IT ALL BEGINS WITH PUTTING ON WEIGHT AND OBESITY

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IT ALL BEGINS WITH PUTTING ON WEIGHT AND OBESITY

Uncategorized November 21, 2025 , by Tara Narayan

SIGH! Go and crazy and pop a lot of rubbish in your mouth and then don’t move for hours and before you’re old and older, you’re in trouble with your body beautiful. It’s been my problem for forever. I know enough to be good, very good, but when I lose my mind I’m my own worst enemy! And over the years I’ve seen how waxing and waning on the scales has been a perennial problem with me too amongst a whole lot of other folk who have enough cash on them to indulge and over-indulge in what we perceive as the good life of wine, food and whatever else.
Last two weeks I’ve got this on my mind anew and I dare say many of us dying slowly — either out of being over-nutritioned or under-nutritioned. I certainly am for most of my life I’ve eaten indiscriminately even after I learned that what you put in your mouth determines what you will suffer from as time goes by – overweight or obesity sets the stage for a host of latter-day miseries.
Most of us are conscious of the dangers of being overweight and its relationship with the excessive consumption of refined carbohydrates – all the whites of white bread, white rice, white sugar, white oil, etc. If you’re asking me Goans should cut down on stuffing themselves with its bakery breads and instead re-discover the millet bhakri of an older tradition. One gets such wonderful feedback from those who have ruthlessly eliminated the white refined carbs from their life…I remember an ENT doctor telling me how much of his superfluous weigh melted away when he started eating a nachne chappati or bhakri daily for breakfast and even lunch and dinner. Much though I would like to follow suit I have not been able to swing this for myself.
Over the years I have seen how my erratic and emotional eating habits has led to the waxing and waning of my weight which tends to tilt towards being over-nutritioned rather than under-nutritioned. One bypass surgery later in 2011, I learned a lot about the heart, arteries, venous and capillary systems of body beautiful and how they turn to concrete as time goes by, depending on such things as oxidation, insulin resistance, the slowing down of mitochondria engines, venous insufficiency, reduced production of nitric oxide and much else – we begin to die feet upwards or something like that. I guess I am dying feet upwards currently in my mid-70s and have more or less given up along with some of my friends!
MEDICAL science educates us endlessly about what to eat, what not to eat, what diet is best, etc. For who doesn’t want to feel leaner, healthier, stronger, to slow down the degeneration of aging…the rich and the beautiful are forever seeking the fountain of youth and especially so in the western world where women don’t even want to have babies naturally for fear of losing their slenderness!
Our mod con civilization of the good life is bad for us and learned doctors will say the best diet is the paleo diet of no carbs, no sugar, no dairy and so on but this is such a rigid restricted diet that most drop it after feeling deprived most of the time. Hey, worldwide, most of us battling the problem of obesity today – it impacts men and women majorly. Yet few of us can free ourselves from sugar, candies, bread, cookies, cakes, potatoes, white flour foods, pizza, pasta, sodas, sherbats, all the industrial junk foods our palates find so easy to relish now. You get the idea. The path to obesity today is not lined with ignorance but just lack of willpower, plus I will say the government of day will promote and celebrate wellbeing with hi fi millet conferences and Ayush exhibitions but no, there’s no ground level infrastructure for citizens to benefit from nutritious food…sattvic, alkalizing, antioxidant.
At some point of time the body will give up trying to save you and go into self-destruct mode. The drugs of mainstream Allopathy will help for a while but all drugs work on the principle of diminishing returns. In wealthy places like Goa there’s more diabetes, more heart disease, more cancer…recently, came news of a friend of mine, colon cancer, the statistics for this cancer are very high in Goa and her daughter-in-law who had to take care of the nitty gritty of caretaking of a very debilitated patient post-surgery shared that they removed a “horrid tight mass of constipated shit from her colon during the surgery!” If our diets are pro-constipation we will spend hours in the bathroom trying to get it all out and of course more or less everyone is taking “isabgul” daily or some form of laxative to make it easier to evacuate. Fruit like papaya too can be gently laxative, also a prune or two, a date or two, a banana, in fact any fruit with a few exceptions before breakfast…a friend of mind soaks a teaspoon of …. Overnight in a glass of water and drinks the jello like cool mass next morning, this takes care of her like a whistle, she confided.
ALL this is to say it is never too late to take stock of yourself! Body weight, body mass index, fat mass, belly fat thickness, waist/hip/thigh circumference … all define body wellbeing. We never ask ourselves how many calories we consume daily and what kind of calories. How many of us limit ourselves to 2,000 to 2,200 calories per day? How we eat also tells a story…do you know we may not gulp large quantities of water during a meal either before, in between or before? For this will slow down digestion; or that we should always eat fresh before cooked…the fruit and salads before cooked main dishes? Most of us don’t know, if we did we would not eat fruit salad as a dessert but as an appetizer!
All this and much more. In my latest reading up on the subject of losing weight safely Dr Al Sears, MD, CNS of USA is prescribing something called “Ultra Primal Lean” and I learn that NASA has many healing secrets but these are not being shared with citizens to safeguard the profits of the powerful killer pharma lobbies of the US…can something called long-wave light therapy prevent Alzheimer’s disease for example? There’s also something called “Apollo Gold” – you may check up on this if you wish.
IT’S very difficult to decide what disease is worst to suffer from as we grow old, older! I’m convinced it’s the dementia diseases including Alzheimer when your brain cells start dying…and you start forgetting things and are no longer in control of what’s happening to you. You life is taken over by folk (relatives or caretakers) who may be kind or unkind and deceitful, and outright cruel. I see this all around me nowadays. Of, course if one is on medications post-surgery and that too several times, this too may be a contributing factor for the body’s integrity starves for want of the fresh enzmes, fiber and trace vitamins we get on we eat fruit and tangy lemon-tossed salads and bountiful raita.
And that’s why when I’m eating one of the veg thali meal deal down town Panjim when they have a portion of cut salad of julienned cabbage, carrot, beetroot, onion, chopped green coriander, etc. I eat that first although I wish I could find a jowar chappati instead of the wheat chappati everywhere which goes from good to bad depending on where you’re eating. Recently, I got these finely deep-fried puri in my thali meal, the best in town amongst Goan eateries, like the fine “luchi” of West Bengal…refined flour of couse…when cold such puri are inedible. It is true, whenever I eat refined white breads or such friend puri the very next day my stomach will punish me! Usually, I avoid. But sometimes…what are the options to whole wheat chappati or bread or white rice in Goa? When you’re eating out? I always ask if I may get a jowar chappati but the answer is always no, likewise with “ukde sheet” which is more flavorful!
Well, think about all this, my friends and don’t just think. What connection does what you eat day in and day out has on your health issues of blood pressure to diabetes to heart to joint to cancerous problems? It is never late to make an effort to clean up body beautiful so that it stays on the alkaline and not acidic road to perdition! This week I’m giving myself the same advice.