Sugar-free mithai is not your passport to a skinny waist. The sweeteners in the mithai will make you gravitate towards more calorie-dense food and will ensure that your hormones are upset, acidity is up and head hurts. That way you will need another mithai, and another size of jeans post-Diwali.
- Starving for lunch doesn’t ensure that calories from big late-night dinners don’t go to your waist. It, in fact, also goes to hips, thighs and right on top of that double chin. Since the body has an innate sense of meeting calorie deficit with a calorie overload, it will be storing more fat exactly because you skipped lunch/ meals.
- Spending 20 min more on the treadmill won’t burn last night’s drink or shrink that creepy beer belly. Working out on a tired body that hasn’t had its share of undisturbed sleep or on a body that is still digesting last night’s food slows down the body’s fat-burning processes during or in spite of exercise. This is also the time when the body is most susceptible to getting injured.
- A detox diet post-Diwali (juices and salads only) is as torturous for the body as overeating, drinking too much and not sleeping till the wee hours of the morning. The detox should actually be called ‘toxicity step 2’ and is the classical, time-tested method to develop metabolic disorders and stay fat permanently.
- This piece is not meant to scare you, it’s meant to talk sense to you. A week of indulgence has never made anyone fat. Plan ahead and eat you mithai in their full glory, the ghee, shakkar, badam, kesar, the full nine yards. It’s Diwali, after all.
