"You
know, we are not rag pickers," said my dear cousin once, "that we
must eat whatever is put in front of us. We can afford to eat what we
need." This was at some point, in the early years of the 21st century. A
nice new idea to begin a whole new century with!
"If rag pickers can eat all that they want to, they are not
so bad after all," I thought, an inveterate foodie. I would not say that
to her though. Much older than me, she is quite capable of giving me a piece of
her mind, my
Canada wali didi.
A decade later, the inevitable happens, I get older. And soon...
every time I would pay a visit to the doctor, she would ask, "Do you
exercise?" And I'd say, "Oh yes I walk and exercise regularly, but of
late I have been getting tired, so I miss a few days." It took me years to
realise that this was a pattern, that I continued to be firmly in the slightly
overweight category and that my baseline weight, the weight that persisted with
me most often in those years, had slowly risen by at-least two kilos. That is when
I decided that I needed to do something radical about it...
I finally, in-spite of all my misgivings about it, I walked
straight to a dietitian and said, "fix
me now, feed me peanuts..." only figuratively, because peanuts are just the thing to avoid, when you
are dieting. "Feed me peanuts," I said, "but make me the active
self that I need to be." Actually I did not say that, I just told her some
of my problems, but that is what I was thinking all the while.
I was called to her house for consultation. When she opened the
door I found a small, stocky, five feet tall lady with an overbearing
personality with Jack the three legged black dog (probably a Doberman Pinscher,
Pardon me, I am not good with dog breeds) in her tow. She happens to be my
neighbour, in a large apartment complex with 570 flats, neighbour is just a
term of convenience. I did not really know her up until now. Jack has been a
wonderment for my daughter and her friends for months now. She talks about this
dog to everyone who she likes to talk to, her Dada - Dadi, her Nani her friends at school and her
music teacher too. She has been patting it and has been playing silent smiling
games with it, which involves touching the dog and darting away and then going
back to play the same game all over again, whenever she saw it on his walk.
Mostly with a tall hefty and silent man, who never complains, though his walk
gets disrupted by these curious youngsters. No prizes for guessing, that this
man is my dietitian's husband. I instantly liked her for having Jack for her
pet.
Everything about her was mystic. She was unfolding before me to
be just the kind of person I adore and have great regard for. I learnt later
from another neighbour, she had adopted Jack, after having found it abandoned
on the streets, another point that goes in her favour. An obvious follower of
Buddhist philosophies, she had miniature Buddha statues in a large decorative
wok kept over a low table, at the entrance of her pent house. There was a long
chain of the tiny Buddhist prayer flags, hanging along the length of the inner
wall in the upstairs room, where she meets her patients. So here I was, with a
five foot, stalky, spunky naturopathy doctor, with tonsured head. I thought to
myself, probably shaved at Tirupati. That is very common here in Bangalore.
Later I discovered from her, that she had donated her hair to cancer patients,
one more point in her favour. She was rising like a meteor in my eyes. We spoke
for two hours straight. And in the end we got friendly enough, that I gave her
a small squeeze when we parted.
So we went straight up to the consultation room and she came to
the point. You are fire and ether, she concluded from seeing me and my
old reports. As per Naturopathy, all humans are made primarily of five
elements, earth,
water, ether, fire and sky. Each
body has one or two primary elements, which influence their personal health and
choices.
Based just on my body type and my blood group, she already had a
list of dont's for me. No Green Tea... a surprise for me, No besan or Sooji or
maida, no Nuts, no jaggry, again a surprise, jaggry is not meant for my body
type. In my mind I kept chopping off the cakes, the pastries, the nan, the
upma, the besan halwa, the pakoras in besan, the green tea of course, the
cashews, peanuts, fig, almonds and the walnuts, that I fondly munched on, my
morning tea with jiggery, jiggery in curd etc etc... I was already in the arena
and was being tackled and pinned down to the floor, all five foot five of me,
just as I had suspected all this while, before coming to her.
But it was not all tackling... she said the most magical things
to me, Are you constipated, ever since the beginning of my life on earth... okay I will fix that. You
will fix that!! My meeting
with her was getting more and more of a transcendental experience for me! And I
can do something about your haemoglobin count and your hypothyroid and high LDL
too. I have a reputation of curing these!!! She added. I was dumbstruck. No,
she is no small time dietitian, she has credentials to say whatever she said.
But my first visit was mostly inconsequential, because she
needed some reports. It is the second visit that left an indelible impression
of her on me. This time, all equipped with my latest blood test reports and a
notebook and pen, I promptly went to her. To fix my hypothyroid and my
constipation and my High LDL and my haemoglobin, all in one masterful stroke.
And that is when she touched me to the core. She said, quite
nonchalantly, as she worked through my diet chart on her excel sheet, "early
morning, have a scoop of icecream!!!!." Icecream?? Icecream??? did I hear it right? I
am your slave darling tell me what next? She
was my personal Close Encounter of the Third Kind.
Yes, I would do anything to retain the favours of this Ring
Master with a phablet in one hand and a laptop in the other, who presides over
a pack of hungry lions and lionesses and gives them just what their body type
needs. Not everything under the sun. Oh
and she has a cell phone on her lap too and a bunch of outstanding diet
balancing books on sofa. Nonetheless she runs a full fledged circus on her
Whatsapp group!
She drew my diet chart, which had more food in it for one day,
than I ate in two days up until now. Parathas and rice and more rice. And
fruits and curd and okay this is where I almost got a little uppish, two amla
(gooseberries) and a glass of methi juice (Fenugreek) to end the day with!!!
Anyway I checked myself before any disagreement could escape my mouth. Because
here is a person who lets you have ice-cream first thing early in the morning and also snaps at you in case you were
to disagree with her diet plan, without reason.
Thanks to this new diet chart, I eat more than I ever ate in a
day, yet I feel the pangs of hunger at-least two times a day, which I had
completely forgotten about, since I don't know when. No kidding... she does
have a cure for constipation, ask me all about it! Piku
are you listening?
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