The Dieting DILEMMA

INDIA’S OBSESSION WITH DIETING HAS SPAWNED A LABYRINTHINE WORLD OF HEALTH APPS, SELF-STYLED PLANS AND FADS THAT DO MORE HARM THAN GOOD

- Sonali Acharjee

Navya Agarwal, a 32-year-old MBA student from Bengaluru, had to take a year off studies after an internet-inspired diet went wrong. For four months, she ate only vegetables and eggs. The aim was to cut out all gluten, which Navya mistakenly believed to mean carbohydrates, forsaking even rice, which is naturally gluten-free. "One day, I fainted from exhaustion," she says. "I felt tired and stressed and couldn't study for a year." It took her a year of close dietary monitoring by a doctor to improve her health. There's also 48-year-old Hitesh Kukreja from Delhi, who has experimented with at least 20 different diet plans to date. "I have realised there's no one diet plan that works for me," he says. "I get bored and need variety. Currently, he is on a programme that allows for only one of three dishes for breakfast: poha, upma or idli, with lots of vegetables; lunch is bottle gourd with some salt and oil, and dinner pumpkin soup minus salt. It's the same menu every day.

Agarwal and Kukreja are among a growing number of Indians who have made drastic changes to their diets in the past few years. "I call it the 'circus of diets," says noted clinical nutritionist and author Ishi Khosla. "There has been a growth in types of diets since the 1970s, but the pace has increased now. Every few months, the industry has a new diet, a new meal plan, a new nutrition mantra as people look for an answer to growing lifestyle diseases."