Rujuta Diwekar's diet advice for the young and restless

The celebrity dietician lists out simple things you can do to stay fit.

Rujuta Diwekar is perhaps most well-known for being the dietician to help Kareena Kapoor lose oodles of weight before she wore THAT bikini in Tashan.

However, Diwekar has also written two bestselling books -- Don't Lose Your Mind Lose Your Weight and Women & The Weight Loss Tamasha -- in which she has stressed on going back to traditional Indian foods and giving up on fad diets.

She takes the idea further in her new 'video book', Indian Food Wisdom And The Art Of Eating Right.

Shot in Rishikesh and her farmhouse in Sonave, the book that is 'read out' in a DVD format attempts to hark back upon the ancient wisdom on what to eat, how much to eat, when to eat and how to stay healthy.

Diwekar attempts to break popular myths about ingredients such as ghee, rice, salt etc and suggests that having seasonal fruits including mango, chickoo, etc aren't bad for your health at all.

In this two-part series, Diwekar talks about several issues that come in between us and losing weight.

Read the second part here

Like many dieticians, Rujuta Diwekar strongly advocates the need to return to the kitchen, cook and eat homemade meals rather than packaged or restaurant food.

We begin with Rujuta Diwekar's advice to everyone who says they simply don't have the time to make food at home. Read on!

Also read: REVEALED: How to eat AND stay fit!

Rujuta Diwekar is a celebrity dietician and the author of Don't lose your mind lose your weight and Women and the weight loss tamasha, both of which can be purchased on Rediff Books. She spoke to Abhishek Mande Bhot

Even though people say they don't have the time to cook I see that cooking and food has become part of our daily lives more prominently than ever.

I am seeing more men cooking than ever before and there are more food bloggers and food photographers today than ever before.

Food remains an integral part of our lives. We must use this to optimise on our health and fitness. Just as we start losing time in the kitchen the need to look thin increases.

Plan for food shopping time in your week

The first thing young people must do is to keep some time aside during the week to plan for you food shopping and have your ingredients in place.

If you don't have the ingredients in place, even if you have the time you wont be able to cook. Keeping ingredients ready may also act as an impetus to cook.

Patronise local markets and seasonal fruits

More and more young people are getting exposed to international trends but many fail to understand that a truly global citizen 'does in Rome what the Romans to'. So if you're in South America, eat kinova; if you're in Mumbai, eat rice! Get to know what grows in your region.

Know that you can always go for fuss-free food

It doesn't take an awful lot of time to make dal rice. Eat that instead of ordering in a pizza. It'll take as much time to make as it'd take for the pizza to deliver. Some of the basic dishes from the Indian cuisine aren't very difficult to make. Just learn to make them.

Stock your kitchen with pickles and chutneys

Trust me when I say pickles and chutneys come handy. As you may know, pickle or chutney can add much-needed flavour to a simple meal of dahi rice or dal rice.

In the process of losing weight, we commit several diet mistakes. Here are some of the most common ones:

Avoiding calories is always a good thing

I think sometime in the last few years, we began to get bombarded with information about food from articles in magazines and newspapers. That was where we started becoming food victims. We started fearing and avoiding calories, switching to low-calorie foods.

Sadly, in this process, we've never really understood calories. Many of us still feel that consuming fewer calories should translate to weight-loss. Instead, we end up feeling weak and exhaustion takes over.

Know that calories are what give us energy. So you cannot avoid them completely. You have to be mindful of where those calories are coming from.

Rice is our biggest enemy

This is another mistake we make. Rice has all the amino acids we need that are only found in specialised protein shakes. Mix it with dal or curds and you have a very nutrient-rich meal -- no fuss involved.

Then some of us were told that the only rice that is good is the brown rice. But we are a civilisation that has always pounded its rice, which means we have taken great pain to convert so Vitamin B6 is assimilated better in our body. So while pure white polished rice is not a good idea. Eating local varieties like the Kolam etc isn't a bad idea.

Ghee is very bad for our health

Somewhere along the way we were told that ghee was high on fat and therefore must be avoided. Turns out that Ghee is not only a good lubricant for the knees, but is good for the sex life, our skin and our memory. The West has woken up to the goodness of ghee… and so we are turning back to the one thing we've been running away from all this while.

Fibre is good in any form

Fibre is another thing we've misunderstood. So we stopped eating home food and started eating everything that has been marketed as fibre-rich such as fibre-rich biscuits. What we don't understand that even though they may be high on fibre they are also high on salt, sugar, emulsifiers and colouring agents. You have to learn to go beyond the labels.

Nachni chips are another example. Surely, nachni is healthy if you make a bhakri out of it not in chips or biscuits.