Hello and welcome to another edition of #FlavoursomeTuesday.

Believe it or not, the busyness of December has spilled over into January . We have just about entered the second week and I find that I am still on the treadmill of activity of December.

It was indeed one hectic month with festivities around Christmas time reaching a crescendo by New Year’s Eve. Of course with most of the family coming home from colder climes, it was only to be expected and December was a delightful month of family gatherings, dinner parties and reunions of old friends. If my mouth wasn’t busy eating, it was busy talking. And if my fingers weren’t occupied making a spicy curry, they were busy leafing through menus and dialling in takeaways .

So obviously now with my trousers a tad too tight, it is time for a re-think of my meal plans. In other words, it is time to rein in the calories or GO ON A DIET.

If you’ve been anything like me, you’ve definitely done it all or at least know about it all.

The first diet I ever did in my life was actually a combination of eating and exercising. And I think this is the one that works the best. I managed to keep my weight off on this self discovered diet till the babies were born. Then began a whole range of diets that were the fad of the day.

One of the fundamentals of life is that you are what you eat. So if you eat lots, there’s more of you  especially the love handles that you don’t love. But on the other hand, exercising those excess calories can become quite tedious especially if you’re not particularly athletic.

So I naturally gravitated towards the diets that promised weightloss while eating!

The Atkin’s Diet promised dramatic results if you had a low carbohydrate diet and concentrated on proteins and fats. While I didn’t really embark on this, I know that Hubby Dear lost half his weight while on this regime. I might also add that he was much younger .

The next diet that I went on was the celebrated General Motors Diet which offered you n on-off diet plan where you ate specific foods on specific days and repeated the cycle after a gap of four days. The good thing about this diet was that you could still manage it around your social life and lose weight.

When one of my cousins developed a heart condition, he went on Dean Ornish’s diet while his wife kept him compnay doing  The Palm Beach Diet .

Last year my father did the Mediterranean Diet and my daughter did the Dukan diet another diet that was popularised by Kate Middleton’s drastic pre-wedding weight loss.

In the early 80’s  Fit for Life was the fad and many of my friends lost weight only by eating fruit till noon. Then after that they only ate carbohydrates with vegetables or protein with vegetables. I did this very briefly as this meant I couldn’t enjoy my mutton curry rice.

For a while, the Vijaya Venkat Diet was very popular with my friends largely because the renowned dietician used to also provide the meals. This greatly reduced the stress of cooking separate food and many people swore by this program.

Rujuta Diwekar’s eating advice is more practical and doable, concentrating on eating basic home cooked food, avoiding processed food and eating food that our bodies are traditionally used to eating.

But all these diets essentially promise one thing – eating yourself slim. Now this does seem impossible isn’t it? However, what matters is what you eat and when and how.

While this does make you a bit of a calorie counter, it does help in controlling your weight which in the long run improves your general health.

 

So I’m off now, to the market, to buy some fresh produce so that I can get down to my own diet that is a combination of all the diets above.

Have any of you gone on a diet? I would love to hear which diet worked for you in the comments below.

Till the next #FlavoursomeTuesday,

Adios amigos.

My dear friends, #FlavoursomeTuesday happened  when my food blog died a virtual death last year. I had a lot of food stories to share and wanted to hear others’ stories too. So I decided to start a Blog party where everyone was  invited to share  stories of yum and not so yum.

But as everyone knows, hosting a party singlehandedly is hard work. Luckily Shilpa of Metanoia offered to co-host it with me. And this effervescent, bubbly blogger was a Godsend.

Since then, the two of us have been hosting this initiative where we invite other bloggers to share their foodie memories with us.

However , we’ve decided that with so many initiatives, memes, blog hops and challenges it often becomes difficult if not tedious for bloggers to post every Tuesday. So from February onwards we will host #FlavoursomeTuesday only on the first Tuesday of every month. 

We do hope you will join in and our table in February is full of yummy stories. 

Hoping to see you then,

Bellybytes & Shilpa.