Subir Roy: All written in the stars

OFFBEAT

I knew there was something in it. The scales, quite literally, were tilted against me by divine diktat. Only, it took me a long time, till well into middle age, to find out. The truth was recently revealed by the research findings of an Australian academic. When you try to lose weight, you sooner or later hit a plateau. This is despite following a negative energy balance "" burning more calories than you consume. Why? The body has a strong mechanism to fight weight loss and a weak one to fight weight gain!

And here was I, spending a lifetime following all kinds of diets and becoming an authority on them but singularly failing to make a dent on the scales except for a brief spell. Then, my own adapted version of the Atkins diet worked so well that the other half of humankind actually started looking at me. The person who has complained endlessly thereafter that she was conned is the one who eventually married me. I never got back the looks and the weight that I achieved while I courted her.

Now I know that there is nothing sinful about being unable to lose weight beyond a point. Some like me are simply born with the wrong cravings. Cakes and pastries are fine and some of them are absolutely heavenly, but taken altogether, the sweet stuff that Bengalis call their own, the product of their unique genius, is unbeatable. The one way I splurge during my annual visit to Kolkata is to go to meet whoever is close to me with a box of sandesh flavoured with natuan gur from Girish Ghosh & Co, who have made it the same way for 50 years and more.

Sweets are obviously fattening, but the Bengali genius extends to making the healthiest of foods into lethal devices by the way they are prepared. Take fish. If you bake it and flavour with a squeeze of lime and salt to taste, then that should be both healthy and tasty, but not to the pallet in the land of rivers. Fish has to be nicely fried, or smothered in mustard paste and oil and steamed, or cooked in a curry made up of a range of masala paste fried in a lot of oil.

The way you cook things, does make a difference but ultimately it is the taste buds you have been born with which define your dimensions. The brief period I lived on continental food vindicated this. The only English preparation that I found edible was fish and chips, both of which have, of course, to be nicely fried. I also developed a taste for cheese, which again is good for neither cholesterol not calories. And the other great preparation that took my fancy was quiche of any kind. Only much later, courtesy a dietary column, did I cone to know the frightening number of calories that a decent slice contains.

Bangalore has changed my lifestyle. Its weather and parks have turned me a regular walker, making it easy to find a half hour almost whenever or wherever I may be. Not only is the Delhi heat absent, our office on Lavelle Road is three minutes from Cubbon Park, ready to embrace you with its peace and greenery. Southern cuisine is also so much healthier. Idly with properly made sambar is good to both pallet and cardiovascular system, but if you are a born loser on healthy eating, you will love to order not two idlis but one and a vada. The latter is, of course, deep fried.

I am nowadays at peace with myself. If I am born with gluttony in my taste buds then the fault is hardly mine. Heaven knows how many times I have tried to deny myself and lose a bit of weight. The big change today is that whereas earlier every time I hit a plateau, I used to blame it on my dietary lapses, today, thanks to the good antipodean professor, I know that also is written in my stars or genes.

sub@business-standard.com