Shilpa Shetty Kundra really is an excellent example of someone who practises what she preaches. Her posture is flawless, her demeanour calm and poised, and she handles the crowd of admiring fans that gather after her session at Penguin’s Spring Fever 2016 with charming ease. Meeting Shilpa is coming face-to-face with the result of the discipline with which she leads her life. She is a picture of good health, a fact that she stress is the more important fallout of her fitness and diet routines.
At the session, titled after Shilpa and her co-writer, lifestyle coach and health expert Luke Coutinho’s latest book, “The Great Indian Diet”, the actress is a doubtless hit. Accompanied by Coutinho, along with Yoga expert Payal Gudwani Tiwari and the session’s moderator, Palki Sharma, Shilpa answered questions directed at her with a frank, easy directness; in a manner that suggests confidence and poise, and a command over the topic she speaks on. At the interview, she exercises the same straightforwardness, and begins with the issue that she thinks is the most crucial and problematic result of skewed body image perceptions and goals. “The world over, people have become more weight obsessed than health obsessed.” It is this mindset that “The Great Indian Diet” sets out to change, handling the idea of healthy living and balancing it with the need to lose weight.
Both Coutinho and Shilpa tackle the idea of Indians moving away from the traditional Indian food preparations and habits, and stress on the need to rediscover this aspect of their culture. “We don't value don't we have. Home-grown ingredients are any day better than the preserved ingredients of the west”, says Shilpa, and goes on to expand on the benefits of ghee and coconut oil.
“Why do we need to wait till Madonna says she puts ‘clarified butter’ on her toast to value our own homemade ghee?” The obsession with weight, coupled with foreign fads that make their way to our fitness routines, becomes extremely harmful. “Fads is what’s killing us. Most people want quick fix, and Google is god. So you have a question on how to lose weight and you put it onto Google.
Some eight crore sites will open up with suggestions on losing weight. Some of them you should shut as soon as you open, because they are terrible for you.”
It is this shared outlook towards diets and western fitness fads that brought Coutinho and Shilpa together. After her son Viaan’s birth, Shilpa remembers putting on weight. “I put on 32 kilos post pregnancy. I was a person and a half!” She speaks of her insecurities, and of staying home for months to keep away from the public eye. When she did decide to lose the weight she had gained, Shilpa managed her diet with the discipline she had grown up with. “It isn't easy, you have to work with discipline without overdoing things. Diet doesn't mean to eat less. It's about eating right.” Extending this idea to her young son, Shilpa felt the need to draw up a diet plan for him too. “I was a young mother, and he had just started eating solids. I wanted to know what I should give him, what I shouldn't.” Having heard of Coutinho, she decided to turn to the expert for help. “During those four months he would come home for Viaan, I was on my diet too, shedding the weight I had gained.”
Over a lunch with Shilpa, Coutinho noted her eating habits and remarked that it was refreshing to see someone who belonged to the film industry eating normally, not starving themselves and subsisting on protein shakes. “I told him that I liked keeping it true to being Indian and eating in the traditional, Indian way, and he revealed that he was toying with the idea of a book based on exactly that concept.” Later, Shilpa and Coutinho met again on a flight, and Coutinho showed her his notes on the book. “I told him this was amazing and I completely believed in this. And then we decided to write the book together, to tackle the myth with Indian food, with spices, and how we have actually changed the way we make Indian food.”
“The Great Indian Diet” works on levels, breaking myths, exploring the science of eating healthy, and eating natural, and proposing the great Indian diet plan to its readers. For her own success in following this diet plan, Shilpa credits the discipline with which she was raised. “I am very proud of my middle-class background. I am who I am because of the way I was brought up. We were not encouraged to have aerated drinks, junk food. There was no question of having a coke with the meals. The options were nimboo paani, juice or water. We had a certain discipline when it came to even snacking. We had to ask permission before raiding the wafer box or banana chips. Chocolate was only on weekends.” Later, this discipline became a part of Shilpa herself, and made her more health conscious. It is this kind of upbringing that she wants for her son too. “But today’s generation steers towards junk food because there are far more opportunities to get them and far more availability, which creates a lust for them that is more widespread.”
The ultimate goalWhile the title of her book suggests a manual for losing weight, Shilpa steers away from this, instead insisting that losing weight is not the ultimate goal. “Your body is just like you. It will signal you what is correct for you. Don’t worry about weight. Be happy with your body.” What she does express concern over, is the way people's health is being severely affected by their eating habits. “This book was born out of mortification rather than motivation. I noticed how the number of cancer cases have increased around me. In the last few years, every third person I met knew someone in their family suffering from the disease. Something is going wrong, and a lot of it has to do with what we eat.”
Of course, Shilpa stresses that the choice is ours. “What is important and what the book does is that it tells people what their choices are. This is good and this is bad. Now, if you want to go down the bad road, the choice is yours, but you are risking your life and your health.”
Passionate about the topic, Shilpa knows that this first book is just a beginning. “Luke and I are already working on our second book. It is more children and women centric, but I won't say that it isn’t for men. It's just something that will make life easier for people. After that, I have a third book planned too.”
