The monsoon is here and it will hopefully pour sooner than later. Most of us romanticise about a lazy evening spent watching the pitter-patter on our window along with pakoda and adrak chai. Ever thought why? The monsoon comes with its share of infections, fevers and other ailments. Your chances of falling sick are higher when your immunity is at its weakest. And one of the reasons why our immune system collapses is insufficient calorie intake. For a lot of us, counting calories and discussing weight loss has become second nature and when that happens, avoiding ‘high-calorie’ food like the plague or depriving the taste buds of anything that could be enticing becomes a natural response.
Obviously, that leaves no room for freshly fried hot pakodas and plenty of room for flu, bad throats and general lethargy. Your taste buds are not against your weight loss plans, they are simply against your plan to lose your immunity. And to guard you against a possible crash of your immune system, it urges you to eat fried food. This inherent intelligence of the body wards you off from the same fried food in the summers, remember? So it is not as silly as you make it out to be, nor is it a question of willpower as the weight loss industry makes you believe.
Essential fats, like in filtered groundnut oil, are rich in antioxidants that help you fight free radicals and prevent illness and also work at keeping your skin and scalp healthy (I am talking about the pakoda you make at home, where you don’t reuse oil). And the reason you want an adrak chai with which to round off the pakodas is because ginger aids your intestines to break down fat and rids your stomach of gas. That way, you take care of overindulgence too.