Funny Tales of my Funny Diets
By: Harshad Fad
Tags: Lifestyle, Vegan, Diet, Food, Mindfulness

I had a rather unfortunate epiphany on my 25th birthday. The food I was eating was staying with me in the form of love handles (nowhere close to the acceptable form of an ideal body in popular culture), and that made me think about my diet for the first time.

When you are happy-go-lucky all your life and get struck with the realization that you are already 25, you start looking at your life from a third person’s POV. Both emotionally and physically. When it came to the body, I started getting influenced by the ‘influencers’ who ate like a job and called their body ‘results’. Come to think of it, it was a tragedy, but at that point of time it was motivation.

So I tried and tried until I failed at everything and ended up inventing a new kind of diet.

I tried the vegan diet, to begin with. It felt great, again, to begin with. but living away from home meant I wasn’t getting a food supply as consistent as this plant-based diet would need. My weight dropped and soon I started feeling dizzy. I broke the diet and ate an egg. It filled me with B12. I was a failure, but I was feeling better with cheat meals. Vegan was out of the room and that ended my misery only to fall into another.

I saw a friend eating fish and refusing to eat chicken at a house party. My diet radars sensed something new to try and I discovered pescetarianism. A diet that incorporates seafood as the only source of meat in an otherwise vegetarian intake. I felt the idea was terrific. Only good protein, no bad carbs, or fats or hormone infused poultry! The guilt of killing an animal, low. (You see the problem with that? Yes, I did too, but late. Selective empathy.) So I started with it, but soon as a fresher in the jobs industry, realized that fish wasn’t very kind on my pocket in a city that is nowhere close to a river stream, healthy lake or coastal line. I should have been eating it twice a week but settled on replacing one serving with eggs again. Pescetarianism was as hard to follow as it was to pronounce.

A month later I saw a colleague eating only proteins to lose weight. No carbs. It felt odd. For the first time in many months, I was not influenced. A couple of weeks later that colleague told me how difficult the diet was and she couldn’t keep up with it. Safe to say it hadn’t even helped with her goal. So much pressure to not swallow a carbohydrate — your energy source.

I also heard about this guy Jordan Peterson who advocated a carnivore diet. Eating only beef, salt and water. Day in and day out, 24/7, every year. Well, to put it gently, I have been dumb but not dumber than that. I did the research though, not to judge someone by our preconceived notions. Everything online screamed of stopping Peterson’s maddening food habit.

By this time I was eating non-veg but only home-cooked. If I’m ordering from outside it had to be vegetarian. It felt great mainly because it wasn’t too difficult to follow. But then again, having friends who were more disciplined and followed a more ethical and healthy diet, namely veganism, made me think of my choices and again I was succumbing to my guilt. Those zillion documentaries about veganism only put the last straw in the coffin.

Inside the coffin when everything seemed dark and claustrophobic, I heard someone say, we are what we eat. I heard someone tell, you have only one life. I heard someone say, believe in something and give in to it with conviction. Thank you, there I started an experiment that lifted me off this guilt and showed me the best diet that could be for me. It was called — knowing yourself better. I looked at what I grew up eating. What made me happy. It was a mix of everything, largely greens. Wholesome Indian food with lots of carbs and occasional meat. I knew it was not perfect, but it was keeping me happy. I made positive changes, but gradual, letting the body get used to and not fall into a shock. I guess most of the problems can be solved in life when you know yourself better and have the will to work towards betterment. Often we miss either one of those and sometimes, both.