...shoOOonya...

I spent about 10 days in Mumbai last week. As always, being home is a wonderful feeling. Home cooked mom-ke-haath-ka-khana is a treat unto itself. Its also a vacation for me where I don't really have to worry about office. I get to spend some time with my family once in a quarter for about a week.   During the weeklong trip … I attended 2 weddings. One wedding was in my family so I was there practically from 10 am to 10 pm meeting the entire extended family on my maternal side (metting several members after a long gap). It was actually nice meeting all people and yes, food was excellent. The second one was a Punjabi family wedding reception … wedding of the daughter of one of my Dad's business associate. I just went along since dad did not want to go alone. It was interesting to attend the wedding. Food was good J rounding off with dessert of Jalebi, Kulfi and Rabdi J     One of the things I do when in Mumbai is to watch movies J the economics and the logistics are s...

  Weight check … I began the diet with 82.9 Kg and ended up with 78.9 Kg. Accounting for the variable weight of the various external elements like clothes, shoes, mobile, change in the pocket and money in the purse J , the GM diet enabled me to lose approx. 3.5 to 4 KG. So I can conclude that the diet experiment was pretty successful.   Diet Discounts ... it was fun to take them but maybe not taking them would have resulted in greater weight loss by at least a kg or two – I had taken diet discounts in the form of chocolate bites, dry fruit sweets, tea with milk and sugar, salt and spices etc. Learning Curve … Also, now I feel packaged coconut drink was not a good idea. I was probably supposed to have fresh coconut milk/drink and fresh juice. Also, I read somewhere that Rice is a not an effective substitute for beef in the veggie version and it reduces the extent of weight loss. Work-Out - Yet another key thing was that I did not visit the gym even once during the diet w...

I woke up in the morning with the pleasant realization the diet period was over and I could eat all tasty spicy stuff without worrying about any restriction !! YAY !! Stated the day with 2 khakhras with ghee and pudina chatni / singhdana chatni ! WOW !! In office I grabbed a pack of Potato stic (Hot Chilli flavor) and also took a Tiffany creamy wafer biscuit. Lunch was the pulav and vegetable I prepared yesterday evening. .... I am off-diet now and I am going to take full advantage of it. Will go out McDonalds and grab a Pizza McPuff and a Aloo Tikki (called Veggie Surpise here), have an ice cream and even a Do-nut before I go to India by weekend … that will be FEAST Time !! My birthday also coming during the home stay ... sooooo .... cakes and ice creams and pizza and all .... .... And yes .. just FYI … I weighed myself yesterday and the pointr crossed 79 KG on the downward journey.    

Weekend time  !! Woke up only at 11 AM on both days :P Day 6 At 12 Noon, I had some salad of chopped carrot, cucumber and tomato ! About 3.30 PM came the lunch … Rice with peas, corn, cabbage and tomato !! Kinda fried rice or Pulav. This was practically the first time i had tried experimenting with making Pulav ... I made a call home and asked Mom how to go about it. She guided me and the result was not bad at all :) Nimboo paani in the evening at about 6 pm before going out for grocery to stock up again for the last day of the diet and the few days left before my Mumbai trip to home. Late evening, I had the dinner of the Pulav I made in the afternoon. It was kinda nice. Now one more thing gets added to the (short) list of things I can cook :P Since its weekend, no preparations for tomorrow to be made in advance. Day 7 – Woke up at 11 AM again ... and last day of the diet !! Started the day with the two tomatoes and then lazed around watching TV and thinking :P Late...

Day began with some rice which I prepared early morning. I packed my lunch box with the tomatoes and the rice and the soup for the day. I had prepared the soup on previous night itself. cant do eveything in the morning. I had the 2 chopped tomatoes at about 10.30 in office … Lunch was the time when I had Rice along with the Soup. It was not exactly tasty but definitely better than having the plain rice alone. I guess the difficult part of GM Diet is that u get 'taste deprived'. Eating plain rice is very difficult for the simple lack of taste. Late Afternoon I had the two chopped tomatoes again. As mentioned earlier, plain rice is hardly consumable so while returning home in the evening, I picked up some Fried Rice from the super market. I guess this will qualify as a diet disount of the day (fried food). Had a little of the fried rice in the evening and the remaining in the night for dinner. It was indeed tasty J BTW … I weighed myself yesterday and found that...

One Litre Low Fat Milk and about 9 bananas - ready for the day. Began the day with a singular Banana and a glass of milk. Poured a glass of milk in a small bottle and a kept it the refrigerator, carried the rest of the milk in the original carton to office along with about 6 bananas. Anyone coming to my desk will be wierdly surprised to fidn the milk carton on my desk today. Day was not bad in the sense that there were no serious cravings or hunger pangs. I had One Banana and a gulp of milk at about 11 and then 2 Bananas for lunch at 1 and one banana again at 3.30 and finally one before leaving office by 6. Milk also consumed through the day in occasional gulps. And yes, how can I forget. The sweets from day 1 (Extremely delicious Dry Fruit Barfi) appeared on the scene again and I took my pick. That was today's Diet Discount for me !! I had some concerns for the next day though ... Day 5 is only Rice and Tomato. Plain rice without anything else is virtually impossible f...

having only fruits on day 1 and only vegetables on day 2 .. i felt a day of both combined would be better. Atleast, no monotony. Started the day with a carrot at 7 am. Packed my lunch box with salads and fruits (apples and pears). I had to come to office for a conference call which eventually did not happen for me since I was unable to connect and log-in into the web conference portal. :( Unlike yesterday, i had a proper tea today although with very less milk. GM Diet recommends only Black Tea or Coffee and no milk consumption allowed. So this became my Second Diet Discount !! Day was fine with the salads and fruits consumption. I was not really bored of them. Late afternoon I attended a meeting with Senior Management members of the organization (including CIO & CFO etc). Nice cookies were served at each seat and during the course of the presentation; I nicely and quite absent mindedly munched on a couple of them. I relaised what i had done only at the end of the session...

The day began with the recommended boiled Potato and the 'suggested' pat of butter on it. I took the suggestion J . It was absolutely AWESOME and while I was enjoying the Buttered Potato, I realized that I hadn't had a slice of raw boiled potato with 'maska' in ages. I had woken up early today to prepare the vegetable salad (washing, peeling, slicing, chopping, shredding) the carrots & cabbage and added corn, cucumber etc. Lunch Box packed for the day :) Day went off fine with the salads ... although it became actually boring to eat raw stuff with no spices etc. I added some salt though or else the veggies might have jumped back into the plate from my throat. Made it a point to have my usual tea in office in the mornign and evening tea while returning home At home, had the evening glass of tomato juice and then prepared for the dinner. Lauki/Doodhi/Bottle Goard or whatever it is called in other languages. I am no fan of this long vegetable and have n...

First Day of the GM Diet ... mind filled with some doubts and some apprehensions and a tad bit of excitement too (at the prospecti fo losing a few kilos before my Mumbai visit) I started off with one sweet lime and the mandatory glass of water. I had cut musk melon and water melon the previous night and packed them in lunch boxes (large ones) and stored them in refrigerator. Along with them, also took apples and pears to office; not forgetting the Knife J . My Lunch Box for office was ready :) The water melon turned out to be disaster. After a few bites I realized that the taste was not right and the smell was not right either. Dumped the entire load into the dustbin and relied on the musk melon ! A colleague got some sweets from India. Ordinarily I would have resisted the temptation but it was an awesome "dry fruits barfi" which has an out of this world taste. Everyone was going ga-ga over it. So took a piece and then another. That was the 'diet discount' I ...

The GM Diet is not an easy one to execute. Not only one need to be restrictive in what one is eating but accordingly one has to prepare and stock up in advance. A person like me who is living alone, away from home has a refrigerator which has pretty limited items based on the very limited cooking abilities. So stocking up the refrigerator for the week long ordeal was the first task. So I went through the entire GM Diet plan (vegetarian version of course) and prepared a detailed list of things I would need for the week. For this reason, I decided to stock up during the weekend and start the diet on the first working day of the week and finish off in the next weekend. The list was pretty long and impressive too: lots of tomatoes, cucumber & carrots, a nice large cabbage, potatoes (only 2), one lauki/dhoodhi, about 8-10 bananas, musk melon, watermelon, apples, sweet lime, lemon, packaged coconut water, peach and tomato juice pack and Milk. For the first time, my refrigerator was...

After spending 6 months in Dubai from Sept'08 to Mar'09, I suddenly realized that my weight had not only crossed 80 but reached an alarming 85. BMI says my weight should be about 67-70. Being Indian with a slightly built body, I thought 10-15% over the BMI is OK. I have never really thought of myself being over weight or worried about the extra weight ever. But 85 was different. I realised that although 80 was OK; 85 wasn't. So I consulted my dear friends and created a diet plan for myself. A strict control on things I consumed and a daily 30 min walk on the treadmill ensured that I was able to cross 80 on the downward journey within one month. i blogged about those 'glorious' days and experiences. Alas… I could not maintain the same tempo further. Post April, I was not able to do it again and my weight rose steadily although not at an alarming rate.  Tried to follow some of my diet plan parts but eventually did not happen. The cranky poffice timings due to p...

NaNoWriMo - National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing.   Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30. SIMPLE !!! NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved. In 2008, we had over 120,000 participants. More than 20,000 of them crossed the 50k finish line by the midnight deadline, entering into the annals of NaNoWriMo superstardom forever. They started the month as auto mechanics, out-of-work actors, and middle school English teachers. They walked away novelists. So, to recap: What: Writing one 50,000-word novel from scratch in a month's time. Who: You! We can't do this unless we have some other people trying it as well. Let's write laughably awful yet lengthy prose together. Why: The reasons are endless! To actively participate in one of ...