Your mood depends on what you’re eating. Appetite is a moving entity and keeps changing from day to day, so how can anyone else decide the quantity of food you should be eating? But what you need to know are the five essential items that need to get back on your plate right now to help have a flat stomach and a well-rounded butt, instead of the other way round,” said Rujuta Diwekar, before giving us her top five at ‘Super Food. Super You’ at The Oberoi Grand, president Rita Punwani’s maiden LSG event. 

RICE

The first food we need to bring back on our plate in all its glory, and without any fear, is rice. It’s the first food that is introduced to us as a child. Rice is the easiest thing to digest and other than carbs (which essentially puts us off rice) it also contains essential amino acids, especially Branch Chain Amino Acids (BCAA) that facilitates fat burning, and isn’t produced by our body. Fifteen days before a song where Kareena Kapoor has to bare her stomach she goes on a pure dal chawal or dahi chawal diet at night. Our body faces a lot of wear and tear that needs to be repaired on a regular basis. Also, when you’ve had a particularly stressful day, eating dal chawal leaves you feeling content because it also gives you unbelievable amount of mental calm.
What rice is best? Eat the rice you like best, because if you don’t like what you eat then your body will take longer to digest it, resulting in you looking bloated. 

JAGGERY

 

How toned and tight we look depends on the jaggery we eat. Jaggery in various forms, solid or liquid, is very important. But that doesn’t mean that sugar is bad. If you look at most of what we eat, there are certain things in which we use jaggery and certain things in which we use sugar. It’s important not to replace one with the other because jaggery heats and sugar cools down. 

 

 

GHEE

Ghee accelerates weight loss and New York is aware of that. If you walk down Fifth Avenue you will see that all supplement stores stock what they call ‘clarified butter’, which is nothing but desi ghee. The one thing that accelerates fat metabolism and safeguards the heart is ghee, that too from the desi cow or the buffalo. Not only that, it also helps us look younger, is good for your joints and nails and will also help you get rid of the skin patches. Women who have lots of ghee post-pregnancy are thin later. Also, more than anything, ghee contains the good fat that helps the body in assimilating vitamin D, the deficiency of which may lead to cancer. So one should basically be swimming in ghee.

 

 

COCONUT

Are we eating coconut, or are we eating olive oil? The status that olive oil has in India today, virgin coconut oil has the same status in USA. Before every big project we first break open a coconut because it can give our body endless physical energy and give our brain ability to be reasonable and calm. Also, it’s linked to a skinny waist, which means that you will never have a hormonal disorder. 

 

SPICES

To get an idea of how important spices are, you should first know that the Western powers invaded India because of spices. All spices are anti-oxidants, fat-burning and anti-carcinogenic in nature. And most importantly, they help cut down diabetes. We look for Western alternatives to these same qualities that the spices contain but somehow we mentally feel that if it’s been coming down through centuries in our culture it must be bad. We should inherit our food culture more than anything else. 

 

Rujuta shot to fame with Kareena Kapoor’s size-zero figure flaunted in the 2008 movie Tashan. “Rujuta has not just changed my body but also my mind and soul. She is the best thing to have happened to my life!” reads Kareena’s endorsement on Flipkart, for Rujuta’s book Don’t Lose Your Mind, Lose Your Weight. On the myth that is size zero, Rujuta said, “A size zero is possible, but only if you are a piece of cloth on a hanger. I didn’t know what size zero was till the media coined it for me,” adding that Kareena was “fit and slim”.

Text: Riddhima Khanna
Pictures: B. Halder