The latest from diet gurus is that if you want to lose weight and acquire a smart shape, you should eat five meals instead of three. When most of us rushed to embrace what sounded like a dream diet plan, what happened at the end of the day was that instead of losing weight, we gained!

The result was that people gave up all hope of losing weight and returned to their habitual diet, labeling the five to six meal plan a useless strategy.

Everyone wants to get rid of excess fat and shape up. In some cases, as a result of a temporary fit of disappointment, they resort to taking pills or quacks’ powders [phakki or safoof] to lose weight and end up developing a whole set of brand new health problems.

Forget you ever heard about the five meal plan … this one is far better suited to the desi palate and lifestyle

So here are some good tips to lose weight which I have tried out myself.

Let’s begin by establishing the fact that having five or six meals a day is not a flawed strategy. It is just a gimmick that would affect different people differently. The secret is only one: the number of calories that you take on a daily basis according to your body mass ratio and body mass index.

Did you ever think about the origin of five or six meals a day? It does not require extensive reading. All research or studies are conducted either in Europe or the West. Climate, environment, culture and food from that part of the world is totally different from ours. We import ideas without paying attention to the context they came about in. The spirit behind the five or six meals philosophy is to put less burden on your stomach, enhance the process of burning calories and to be able to light exercises at anytime.

For example, if you are working most of the times sitting in an armchair in front of your laptop, and if you want to follow the five to six meals plan, you can start doing any weight or cardio exercise for two-minutes after every one hour. If you work for ten hours and take such a break every hour, you will end up burning 200 calories. A great achievement provided you have not exceeded the required calorie intake.

I tried the five-meal plan and found it useless because it does not fit into our culture. We love spicy food; we can’t abandon it. We can’t really cut down on our oil use either. These are our chatkharas and we love them.

So, here’s my plan — the 1 ½ meal plan. But first I’m going to tell you about my physique, life and work style so you can understand how the plan works and how to make it work for you:

Being an entrepreneur, I don’t have to get up at six or seven in the morning, shave, have breakfast and rush to the office. I get up at 11.30 or 12 noon, so breakfast time is gone! I have a heavy breakfast around lunch time — four fried eggs (around 320 calories); five bran bread slices (dry) — around 450 calories and one mug of strong tea with little milk (30 calories). This is breakfast within 1,000 calories. Dinner follows at 9pm — anything of my choice, spicy, oily but with one light chapatti. I make sure everything stays under 700 calories. But that isn’t enough, you still need cardio to burn the fat and this is what I choose to do:

At 4pm, I will do 30 or 45-minute staircase exercises. This is probably the greatest cardio exercise. Do it for ten minutes and you’ll see why.

I must mention that I have a clever formula here. The question is not how long you do the exercise for but how many floors you have covered.

The formula is simple: When I am fresh and energetic, I will do the staircase for 10-minute with a stopwatch and calculate how many floors I climbed. This then becomes my benchmark.

Of course, after the first 10 minutes your speed will slow down (unless you have developed a great stamina with practice) — but my yardstick is number of floors.

The height of my ground floor is 10 feet six inches. Same is the height of the first floor. So, I climb up two floors. Each floor has 18 steps. This means that a 30-minute staircase exercise is like I climbed up 80 floors and came down!

This is a true cardio. Now if you don’t have a staircase then go out and get an elliptical; that works far better than a treadmill.Besides the staircase, I do 20-min resistance band exercise — one muscle a day. I hit the bed at 3am after drinking half a liter of milk. This plan keeps me fit. My weight neither drops, nor increases. But if I want six-packs, I will have to keep the same diet plan but increase cardio as well as include power exercises.

The advantage of the one and a half meal plan is that I don’t give up my culture, my spices, my favourite dishes and yet I stay fit. But let me warn you: this means no sweets, no mithai, no sohan halwa!

Otherwise, your plan is gapoojee gapoojee gum gum (as delivered by Upendra Limaye in the movie Sarkar Raj)

The writer is a freelance jou-rnalist and researcher based in Islamabad.

Yamankalyan@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, January 18th, 2015

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