The holiday diet
(By Lisa Sarah John, Courtesy Bangalore Times, October 15, 2007)
Many of us are on a diet for a period of at least two to three months. Sometimes a family holiday
or travel plan comes up within this period. It is important that we don’t indulge and stick to the diet plan during
the trip. If we are careful we can maintain our weight till we get back.
Firstly, get your focus right. Holidays are not only about eating and drinking uncontrollably. Yes,
when we think of relaxing we don’t want any restrictions. But being so relaxed may cause a great waste of all that you
have worked so hard to achieve. So mentally, prepare yourself to enjoy some delicacies of the place you are visiting but don’t
just overeat from morning to night.
It’s like you winning a lottery today and going out on a shopping spree with your kids and you
spend and spend, and after a week you don’t even have money to buy their food. We need to be more responsible and sensible
than that with our bodies. We can’t say that we will just eat whatever we want and come back and then, start over.
Believe me, one can easily gain 3-5 kgs in 10 days. So, be sensible and cautious. How? The common practice
that we see if you are living in a bed and breakfast hotel is to eat as huge a breakfast as you can, skip lunch or just have
a juice and sandwich lunch and then eat a huge dinner with all the goodies the place offers you. This is the most harmful
practice. In the morning if your body needs three slices of bread but you eat six, the other three are converted into fat
and stored. Eat a sensible breakfast like one to one and a half cups cornflakes and 1C skimmed milk. Or 2-3 slices of toast
and an egg or 3-4 idlis and sambar. Avoid fried bacon, sausages and heavy pastry, croissants or vadas.
Avoid butter. A little jam or honey is not harmful.
Take the fruit served at breakfast along with you and munch on this at 11 am instead of a packet of
wafers or chips. Lunch should be the main meal of the day. The specialties of the place are to be enjoyed now and not at night.
Make sure you eat whole wheat bread or rotis or rice along with a dhal or beans. Some vegetable and curd or non-veg can be
eaten. The meal must be accompanied by a fresh salad which is filling and gives you a supply of vitamins and minerals that
are lost with all the walking around and sight seeing. Any dessert can be tasted after lunch and avoided after dinner.
Tea at tea time and a fruit at 6 or 7 pm is again refreshing. At this time a cup of yogurt or a glass
of skimmed milk will keep you from overeating at dinner.
Dinner should be a light meal. A clear vegetable soup along with whole wheat bread and baked vegetables
or rotis with dhal or pulses and lots of salads is a balanced but light dinner. A glass of skimmed milk or a
fruit at bedtime is permitted if you are still hungry.
Any fatty food eaten after 6 pm is converted to fat in the body at midnight and it is stored away in
the fat cells. If you starve the whole day and eat fatty foods in the evening it is useless. You may think you are eating
only one meal in the day, but as you sleep all the fat in that one meal will be stored as fat. In 10 days, you may eat a good
dinner once or twice but if you do so all days you will be fat again. So out of 10 days and 30 meals if you eat only 10 lunches
heavily you may come back with no weight gain or only 1 kg up, which should be easy to lose. Besides this, you can’t
stop walking for 10 days. Try to squeeze in a 20-minute walk in your hotel driveway in the morning or even after dinner. Finally
drink plenty of water whenever you can.
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