This blog post explores the Cheat eat. If festivals were nestled in a transparent glass bottle, with everything that kindles joy packed to it, it would be bright with the best food in the world. With everyone wanting their share in the pie.
Festivals are important, it brings the community together, it fosters pride in one’s culture, it stimulates the need to share what we hold as our own from when we were kids. That sense of belonging, those smiles that begin where no one else can see, and above all the fact that all the merrymaking orbits around food – where food isn’t cooked with mere ingredients and hands for tools but with a heart hanging on the sleeve!
Which brings us to the fact that along with the dances on our taste buds, festival food also packs in excess calories and the adipose tissue we care in the least for. And the guilt just when the most tantalizing favours are finding home in your heart, we care even less for.
But it doesn’t have to be so. It takes just a few steps of “reverse work” to ensure you don’t step a few months behind in your efforts with staying fit with exercise and self care!
Festivals & food go hand in hand! Learn from Anupama Menon, leading Nutritionist in Bangalore, how to indulge mindfully without derailing your diet.
- Don’t feast on the treats just because there are excesses lying around the house, save your treats for the fresh mithai and savouries that are part of the main celebrations. Which means consciousness. It’s the periodic eating through the day that causes damage. Pick and choose your feast times, not days!
- When parties run into late nights and the tummy roars hours after dinner, choose your munchies. Roasted makhana, rice puffs, nuts, dark chocolate, even salad sticks with hummus and no caffeine teas (chamomile, tulsi) can help you ride over late night hunger pangs and cravings.
- Precede planned cheat days with a little bit of food planning. Plan your day’s meals differently during festival days. Lunches and dinners do not have to be big meals. Spike your day with small meals (maybe even several during the day). Listing some examples for meals when you know cheats are inevitable.
1) 2-3 egg whites for breakfast, a bowl of sautéed greens and veggies with sesame seeds, walnuts & a hint of sourcream and a slice of whole wheat bread for lunch, buttermilk and dark chocolate for a snack and then a full blown cheat for dinner.
2) A smoothie for breakfast (fruit and yoghurt with a tbsp of oats), a rice bowl where the hero is vegetable, pesto, some salsa, 3-4 roasted almonds and just a ¼ cup rice all combined together with heat for lunch, lime juice with a tsp of honey & a few nuts for a midmeal and then cheat your heart out for dinner
3) Yoghurt, Buttermilk, 1 cup haldi milk (all organic), a slice of whole wheat bread and 1 tsp butter, a fruit, 2 tbsps oats with a tsp of jaggery and ½ cup almond milk, 10 almonds and such meals through the day @intervals of 1.5 hours each. That’s it. No main meals. The trick is to have these small meals just before you get hungry and then a full blown cheat for dinner. - Strike out the sugar from your caffeinated drinks for the entire month of celebrations, you make up a little for the quota of sugar you will overshoot!
- Keep your digestion smooth in the month of festivities, with all the rich food coming in from various kitchens. Triphala juice, 2 tsps olive oil mixed with the juice of 1 lemon daily before bed, cold pressed green juice, soaked prunes & regulating the salt in your diet are few simple steps that will help.
- Make sure you exercise regularly.
- Eat without guilt, eat without remorse. Life is not just about calories in and calories out. It’s more about raising our happiness quotient!
Damage Control they say. I would rather term the steps we take to balance our meals during festivals as “managing our food”. It’s about management. Managing our meals such that we still feel lighter, we don’t suffer from indigestion, we don’t feel bloated, we manage our calories in an excess of not more that 10-15% than on normal days. Because more than that is just uncomfortable, way away from what we are used to. So when we manage our food, we don’t do it just to fit into our clothes, we do it to continue to feel healthy
