawal. She has struggled over the years to control her appetites just like you and me. She’s failed sometimes. And sometimes she has succeeded. And she feels no shame in sharing both these narratives with her readers.

There is a certain searing honesty in Kalli’s account of her journey to her fattest self and the struggle to find the skinny girl inside her. It takes courage to admit to your own vulnerability – and how heavy you really were. But Kalli has done just that, allowing us to accompany her on what is as much an emotional journey as it is a weight-loss plan. She comfort eats; she binges; she purges; she works-out like a maniac; she fall off the exercise wagon. She is full of self-loathing one moment; and on an endorphin high the next.

Yes we’ve all been there; but some of us have come through on to the other side. And for that alone, the story is worth telling. Try chewing on it instead the next time you find yourself reaching for the jar of cookies.