Revise your portion

 The best example of a perfect, well-balanced meal is the Indian thali

The thought struck me first a couple of weeks ago as I sat down for lunch at a traditional thali restaurant. This, I said to my fellow diners, is the best way to practice portion control. 

You get a thali with small katoris containing tiny quantities of every dish you are going to sample with a small portion of rice or roti in the middle. If you don’t want to eat something you just ask for that katori to be removed. And then after you have had a taste of all, you decide which dish you want seconds of and it is served to you. So, you eat a variety of dishes in small portions choosing which one to have more of and ask for an extra roti or rice as required. Zero wastage. No overeating. What better example of portion control could there be?

But as I got thinking, I realised that many modern dietary practices and principles have their roots in traditional ways of eating in India. Let me count the ways. 

• Combining proteins and carbs: In a traditional Indian meal, we always include a protein like fish or meat in small quantities (paneer and dal if you are vegetarian), a subzi of some kind, all to be eaten with a roti or rice. But on the whole the roti is made of whole wheat which makes it a much healthier option. And the entire meal itself is an exercise in balance. 

• Using a healthy fat like ghee: The ancients knew a thing or two when it came to using gut-healthy fats. And ghee is right up there with them. So whether you use it for cooking, tempering, or just slathering on your chapati your digestive system will thank you for it. 

• Including a probiotic in the meal: They are all the rage now but Indians have been including natural probiotics in their meals for centuries in the form of a bowl of dahi (or its fancier variant, raita) or even a glass of buttermilk. This doesn’t just act as a cooling counterpart to all the spices in the food it is actually beneficial to your gut health. 

• Raw food: We are told by nutritionists that we should begin our meal with raw vegetables in the form of salads to aid digestion and ensure that the release of blood sugar is regulated when we eat. But we have been doing this intuitively all this time, adding a bowl of sprouts, slices of onions, cucumber, carrots and the like to our table every time we sit down to eat. 

• Fermentation and pickling: Yes, that’s the latest dietary fad that we are all supposed to follow. But we are way ahead on this with the array of achars that live on our dining tables, waiting patiently for meal times. And a good mango, chilli or garlic pickle beats kimchi every time. 

So I guess if you want to follow modern dietary advice you really can’t go wrong by adhering to ancient Indian rules of eating. You will eat well; you’ll eat the right stuff; and you won’t eat too much. And you really can’t ask for much more than that. 

Mend and make do

That's a good guiding principle to live life by

 

Last week, for the first time, I tried my hand at the Japanese art of Kintsugi. To save you the trouble of Googling, this is the process by which the Japanese join together things that have been broken with a lacquer dusted with gold or silver. The joints are covered with this veneer so that the repaired object looks even more beautiful than it did in its original state (it’s all part of a Japanese concept called Wabi Sabi – you can look that one up yourself!).

 

It so happened that one of the saucers of my favourite tea set was broken into three while washing up. But the breaks were clean and the edges such that they could be glued together. So, once I had got over my disappointment at ruining a perfect set, I decided that Kintsugi was the answer. So, I used some glue to stick the pieces together and then using a golden metallic paint that I bought online, I painted over the cracks in as delicate a line as I could manage. And even though I am no expert, I have to say the end result looked splendid. In fact, the saucer looked even more amazing than it had before. 

 

I guess you could draw the usual lessons from this episode: that we should not become a disposable culture; that we need to learn to mend and make do; and that sometimes repairing something can provide an added patina of beauty. But the lesson that I took from it was this: that truly luxurious objects are the ones that you don’t throw away when they get damaged, but fix lovingly so that they live to give you joy for many more years to come. In my case, it was a part of a tea set that I am particularly attached to, but it could be anything from clothes to shoes to bags, or even objects that we use for home decor.

 

It is a lesson that the English aristocracy have learnt well over the many centuries they have been around. They revel in a look dubbed shabby-chic in their country homes, with curtains and carpets that are well-worn but carry the weight of decades very well. They take pride in using the furniture they inherited; in fact, buying your own furniture marks you out as nouveau riche. They never throw out their suits or shoes when they get a tear; instead they send it off to be repaired by experts and get a few more years out of them. 

 

Prince Philip, famously, never bought any new clothes for the last few decades of his life, just fixing the suits he had bought in younger days. His son, King Charles, has often been seen in public wearing suits with a darning patch over his pocket or lapel. And his shoes often sport patches where some discreet repair work has been done.

 

Well, if something is good enough for the King of England, then surely it should be good enough for the rest of us as well. So, even if you draw the line at doing a spot of Kintsugi on a humble saucer, perhaps you would consider mending and making do when it comes to home décor or your wardrobe? Believe me, it sparks a joy entirely unlike any other.

 

Lose that weight!

Here's how you can do it the old-fashioned way

 

Weight-loss drugs are all the rage these days and over the past few months they have arrived in India as well. It seems to matter little that these medicines are targeted at those who either have diabetes 2 or are clinically obese, as everyone who can afford the (humungous) costs is lining up to take them. Some people are doing so to lose weight for aesthetic purposes while others have been attracted by the plethora of beneficial side-effects these drugs – Ozempic and Mounjaro, for the most part – are reported to have.

 

But what if you are one of those old-fashioned people who wants to lose weight the natural way; i.e. without the benefit of weekly injections? Well, if you are one of those, then this column is for you. Here, based on my life-long experience of struggling with my weight, are just some tips for keeping the kilos off.

 

·       I know that it is fashionable to sneer at portion control as a weight-loss method (though appetite suppressing drugs work on the same principle, more or less) but in my experience, it works a treat. So, if you are embarking on a diet journey, start by simply eating less of the bad stuff (fried food, white bread and rice, etc.) and more of the good stuff (raw vegetables, leafy vegetables, beans and legumes, white meat, fish). Your transformation will be slow but it will also be steady and that’s the kind of weight loss you want.

·       Learn to eat slowly, chewing each mouthful mindfully, instead of scoffing your meals down without a thought (and ideally, don’t eat while in front of a screen, whether it is your TV, Ipad or phone). This gives time for your satiety centres to get a message from your stomach that you are full. 

·       But don’t keep eating until you are too full to manage even one more mouthful. The sensible thing is to leave the table when you are just 80 per cent full – as the Japanese of Okinawa do; and who can deny that they are among the healthiest beings on the planet – so that you retain just a smidgen of hunger rather than feeling overfull. Follow this 80 per cent rule, known as Hara Hachi Bu, and see your health improve.

·       Sometimes it is as important to fool your eyes as well as your mind. So, start using smaller plates and bowls to serve yourself. That way, your meals will look larger than they really are, and if you are eating mindfully and allowing those satiety signals to go through, then it is extremely unlikely that you will go back for seconds.

·       Food pyramids make sense. So, do apportion the best part of your meal to good proteins and flavorful salads and vegetables (the base of your pyramid) and keep the unhealthy elements (the tip of the pyramid) to the minimum. But the order in which you eat what’s on your plate is equally important. So, eat your salads and raw vegetables at the beginning of the meal. Not only will this make you feel full quicker, it will also regulate the release of sugar in your blood. And you know, when it comes to eating, it makes sense to save the best for the last!

 

The face in the mirror

 When I look in the mirror, I find my mother staring back at me

Increasingly over the past few years I find that when I look into the mirror, I find my mother staring back at me. This is disconcerting because as I have been told all my life, I look nothing like my mother, who was a certified beauty in her youth. And rationally speaking, other than her eyes and her forehead I have not inherited any of her features. 

 

And yet, there she is in the mirror, looking back at me. I don’t know quite what it is. The best explanation I can offer is that there is an ineffable expression in my eyes, a specific turn to my mouth, or just the slant of my eyebrows. But there is no denying that as I turn older, I find myself morphing more and more into my mother. 

 

It’s not just about looks, though. There is more to it than that. Just like mom, I find that food has turned into my love language. I take intense pleasure in feeding those I love, thinking of new recipes to tempt their appetites every day. My idea of hospitality revolves around food rather than flowers and free-flowing drinks. In fact, the first thing I ask people who drop by is, “Have you eaten?”

 

There are other habits of my mother – that used to drive me crazy when she was alive – which seem to have seeped into my behaviour without my even noticing. The most annoying of these is “buyer’s remorse” that my mom suffered from all her life. She could never buy anything without agonizing over it afterwards, and in two cases out of three, returning it to the shop the next day. On the contrary, I took great pride in being a decisive shopper, who knew what she wanted, bought it and then thought no more about it. Well, guess what? These days, more often than not, every purchase I make is followed by “buyer’s remorse”. It’s really as if my mom’s spirit has taken mine over.

 

It's not just my mother, though. My father too comes alive in my everyday behaviour. When I was young, I used to giggle endlessly at how my father took the news so personally, talking back to the TV as if the people inside it could hear him. But now, when I am watching my streaming shows, I find myself shouting at the TV too – much to the amusement of my husband – when the plot points get particularly absurd.

 

But I guess that I am not alone in this. All of us, in varying degrees, are destined to end up as versions of our parents as we get older. All the stuff that we complained about as children – unreasonable curfews; the insistence on good grades; early bedtimes – and swore that we wouldn’t subject our kids to? Well, that’s exactly the kind of stuff we do as parents. 

 

That’s the least of it, however. It’s in our own interior lives that our parents live on – long after they have departed from the material world. It’s almost as if we become a version of our parents because we can’t bear to accept the fact that they are gone. And telling ourselves that they live on in us at least makes the loss a little more bearable.

 

Get out of that rut

Sometimes it makes sense to mix things up a little 

When you travel as much as I have been doing of late, then it is almost inevitable that you will lose a few things along the way. Even though I know (and accept) that at some rational level, I was still devastated when I couldn’t find my favourite eyeliner in my make-up pouch when I arrived back in Delhi. But even that devastation paled into inconsequence compared to my crushing disappointment when the brand in question did not have the Noir Intense shade I have been using for years. Worse, they did not have any black eyeliner at all; but I could choose between several shades of brown, they offered helpfully.

 

Once I had recovered my equilibrium, I chose two shades of brown, hoping that they would tide me over until my usual shade was back in stock. The next day, with great trepidation, I tried the darker shade on my upper lid and the lighter one on my lower lid and stood back to see the effect. And much to my surprise, the shades looked amazing – even better, dare I say it, than the black that I had been relying on for years. There was a certain soft smokiness to the look that the black had never been able to achieve, no matter how hard I blended it. So, as it turned out, it had been a stroke of luck to lose my eye pencil – because its loss had led to the gain of an entire new look.

 

I guess that’s the problem with growing older and set in your ways. You decide at some point that this is what you like and you stick to that without experimenting with new things. And, as I had discovered, when you get into a rut like this, you lose out on novelty of new things. 

 

But when I sat back and thought about it, I realized that when it comes to getting into a rut, make-up was the least of my problems. My penchant for familiarity was leading me to stay safe with choices I was comfortable with rather than venturing out to make new discoveries. When it comes to restaurants, for instance, I have my perennial favourites in every city which I head back to like a devoted pilgrim. What’s worse is that in each of these restaurants I have my favourite dishes which I order every single time. 

 

The same thing goes for travel. I head back to London in the summer and Bangkok in the winter like the proverbial homing pigeon. When I am planning a European holiday, I can’t seem to think beyond Italy. When choosing hotels, I always plumb for the safe option of a chain that I am familiar with rather than a standalone boutique property, which might conceivably be more fun.

When it comes to clothes, I am in a bit of a rut there as well. I spend my summers in Anokhi kurtas or Marks and Spencer linen dresses. I have been wearing the same brand of pajamas to bed for over a decade now. And my brand of shoes hasn’t changed either.

 

But if the eyeliner revelation has taught me anything it is that it is time to go forth and explore new options – for a newer and better me.