From a regular gym goer to a qualified yoga practitioner, actor Sarah Jane Dias, has finally learnt what is good for her body. It has taken her almost a decade to discover this fact but she is now a much happier person, who understands that fitness also means feeling good not just externally but also internally. She performs regular asanas and speaks about their virtues to the unenlightened.
Having undertaken a five week beginner’s teacher-training course at Sivananda Ashram in Palampur near Dharamsala, Sarah says, “Yoga is my perfect definition of fitness because it actually deals with your body and mind.
And you eventually feel light in your head and in the physical sense also. Your tendencies to overeat or sleep too less or too much and all your cravings get equalised because yoga is such a powerful tool. It works with your breath and your body.”
She explains how yoga asanas are constantly working on the pressure points and how in the process they massage the body. She has stopped going to the gym now to enjoy this naturalprocess of staying fit.
This year, Sarah is running the marathon and also training horizontally challenged people eager to participate in it. She enjoys going in for long walks and even at her home in Bandra, she walks down to buy fresh veggies.
A non-vegetarian, Sarah has faith in the recent research reports that concluded that the digestive system is a lot happier without the meat in it. “Unless your mind and heart are in the right place, nothing is going to work out,” she says with conviction.
Sarah doesn’t believe in starving but eating in moderation like the French who include milk, butter or chocolate in their meals. She dispels the notion that “eating rice makes one fat”. She eats only rice for both lunch and dinner. “We should never feel ugly seeing beauty magazines as we acknowledge the advancement in technology,” says Sarah.
Her determinationto not add even a single kilo of weight came to the fore when she posed a counter-question to this scribe at the beginning of the interview. “What is the best dessert you have eaten here?” she asked as we settled to eat at a café in Khan Market. She respects her body more than how we judge her on social networking sites.
Sarah, whose fitness regime included kick boxing, says, “You feel good when you look good; that’s a life statement and a deeper truth. But people need to understand that getting fit is not just about the way you look; it’s also about having a healthy and a fit mind.”
Once, the actor confesses, she was thrown out of a show on the ground that she had put on a lot of weight. She went into depression and used to either starve or binge. “Fortunately, criticism became my greatest motivation because I had great support from friends and family.”
