Rujuta Diwekar walks the talk. Her buttercup yellow shirt brings out the glow in her skin, her well-fitted jeans outlines lithe and toned legs; she walks with a spring in her step radiating positivity and energy.
“I think the journey to get fitter starts by loving oneself. You need to be respectful towards your body and tell yourself that you already look great and simply want to get better,” she smiles.
The celebrity nutritionist whose clientele includes Anil Ambani, Kareena Kapoor, Karisma Kapoor, Anupam Kher and Richa Chadda, among others has a refreshingly different take on food and nutrition.
“Never feel guilty about how much you eat. Why should you fear food? It is one of the biggest blessings that life has bestowed upon you. And why do we allow certain foods to become taboo? We belong to a culture where every time we ate a meal we said a prayer. We have a stash of timeless recipes and we should be celebrating them not trying to create fat free, sugar free versions of them,” she says.
Her first two books Don't Lose your Mind, Lose Your Weight and Women and the Weight Loss Tamasha were immediate sellers, exploring the various facets of nutrition and offering practical, uncomplicated suggestions on eating right. Her third book, Don’t Lose Out, Work Out published by Westland which was launched in the city recently, tackles the principles and myths of exercising.
“After I wrote the book on eating, a lot of questions began to be asked about exercising. And exercise is the other side of the coin when it comes to fitness. Just like dieting is simply about nourishing the body right, working out is all about keeping the body in shape and at its prime fitness level. Unfortunately, there are a lot of myths and wrong information floating around about exercise and I have tried to address all this in my book.”
She admits that the fitness industry is an unregulated industry but believes that this will change, “We are a young country and it is a very new profession compared to many others. When I began it was the industry of school drop outs, bored housewives, builders with lots of black money. This has been changing. There are many young professionals approaching it with a good attitude and there is so much information on fitness out there. Having an informed clientele makes a huge difference to the industry.”
She dispels the notion that weight is an effective parameter of fitness and advises people to not get hung up on it, “I feel that people are beginning to understand body composition better. You can always lose weight with disease. And it doesn’t need that you’re fitter and better.
A lot of people say that I want to lose weight to feel better. We are not going to feel better because we lost weight. We are going to feel better because we are fitter and can do more and more with our body. That is what really counts. ”
