It’s almost fashionable to talk about Vitamin D deficiency, a condition that afflicts the affluent.
Let’s leave aside the sunshine vitamin for a moment and focus on the really important thing on everybody’s mind—no, not WikiLeaks but weight loss. Everybody worth his or her Guccis would like to lose some weight (and quickly at that); so the first thing to do, of course, is drop all oils and fats from the diet, especially the desi ones. I mean, it’s okay to spray oil or buy only virgin ‘imported’ varieties, but ghar ka ghee? No way.
And exercise? Please, if you are on a ‘diet’, you barely have energy to wear make-up, so forget hardcore swimming, gymming and cycling. You are not a celeb or an athlete: you just want to lose weight and party, to flash your trim waist and skinny jeans, right?
The whole party-hard-work-harder routine is taking a toll on the way women and men age. We age exponentially and lose energy, vitality and mobility just as fast. We are losing our energy and mobility because our musculo-skeletal system is weakening without a healthy supply of sleep, ghee and exercise. Our minds weaken too, because in spite of all that we unleash on our bodies in the name of dieting and weight loss, all we lose is Vit D: the flab refuses to go and the waist refuses to stop bulging.
Vitamin D is essential for calcium absorption and restores its balance in the body. It also works along with the enzymes and hormones in the body, ensuring that your skin stays spotless, face ageless and bones dense. And we don’t need to look at any exotic sources for this miracle vitamin, the sun supplies enough of it. Sadly, our diet and weight loss fads leave us incapable of converting the sunshine vitamin into its usable forms.
(Nutritionist Rujuta Diwekar’s latest book is called Women and the Weight Loss Tamasha.)