Rujuta Diwekar's new book explores easy, sustainable diets and exercises as keys to a healthy lifestyle

Nutritionist Rujuta Diwekar sums up the simplest way to a healthy lifestyle: “In all our heads, we are constantly thinking of willpower, the ability to deny ourselves something, some crazy amount of discipline so that we can just get fit. What it really requires is education and some self-regulation.” In her latest book, The 12-Week Fitness Project, she enumerates the 12 sustainable fitness guidelines that made-up her 12-week project, which kicked off at the start of 2018. Through an open survey conducted fully on social media, it witnessed a participation of as many as 1.25 lakh people across the world who registered themselves on the Google form created by the nutritionist and her team for the experiment. [caption id=“attachment_7924561” align=“alignnone” width=“825”] As many as 1.25 lakh people registered for the 12-week-fitness project set-up by nutritionist Rujuta Diwekar.[/caption] The focus was, as Diwekar explains, on ensuring that the guidelines were such that despite being in an open setting with no artificial control over the stimuli, people would be able to adopt them in a very effortless, easy manner with children, family members or colleagues in tow. This was a deliberate effort, Diwekar states, “So you don’t need to stand apart from the rest of the world just because you are following these guidelines.” Beginning around the inception of the new year, the project aimed at helping people keep up with their resolution of focusing on fitness, allowing them to plan and structure it, and as far as possible ‘resolution-proof’ themselves for the rest of their lives’ in matters of health and fitness. The project’s success lay in peoples’ ability to keep on following those guidelines long after their 12 weeks were up. Diwekar is hugely popular for her philosophy of consuming ’local, seasonal, traditional’ cuisine for a healthy body, and her emphasis on sustainability in daily habits, diet and exercise routines. In keeping with this principle, the fitness project was also divided into three broad categories: lifestyle or habits, exercise, and food. While adding a spoonful of ghee to your dal-rice, or reassigning those extra five minutes of sleep to five Suryanamaskar seemed like doable feats, lifestyle changes were the hardest to implement for people, she recalls. Enjoying one meal without a gadget, keeping away all gadgets 30 minutes before bedtime or keeping the phone at eye level (even while reading this article on your mobile!) – are a crucial part of Diwekar’s fitness model. On ’local, seasonal, traditional’ Known for being the nutritionist for various actors in the Hindi film industry, including Kareena Kapoor Khan, Alia Bhatt and Varun Dhawan, Rujuta Diwekar has now become a household name too. [caption id=“attachment_7924571” align=“alignnone” width=“825”] In The 12-Week Fitness Project, Diwekar enumerates the guidelines that made-up her 2018 project.[/caption] However, when the Mumbai-based dietician first stepped into the field, nutrition was hardly the full-fledged profession that it is today. “It was either something that a school drop-out did or a bored person kind of did,” she says. So in spite of being passionate about fitness, coming from an academic family, she was urged to first finish her graduation, by which time SNDT Women’s University and IIT Mumbai came up with a post-graduate course in sports science and nutrition. “Otherwise, it would’ve meant going abroad and studying, and I come from a middle-class family, so there are no funds to go abroad and study, especially anything (on pursuing which) you don’t know what your income will be.” But this course — which she could self-finance owing to her work as a part-time gym instructor — afforded her an entryway into the field, and it was from day one that she realised “the kind of diets people are doing are completely unsustainable.” While many nutrition theories hinge on foods such as low-fat khakra or sukha bhel, Diwekar has always insisted on full-fat milk in your masala chai to be enjoyed with a khakra that is best prepared by roasting last night’s leftover roti, until it achieves a good crunch. “A healthy person is a person who is also happy,” she notes, “But there was this intermingling of healthy with weight loss, and if people used wrong methods, if people denied themselves things that they culturally resonated with, they weren’t happy even if they had lost weight, and they were surely not getting any healthier.” Eventually, she realised that better alternatives were to be found in our own kitchens and in the wisdom of our grandmothers, yoga and Ayurveda. “But they were just kind of under-valued, under-sold, or not even spoken about, as far as mainstream health and fitness went.” Eventually, the author of works such as Indian Superfoods and Don’t Lose Your Mind, Lose Your Weight blended the ancient knowledge of food culture that has been passed through oral traditions with the formal training she received to help people achieve their fitness goals. Along the line she realised, she says, that people were also happy to look at parameters beyond weight loss, which allowed her to ask them to eat what was local, seasonal, traditional. “But it took me about 10 years to realise that this is also sustainable, that this is also kind of future-proof, this is also something people can do when they have a holiday or when someone is sick, or when they travel, or when life turns upside down,” she says. Policy matters Diwekar is one of the few dieticians who has steadfastly approached advocacy around health from a public policy intervention standpoint. She has focused on nourishment as crucial to children’s health through her talks and her works such as Notes For Healthy Kids. She elaborates that in order to achieve good fitness levels on a national scale, we need to adopt what are essentially termed as ‘double-duty actions’ that address the ‘double burden of malnourishment.’ She explains this double burden of malnourishment: “Globally, we are a two billion population of micronutrient deficiencies. India has the most number of malnourished children, and we have the second highest number of obese children, so our disparity is wide, and it’s time we addressed obesity as seriously under-nutrition, because both have the exact same reasons. In fact, WHO also recently come out with what they call double-duty actions, because you don’t need one kind of action to tackle under-nutrition and another kind to handle obesity.” Yet, in spite of the gradually changing perspectives around health, to this day, even as she is approached by clients who know about her work, many of them are individuals who have tried different kinds of diets but are now looking for a more sustainable alternative. “So I would say that maybe 10 years ago if people were cutting out fats from their diet and were suffering because of that, now people are just cutting out carbohydrates or grains from their diet and then suffering because of that.” Diwekar’s wry, humorous take on the food industry is well-known. A reductionist view about food, she opines with the same matter-of-fact mannerism, “ye carb hai, ye protein hai (this is a carb, that one’s a protein) works for the food industry, not for people. It works for profit, it doesn’t work for people.” She uses peanuts to articulate how the food industry not only influences our eating habits, but also puts local vendors out of business. Peanuts are part of Diwekar’s daily diet, a meal she looks forward to every day, but over a period of time, it has become difficult to get good khara sengdana (salted peanuts) in the city, she rues. “Because there was just so much misinformation about peanuts that we almost drove the regular chana, sengdana wala out of business.”

“Today, you have people who are eating peanut butter and going for their workout, but the local chana sengdana wala has lost his profession.”

Misinformation around fitness also extends to exercise. Through her work, Don’t Lose Out, Work Out, the fitness guru has busted myths surrounding strength training, yoga and functional workouts. This interviewer asked Diwekar what an appropriate retort would be for the criticism that she and many other women receive for doing their dead-lifts and their squats, for doing strength training. “The best response is to continue doing your dead-lifts,” she says, smiling. “You need the education that strength training is critical, and you need the regulation that whatever weight you lift, you are lifting it with good technique and form, or that you are not weight-training today just because you felt guilty of eating or drinking something last night, or that you are running a fever and you are still weight-training.” “We do know that specially in the elderly, strength training is extremely critical because we are living longer than ever, which means we are at the risk of developing more diseases than ever. And the one thing which can prevent all diseases is exercise.” She continues, “We are not people who are either doing suryanamaskars, or the ones who are doing just strength training. You can do both. In fact, in the 12-week guideline, we had both. And we had an amazing response to people picking up strength-training.” Now, Rujuta Diwekar has kickstarted the 2020 fitness project, which furthers her earlier guidelines. She concludes by saying that one should have aamla (Indian gooseberry), chawanprash and soonth (dry ginger powder). “Winters also call for helpings of gajar halwa, bajra roti, white makkhan (butter) and haldi subzi (turmeric vegetable),” she signs off. ‘The 12-Week Fitness Project’ has been published by Juggernaut Books