Breaking the Unhealthy Food chain!!

For the best part of my life I didn’t have to worry about What I am eating, When I am eating and How good the food is! But last couple of years, it has started to change. As I turned 33, I got the realization that my food habits need a drastic change and I need to get control over my diet. I can’t focus on my work and enjoy life if I wake up every morning with one niggling health problem or the other.

Born in a traditional middle class Indian family, I had the luxury of my mother taking care of me with delicious home cooked food every day. That changed when I left home post my 10th grade, chasing an education and a career for myself. So for the next 8 years until I started working, I never cooked or had home cooked food (except on holidays of course!). Not surprisingly, my digestive tracts were not happy! However, they didn’t start complaining yet. Coming from an Indian Marwari family, my love for good food is obvious but my new lifestyle just didn’t allow a healthy diet.

As soon as I started working and got married, things became much better, I started eating more often at home (Thanks to my caring wife!!). Though it was a mix of eating at home and eating out, things were good in general.

But then something happened, I turned 30! And I moved to US!!. As a result, two things happened! One, my gut started showing signs of intolerance towards certain type of food and second, thanks to the highly commercial food and drinks market in US, my daily sugar intake skyrocketed!!

Before I realized, my breakfast Poha got replaced with Bagel with creamcheese and cereals. Traditional Indian street food got replaced with Waffles and Pancakes, Nimbu Pani(Indian version of lemonade but healthier) got replaced with plethora of sugary off the shelf beverages. Last, but not the least, a small scoop of icecream every other week got replaced with a pint every other day(but costing the same!).

Thanks to this sugar onslaught, I found myself struggling with problems like increase thirst, dryness of mouth and eyes, skin irritation, fatigue and frequent headaches etc. almost on a daily basis. The lack of exercise didn’t help either as I gained atleast 25 pounds. My Vitamin D level took a nose dive to below normal range with other nutrition metrics dropping as well. Adding to the pain, the lack of physical activity and poor ergonomics resulted in chronic back pain issues.

Almost 1 in 3 person in US either has diabetes or is prediabetic and before I realized I was already on the highway to join this undesired club. Unless! I took drastic steps to change it NOW!

The first step towards bringing a change is awareness and will to change. It became quite apparent to me that I needed a solution! But that’s the easier part, finding the right solution is the difficult one. Changing my dietary habits build over a decade, was certainly not going to be easy. With a plethora of diet plans, youtube videos, blogs and friendly advice available. It felt frustrating as well as shooting in the dark for months. Most of the issues I had were symptoms of many possible underlying problems.

After months and years of hit and try, I found that the root cause of each of them came down to a certain ingredients and lack of physical exercise. So here is what I have started doing over the past 1-1.5 years…

Avoid food with high sugar content- Off the shelf beverages, Ice creams, high fructose bread, so called health bars, desserts and so on.. Trust me, the label behind most of the products in super market will blow your mind. Do you know the large AMC pop corn bucket has close to 1000 calories!
Exercise- I am trying to find time for exercises and break out of the sedentary lifestyle. I ran my first ever 5K last summer! But I have been going back and forth with my back pain which is not helping in being consistent. But, I have not lost heart!
Get conscious of my body posture- Spending most of the awake time in front of a phone or laptop screen is a recipe for disaster for spine health. I am trying to move more and work on a standing desk whenever I can.
Take health supplements- This is the one which actually came from the doctor’s prescription when I was diagnosed with very low Vitamin D levels.

Habits are hard to change and specially when it comes to food habits. Overall, I am still a work in progress and will write more about my journey to get healthy in my subsequent blogs but for now. Hope you make changes to your diet too if needed and have a good healthy life!!

PS- The plate of Idli in the blog post image is a healthier form of Idli made with mixed lentils and brown rice. It’s served with spicy cucumber chutney!

~Vishal