The hilsa on the table in front of me had been cooked with cumin seeds and green chillies and was ripe with roe. The prawn, in a coconut curry, was next to it, on the left of the plump tangra fish cooked in mustard. The fried chicken was already on my dinner plate, and the red mutton winked seductively from a bowl.

I was visiting a loving aunt in Calcutta who thought I was in need of some serious nourishing. It was a great meal and I loved every moment of it. There was just one hitch — I was on a diet.

But let me start at the beginning. One evening when I was blissfully engrossed in a mind-numbing book, quite unaware of what lay in store for me, the phone rang — and life changed. I was given an assignment — I had to go on a diet. A celebrated Mumbai-based nutritionist was writing a book, and she was to give me a diet. After two months, I would write about my experiences, just when she launched her book.

The next day at work, I found that news of my assignment had even elbowed out Barack Obama’s presidential win as the hot topic of discussion. A few guffawed rudely. I’ll have the last laugh, I told them. For the dietician — Rujuta Diwekar —knew her onions, to say nothing of her soya milk.

To be honest, I hadn’t heard of Diwekar. I learnt, a frantic Google search later, that she was Kareena Kapoor’s dietician, and was famously responsible for her so-called size-zero body. Oh goody, I said to myself. Bebo and I. What more could I want? There was more — Diwekar was also Saif Ali Khan’s food adviser, and had trained Anil Ambani for the Mumbai marathon. And I liked the name of her book —Don’t Lose Your Mind, Lose Your Weight (Publisher: Random House India). That sounded promising. So did the dedication. “This is for you, Bebo,” it said.

Diwekar found me on the Net too — and zeroed in on my Facebook page. “What’s that in your hand,” was the first thing she asked me. It was a glass of coke, I confessed, and not even the Diet kind. “It’s better if it’s not Diet Coke. It means your system will respond better to a diet.”

It wasn’t easy for me — but I am sure it wasn’t easy on her either. Before we got started on my regimen, I sent her, as she had suggested, a chart of all that I had eaten and done over the last three days. I didn’t hear from her for several days after that. I thought she had been mortally struck by some of the entries in my diary — innocuous little postings such as “8.30 am to 10.00 am: read newspapers in bed with tea and Good Day biscuits”; “8.30 pm to 10.30 pm: met friends after dinner; had 1 large vodka with soda and lime juice, 1½ shami kababs, 5 pieces of roast potatoes, cucumber, paneer and tomatoes, 3 pieces of egg on toast (each piece a fourth of a slice, fried, with scrambled egg on top)”, “11 pm to 2 am: read in bed.”

But she rallied, no doubt after a quick visit to her shrink. “You are doing it all wrong,” she said to me gently. “You don’t eat for long hours, and then you overeat.”

So she gave me a diet to follow. Her logic was simple — eat small quantities at regular, two-hour intervals. If there is a gap of three hours or more between two meals, the body goes into starvation mode and starts to store fat. Two-hourly feeds reassure the brain, which tells the body not to panic, that nutrition is just round the corner.

The first two weeks went like this. I woke up and ate an apple. For breakfast at 9.30 am, I had milk and muesli. At 11.30, I ate a fistful of peanuts (she didn’t say whose fist, so I cheated some and went by Arnold Schwarzenegger’s). Lunch at 1.30 pm consisted of a veggie, dal and one roti. At 3.30 pm I ate a bowl of curds. At 5.30 pm I drank a glass of soy milk. Dinner was at 7.30 pm, and consisted of a chicken breast, salad or a home-cooked vegetable. And she suggested that I take a lot of vitamin supplements.

She also asked me to go off tea or coffee. I thought it was because of the little heap of Good Day biscuits that went with it (“You really like your Good Days, don’t you,” she’d asked me. For the record, I like chocolate biscuits better) but it wasn’t that simple. Drinking tea in the morning may wake you up, but it masks hunger, which means your body craves food later in the day.

“In the morning, the heart and breathing rates are at its lowest as this is the reflection of a relaxed state of mind and body. To keep the system relaxed, we need to give it real food, which is easy on the heart, lungs and stomach too,” writes Diwekar in her book. “The stimulants provided through tea and coffee increase blood sugar levels but provide zero nutrition to the cells that have been starving for the last 9 to 10 hours or more, post dinner.”

I followed it as much as I could, but there were times when I looked the other way and helped myself to a pasta with seafood and wine, or an aromatic biryani. I had an occasional drink, and a gooey piece of a chocolate cake now and then.

But it still worked. And this despite the fact that my food-writer husband loves street food, and often comes back home laden with succulent kababs and daulat ki chaat, which, incidentally, is a sweet prepared with the foam of milk, powdered brown sugar and a dash of saffron. You don’t say no to daulat ki chaat. So I didn’t. And of course when I visited Calcutta I had to keep all my relatives happy — and leave not a scrap on my platter. Yet it worked.

Diwekar doesn’t believe in heavy dieting, or crash diets. “Crash dieting is like a fling with a bad boy (even when you are in it, you know it’s not going to work long term),” she writes. On the other hand, good eating habits, she argues, are like happy marriages; perhaps a bit boring at times, but good for your body and mind.

I don’t have to live my life eating muesli and peanuts. There are variations that she has suggested — an omelette cooked with the white of an egg with a slice of brown bread for breakfast, black olives for the 11.30 am snack, brown rice with veggies for lunch, and a piece of cheese at 5.30 pm. The curds stay — it’s high on protein, low on fat, and good for the stomach. Little Miss Muffet, I bet, was another size zero.

If you go out of town, Diwekar urges you to try out the local food. Bebo ate momos in Ladakh, and appams in Kerala. For my Calcutta trip, she had suggested luchi for breakfast and puffed rice for the evening snack. I stuck to an egg-white omelette and peanuts.

At the end of two months — with a great many transgressions — I lost almost six kilos. I am back to wearing long-forgotten pairs of jeans. My diet is now a conversation topic, and I hold forth on it like a veteran. “Will you go ahead with it now that the assignment is done,” a friend asked me. I think I will — but not all the time. I’ll be good on most days, bad on some, and, depending on my social calendar, downright ugly once in a while.

Meanwhile, I’ve been wondering what other surprising assignments the future will bring for me. I just hope it’s not going to be a story on training for the half marathon. Till then, here’s my own humble dedication: This is for you, Ruju!

LITE BITES

8.30 am
Apple

9.30 am
Milk and muesli or a slice of brown bread and an omelette with egg white

11.30 am
Peanuts or black olives

1.30 pm
1 roti, sabzi, dal or brown rice with vegetables

3.30 pm
Curds

5.30 pm
Soya milk or a piece of cheese

7.30 pm
Chicken breast with vegetables