The Lightness Of Well-Being

Just as caught up in weight-loss arithmetic is the Deodhar household in Mumbai’s Worli. Investment banker Umesh Deodhar, 41, 5 ft 8, is "miserably overweight" at 92 kg. Spouse Nandini, lecturer, 40, 5 ft 4, feels "bloated" at 67. And daughters, Sneha, 11, and Snigdha, 13, are unhappy being "plump". Oil, potatoes, mangoes, corn, fried savouries, sweets, aerated drinks—the list of banned edibles goes on in this vegetarian family. Back from the neighbourhood gym in the evenings, the adolescents use aspartame to sweeten their skimmed milk, emulating their parents who are forever yo-yoing between diets. Some stranger than the others: like the diet that the couple got off the Net recently, it had them eating only cabbage for a week! Shares a sheepish Nandini: "It started with wanting to be slim and healthy but it gradually became about being thin, everybody’s desperate to be slim these days..."

Meet Hindustan’s Flab Fighters, a growing army of men, women, teenagers and children battling bulge like never before. Crusading against fat with a newfound commitment to their bodies. Ardently attacking adipose with meagre meals, manic exercising, makeover machines and medicines that guarantee to thin. But make no mistake, it’s not just a story being played out in the body, it’s also about the mind, about a new mindset: it’s as if Fat, ignored, hidden, dismissed for long, has burst out of the seams into the national consciousness. "Voluptuous" is now bloated, "big-made" or the north Indian "khate-peete" is overweight, and there’s nothing pleasant anymore about being plump. Instead, the weight vocabulary has new, if arguable, synonyms: Slim means Healthy, Slim spells Fit. And the Body Dream hankers for ramp worthiness, anorexic lean looks, surfboard stomach, thighs without thunder, firm hips and a chin without a twin.

"Waif-thin, ultra-firm and super-fit bodies dominate our magazines, television and movies like never before. They pressure the old and young alike into achieving perfect and impossible looks," observes psychiatrist Vishwamohan Thakur of the Ahmedabad-based Body Care Centre. Add to that the increase in disposable incomes plus the freedom and time to focus on one’s own body, and the current obsession with weight control explains itself, says Surendra Dilawari, a physiotherapist who runs a slimming centre in Panipat. "Moreover, in small towns like ours," he says, "the biggest motivation to lose weight is marriage." Yes, the slimming mania is no longer confined to upper-income homes in the metros. It’s raging in smaller towns, in semi-urban India, across income groups and social classes. Looks like if you’re comfortably above the poverty line, the slimming bug will bite you, and bite you big.

Of course, there’s a lot of weight to be lost in the country. The Nutrition Foundation of India puts the figures of overweight males and females in middle-class urban India at 32.2 and 50 per cent respectively. Tell-tale consequence this of our over-indulgence in post-liberalisation goodies. Affluent sedentary lifestyles with a high intake of junk food, increased consumption of polished cereals, reduction in intake of essential dietary fibre by about 50 per cent have all added to make for an obese population. "The higher people go up the socio-economic ladder, the higher is their consumption of visible fat," says Dr Umesh Kapil of the Human Nutrition Department at Delhi’s All India Institute of Medical Sciences. And considering that increasing affluence also has people doing work that is decreasingly strenuous, says he, "it’s a bit like a fat bank account that sees few withdrawals".

Cashing in on which is India’s ever-growing Weight Reduction Industry. Metros, small towns, television, magazines, newspapers, pamphlets, mailers, billboards, Internet, they’re everywhere. Promising smooth rides into Slimsville through roads diverse: slimming clinics, weight management centres, fitness shops, rejuvenation spas, neighbourhood gyms, aerobic activism, yoga gurus, potions to purge weight, pills that slim, designer dieticians, no-nonsense nutritionists, food to fight fat, calorie-conscious cookbooks, how-to-be-thin literature. Here’s an indicator: according to a McKinsey report, the sports, preventive health and fitness sector industry has a whopping gross turnover of Rs 2,000 crore, and growing fast.

A decade ago, Bhopal had two gyms, neither hubs of activity or profit. Today there are over 50 fitness centres here, with demand still outrunning supply. The Arjun Fitness Club ceased admissions within three months of opening. Preens the club’s manager Rajiv Saxena: "We were besieged with applications but just had to stop after we took in 1,600 members. People still try pulling strings to get in." In the grips of similar slimming hysteria, Patna, which had only five gyms till 1995, now has about 30 weight management centres. Sanjay Akhoury, general manager (marketing) for Beyond Looks, a Delhi fitness shop specialising in "body, mind and soul" rejuvenation, confirms the expanding demand: "It’s a very lucrative business. We have gold and platinum cards, corporate memberships, personal packages that start at Rs 3,000 and go up to Rs 30,000." Beyond Looks is already averaging a turnover of Rs 1 crore, all in three years of existence.

Naturally then, with so much to gain, there’s a new recipe for weight loss every other day. A new technique, a novel therapy, a faster, surer way to being thin. Delhi-based homemaker Surjit Makkar, 35, shelling out close to Rs 60,000, has tried them all as armoury in her war against fat. From vlcc’s heat therapy to Personal Point’s food supplements to Herbalife’s elixir powder to Dr R.M. Bedi’s ayurvedic slimming preparations to yoga to sauna sittings, Makkar has eaten of different pies. But the weighing scale has yet to relent. So now she’s settled for a gym regimen: "At least slimming this way builds stamina."

For many, slimming, any which way, has become about self-worth. Down to 50 kg from 87 in a year through rigorous food discipline, Delhi-based Namrata Suri, 25, says it like it is: "I looked older when I was fatter, kept to myself. Being thin has made it easier interacting with people, I am more self-confident now."

Amit Miglani, 21, a farmer’s son from Faridkot, is struggling to lose 13 kg in one of Panipat’s many low-maintenance exercise shops called Gold Gym: "I want to look good. Being slim is looking good these days." A Body Wrap regular, Calcutta’s Isha Mallaya, 22 years and 43 kg, feels the ideal body has to be worthy of donning spaghetti straps and body-hugging clothes. She admits: "Even the slightest deposit of fat around my waist gives me sleepless nights."

This craze could—and often does—have dangerous dimensions. Insecure about weight, people rarely challenge quick-fix slimming solutions. Food supplements, pills, potions, half-baked diets, jerky machines are all taken at face value: if it works, good, if it doesn’t, move on to the next cure. "Women in their thirties and above often ignore their physical ailments and settle for drastic means to retrieve their teen measurements. This is not only unhealthy but has serious after-effects," says Roma Dey, owner of Bodyline Gym in Calcutta.

Vandita Mulla, 43, lost more than just kilos after her slimming stint with a Mumbai-based diva dietician. Recalls Mulla: "An ayurvedic doctor gave me pills in the dietician’s clinic, in her presence. I was ballooning, so any quick cure seemed attractive. Within days of taking the pill, I was bleeding like a tap. I tried contacting the dietician, she wouldn’t come on line. When she did, she wasn’t much help. I went through surgery to settle the matter." Laboratory tests of the pills she’d taken, alleges Mulla, revealed they had chromium, arsenic and thyroid extracts, among other ingredients. The dietician, nutritionist to many a beauty beacon, continues to flourish.

So do many other worthies in the business. Happy with the rush he gets at his New Scientific Research Centre, "Doctor" Niranjan in Delhi claims he reduces fat with his proprietary gel of 42 jadi-bootis (roots and herbs). This, in combination with a salt-free diet, regular enemas and a genital bath of ice-water. Propelled by the prospects of making easy money, Rekha Bhushan, a beauty parlour-owner in Lucknow’s Rohtas Enclave, invested in a treadmill, a twister and a stationary cycle: "My business doubled overnight!" Meanwhile, pamphleteering its cure for "all types of fat", the Delhi-based Adinath Ayurvedic Research Centre specialises in doing away with "fatty overweight, watery overweight and cellulytes." Hyderabad’s current slimming queen Dr Fatimeh Mojtahedi’s magic cure for excess weight—a combination of herbal cures with allopathy—has found clientele as diverse as film stars and politicians to the rural rich of coastal Andhra. She’s a contender for the Guinness Book of World Records, she says, having helped a client shed 60 kg in nine months, as against a Chinese doctor’s current record of helping shed 53.4 kg in 11.

Exaggerated claims, morphed "before" and "after" pictures, celeb launches, discount offers galore pump up the slimming industry. There aren’t any licensing or registration requirements to set up shop or regulate practices. Nutritionist Ishi Khosla of Whole Foods, a health food enterprise, is astonished at the quality of edibles peddled as low-calorie these days. She wonders at the credibility, the nutritional value of slimming teas, low-fat mayonnaise, no-sugar jams and such like flooding the Indian market: "Nutrition quackery is at its peak." And its victims are aplenty, starving and exercising themselves into emaciation. Says Dr Prabha Sanghi of Delhi-based Pulse Impulse, a weight management centre, "Slimming is an aid to good health, not synonymous with it. These clinics talk big, show no long-term results, don’t refund money when claims are unmet, use equipment not passed by the Medical Council of India and give ready-made meal pouches that sometimes contain Altroxin (a drug used for hypothyroidism)."

The biggest feeder to this mania is the fashion industry which, though nascent in India, still manages to hog large chunks of the popular media, adding oodles to the existing confusion over ideal body type. "A lot of people are confusing slimness with looking anorexic," says Yatan Ahluwalia, a Delhi-based fashion writer and stylist. Indeed, in Britain, two years ago, the government held a Body Image Summit, following a damning report by the British Medical Association that blamed the popular media’s obsession with the waif image as one of the main causes of widespread eating disorders. "Considering the huge demand, spurious slimming centres are bound to mushroom in this totally unorganised sector. It’s a bit like ultrasound for foetal monitoring, misuse is bound to happen," regrets Dr Shikha Sharma. Her Clinique de Rejuvenation in Delhi, she says, has to often carry out reverse counselling for many future anorexics.

But eating disorders already have many in their grip. Bangalore’s National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences estimates that up to 3.7 per cent females suffer from anorexia nervosa and up to 4.2 per cent females have bulimia in their lifetimes. The figures are even more disturbing for the younger age group. An Eating Attitude Test conducted on 500 students of classes XI and XII by Dr Himangee Dhawle, head of the department of psychiatry in Mumbai’s Nair hospital, is revealing. About 14 per cent of the respondents tallied scores that were worrying. Significantly, these were children from families where adults too seemed preoccupied about weight control.

Like Uma Bhatia, 69, who has egged on her 18-year-old grand-daughter Arti: grandmother lost 12 kilos in a year, Arti emulated by losing six kilos in three months. The trim twosome are constantly monitoring each other’s weight. "But more importantly, we keep a check on our attitude towards slimming," says Mrs Bhatia, "The idea is not to be sickly slim but healthy slim." So what is healthy slim? And how does one get there? Says Patna’s leading paediatrician, Dr Utpal Kant, fifty-something, 5 feet 10, 77 kg: "Controlled diet and regular workout is all that one needs to keep fit." The rest, as they say, is mass hysteria and grand delusion.

By Soma Wadhwa and Dhiraj Singh With Savitri Chowdhury in Hyderabad, Manu Joseph in Mumbai, Amarnath Tewary in Patna, Sutapa Mukerjee in Lucknow and Kaberi Chatterjee in Calcutta