Hawking health

MY BIG IDEA

As a child, Shikha Sharma was "lazy and impractical" but her parents' ensured that she was encouraged to work hard and be career-oriented right from her childhood days.

Sharma graduated in medicine but was unsure for a time which direction to move in. That changed when she became interested in dietary regimens.

In 1998, she invested Rs 70,000 to set up the Clinique de Rejuvenation and soon found she was catering to so many customers that she had to set up more clinics and employ a team of dieticians. The company's turnover has multiplied by between 10 and 15 times in the last four years.

I WAS born and brought up in Delhi. My mother came from Kashmir and she believed that professional qualifications are a must, even for girls. She, herself ran a garments business.

As a child, I was never encouraged to dilly-dally about the house or to spend my time in the kitchen. "You can learn how to cook later," my mother would tell me.

"For now, concentrate on your studies." This encouragement was important, because by nature I was a dreamy and impractical sort of person "" my main hobbies were painting and reading "" and I needed this kind of push.

Something that had a great impact on me was when my mother once found me cross-stitching and told me, "If you work hard now, you can set up a cross-stitching industry later in life."

I studied medicine at Maulana Azad Medical College, Delhi but after finishing I realised I had an ambivalent attitude towards the medical profession.

I enjoyed medicine but I also felt working as a doctor and possibly having to deal with seriously unwell patients was too intense for me. I was working in a cardiology department and found I couldn't cope with the emotional pressure. Maybe it was my dreamy, sensitive side at work!

So I considered options that might help me escape the competitive side of the profession.

As it happened, I was overweight and had been following various diets and exercises but nothing was working. So I joined a professional weight-loss centre and became fascinated by how scientific the whole process was. In 1993-94 I joined Personal Point as a doctor "" and simultaneously joined their programme to lose weight myself!

Shortly afterwards, I opened a small weight-loss centre, operating from my home, but it was unsuccessful. Looking back, I think the reason was that I was trying to do too many things at the same time. I was working as a doctor in a nursing home, and also trying to run this business.

So, I decided to stop working as a doctor for some time. In 1998, fortune smiled on me when, with some money I had saved together with a little I borrowed from my mother, I started the Clinique de Rejuvenation at the Holiday Club in Panchsheel Enclave.

Maybe the time was right for such a venture "" it was an instant success. I started with just one dietician but within a few months I had to add another one, and open a second clinic. We now have four, all in the National Capital Region, and I have 28 dieticians working for me.

What we try to do is develop diets that are scientific, using the latest techniques. Using a genetic profile of our clients, we customise diets as much as possible. We also keep doing R&D on people with ailments like diabetes, with the aim of developing preventive diets.

I would like to move to other cities and then perhaps even outside India "" but first we have to ensure that we are up to international standards.

There is no dearth of weight-loss clinics in India today but we value quality over quantity. People still need to be educated about the various dietary techniques and about the food-health relationship.