Opinion

Why The Weight-Loss Industry Won’t Understand

Nutrition science is yet to dev­elop the understanding and vocabulary to express how intelligent, climate-resilient and nutritious native meals are.

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Why The Weight-Loss Industry Won’t Understand
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The reason why most diets don’t work is because they are not a cultural fit. The weight-loss industry knows this only too well and most diets that you try are for a couple of weeks or max months. It’s not uncommon for you to overhear conversations where people speak of how they can diet till 5 pm, after which they just have to eat.

And as a country that had learnt over centuries to be grateful for the food on the plate, we replaced gratitude with guilt. Meal times that were meant to be a time of silence and reflection turned to times that were utilised to watch TV or to wildly discuss the latest weight-loss foods. Instead of eating as per the appetite, we started reducing the amount of food by drinking soup, chomping salads and gulping a fibre drink before the meal. It didn’t make us any thinner or healthier, but gave us a sense of suffering, another emotion the weight-loss industry thrives by. We are willing to do anything to lose weight but eat local, seasonal, home-cooked food.

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It’s like this—if you are looking to translate a word from a vernacular language into English and find no equivalent, would you deny that the emotion exists or do you understand it as a limitation of English? A similar approach needs to be in place with local, traditional diets. In English, they may get translated as too much carb, incomplete protein, too many calories, etc., but that is the limitation of the language. Nutrition science is yet to dev­elop the understanding and vocabulary to express how intelligent, climate-resilient and nutritious native meals are. And till that time we must continue to patronise them because mohabbat, ishq, ibadat are all love in English but the heart can tell the difference.

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(Rujuta’s next book, Indian Superfoods, is out and exclusively available on the Juggernaut books app)

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