Stay fit, stay hit

Bollywood diva Shilpa Shetty shares her fitness mantra

Shilpa Shetty Kundra in her book ‘The Great Indian Diet’ urges the readers to stay healthy. The 40-year-old Bollywood actress states that writing is not her forte, however, after losing weight people were curious to know how she did it and that triggered the idea to pen the book. She is already working on her next book and reveals that it will also be on health and fitness.

She shares a few diet tips here:

Add Indian ingredients in your diet:

Haldi powder: Turmeric is a powerful medicine.
Curry leaves: Carbohydrates, energy, fibre, calcium, copper and minerals.
Jeera: Cumin, an excellent source of iron, it helps in digestion, boosts the immune system.
Soy milk is very good for women.
Ghee: Have two spoons of ghee every afternoon.
Fresh grated coconut and a high fibre diet are also a must.

Don’t opt for western style:
Use ghee and mustard oil instead of olive oil, rajma rice instead of quinoa. Madonna is eating toast with ghee and we are senseless to use olive oil for cooking.

What is bad today?
Milk is not good nowadays and because of it, girls are reaching puberty early, at the age of 8 or 9. This is so because, we are not feeding cows grass, as we used to in early days.
Chicken is not good because you can grow a hen in 4 weeks with injections.

Biryani or kebabs:
I am a Mangalorean and I love fish and coconuts. One can eat biryanis and kebabs on Sundays. Even I used to, but since one year I am a vegetarian.

Food habits of today’s generation:
The current generation is indulging in food habits that are not complementary to their bodies. They drink soft drinks, which are dangerous and that caramel colour can give us cancer. People say that they drink diet coke, however diet sodas have a higher rate of calories.
Don’t go for any fad or exotic diet.

Shilpa as fitness freak:
Before my pregnancy, my weight used to be 56 to 60 kilos. But with pregnancy, I put on 32 kilos. In 2012, for ‘Nach Baliye’, I couldn’t fit into anything. I called up Manish Malhotra and asked him to send across some anarkalis, with a lot of kalis that would camouflage my flab; I just decided to keep it simple. Everything takes time and needs hard work. Every person has a different body type so just focus on being fit and everything else will follow. As far as I am concerned, it took only three-and-a-half months, the weight was gone.

Don’t depend too much on Google:
Recently, when my son had a mosquito bite, I diagnosed it as chicken pox after looking it up online. Even if you want to check any diet plans online, you may get many web pages and we may incorporate details into our diet without having any knowledge of what the food is doing to us. Don’t do that.

Myth of diet:
70 per cent of weight loss is mainly due to proper diet and 30 per cent is workout. Eat home-cooked Indian food instead of fattening food. Discipline is the most important element, which many lack and should work on.

Life style modification
Chew your water, drink your food
Don’t have water in between your food. Have it before or after.
Don’t have anything raw after 4 pm and no fruits after 6 pm.
Don’t over depend on medicines, for cough or cold.
Do some outdoor activity daily, like walking or jogging.
Fasting is the best form of detox.