ASK ANYONE and chances are they will say that what to eat and what not to eat is their biggest dilemma and headache! With the healthcare industry putting stress on preventive healthcare, the message going out is: Change your diet, change your lifestyle! Preventive healthcare in itself is a huge business today, yet people high and mighty and low and humble find themselves lost in a plethora of diets prescribed to them, there are hundreds of carefully honed diets to meet the specific needs. If you respect your mind and body, heart and soul, sort yourself out and find the right diet for yourself, and the right lifestyle.

IN the uppercrust glam world of celebrities, VIPs and VVIPs everyone’s is chasing this diet and that diet to maintain body beautiful. Everyone is walking down crooked and straight paths to lose weight for obesity is today number one disease setting the stage for all the other diseases of gross lifestyles or something like that. We have so much food in the world to write about and over the years I’ve heard of all kinds of diets good, bad and ugly.
Personally, I think most traditional diets set against environment and cultural background are fine, you grow up with them but how long do we continue to adhere to them along with all other things being equal, like lifestyle. After all, what is the oldest human diet of them all when we were foraging or chasing…mainly fruit, tubers, vegetables, honey, fish, meat. Whatever was easily accessible and could serve or convert easily to food for man, woman and child. When food was hard to come by or miserable most didn’t live to see their 50th year; today more and more may dream to make it to their 100th birthday, that is if they work on it and nothing untoward happens like a dropped atom bomb.
Now what a long way we have come with what we shove into our mouths determining our diseases from blood pressure to diabetes to number one killer heart disease, arthritis, gout, cancer, cancers terminal and not so terminal…after the big C it is the dementia diseases which we are preoccupied with in our urban societies because nobody wants to suffer from any form of dementia and the much feared Alzheimer’s disease.
How are we living so wrongly in mind and body, heart and soul, all having a bearing on one another? I have friends who keep changing their diets like they change their attire…the race is on to heal oneself from a plague of degenerative diseases. Doctors prescribe diets to patients and we now have some most prescribed diets; for example, heart patients are usually told to practice the Dr Dean Ornish diet, or in India the Dr Bimal Chajjer diet where you shun refined oil altogether, no seed oils (very evil); cook your food in water only, do your tempering in water. We have an entire water-based cuisine and I’m all for it, ban all frying, only steaming and occasionally stir-frying but only in a bit of say olive oil or rice bran oil which have a high burn index.

The most praised diet is the Mediterranean diet which is on top of the list of best diets to live by (according to US News & World Reports’ best diets’ list). The Mediterranean diet is the No. 1 diet for 2025, it is mostly plant-based, diabetes-friendly and heart-healthy according to a report of January 13, 2025. The people of the Mediterranean countries live primarily on fruit, vegetables, whole grains, beans, nuts, healthy fats like olive oil, fish, poultry and they don’t do too many sweets or processed foods or red meat.
HONEY, now we have thousands of diets, one diet for each ailment and malady. A diet for losing weight, another for gaining weight, to lower cholesterol, to live a thousand years, etcetera. Just to clue up a little bit here some diets prescribed are bizarre. Like say the new-fangled 25 diet – where you consume a normal number of calories for five days and then for two, non-consecutive days, eat just 25 percent of the usual calorie total – 500 calories for women, 600 calories for men.
Might as well do a starvation diet and contact tuberculosis which is primarily a disease of malnutrition if you’re asking me; and the higher up folk are not considering this vital aspect of TB (never mind how huge the public budget to make India TB-free).
We have the top 10 diets as per the USD News & World Report for 2025: Led by the Mediterranean diet there’s the DASH diet, the Flexitarian diet, the MIND diet, Mayo Clinic diet, TLC diet, Menopause diet, Dr Weil’s Anti-Inflammatory diet, Volumetrics diet, Cleaveland Clinic diet. Go read up more about them independently and see if you fancy any one for yourself and are able to work on it on a long term enduring basis.

RECENTLY, I got fascinated by the Flexitarian diet which a friend of mine was waxing lyrical over. What is a flexitarian diet? It’s a flexible vegetarian diet largely but without removing meat completely…say this is a flexible vegetarian diet which means you eat mostly plant based foods, while allowing the occasional small portion of meat be it lamb or meat, or fish, sea food.
The flexitarian diet has proved to reduce the risk of type 2 diabetes and improved metabolic health and blood pressure – blood pressure is the first thing to redress if you’re feeling unhealthy. Begin with dealing with your blood pressure high or low…and then move on to adjusting your diet to redress your blood sugar high or low; and so on. Just by eating better and fresher a lot of good things happen over time, not instantly.
Also keep in mind that with body beautiful everything is linked and whatever you do impacts in totality. What happens when one part of the body impacts another part and so on…all problems are rooted in the absurd amount of food choices we have counting from natural to unnatural and super unnatural which we pop in our mouth. Some folk don’t eat fresh food prepared from scratch at all, but practically live on industrial foods of various denomination in the US and in the countries of west in general.
OF COURSE, today, thanks to so many enlightened foodie movements which also redress Mother Earth’s woes, we’re much off as we learn the many advantages of eating organically cultivated fruit and veggies, all about growing local and what from farm to table means…it’s the folk at the bottom of the pyramid of the good life who’re struggling with health issues to do with mass consumption of industrially-raised chicken, chicken this and chicken that, and hamburgers, pizzas, doughnuts. A slew of other debilitating foods which pack us off sooner or later to a doctor’s and hence to a hospital bed.
WHICH reminds me to add here that the Cleaveland diet is largely based on the Mediterranean diet with its focus on seasonal fruit, veggies, whole grain, lean meat, plant proteins, seafood, beans, nuts and dairy…wholesome foods not high in added sugars, sodium, calories and saturated fat. The Cleaveland diet is high in protein and low in fat, carbohydrates and calories, roughly 1,400 to 1,200 to 1,100 calories to try to boost metabolism and burn fat. The key to fighting poor health is really to plan your day eating-wise ahead of time, this is what most of us don’t do. Then we end up eating whatever “rubbish” we can find within easy access when hunger pangs strike!
Like, for example, I skip breakfast and by 11am I’m hungry and if out at the market place I will succumb to the nearby “chaat” outlet, and before I know it I’m feasting on fried batatvada or samosa with a few more things to follow like “dahi papri” or “bhelpuri” and even “ragda-patice”…the chaat range is amazing and do consider our desi fast food slightly more health-conscious than then the industrialized fast food chains who market and perform with so much efficiency, if I may say so! Anyway, I go home, finish up whatever is left of lunch and snooze the afternoon away. Any wonder why I’m putting on weight again!
Right, I don’t do the right thing at the right time and I don’t plan – so I guess I’m ready to say goodbye cruel world any day soon. The world is not cruel, it’s more like I want to be cruel to myself! Sigh. That’s an old story now with which I’ve grown old and older and I don’t think I can change old habits now.