Eat, drink, be body-shamed

So now the Lancet guys tell us that body mass index (BMI), a standard formula for measuring obesity, is not quite right. The updated version includes analysing the body composition of a person and deciding how much of weight is good (muscle-related) and how much (fat-related) is excludable. Gauging obesity or malnourishment through calculation of the BMI should, at best, be the first step, to be followed by a deeper analysis of the proportion of muscle mass and fat within the person’s body.

Leafing through the newspapers, my mother once pointed out a supreme but somewhat under-reported irony. All the major dailies, she pointed out, were given to devoting a sizeable portion of their features section to wonderfully lavish cuisine and teaching how to score global foodie points by trying out all sorts of exotic food and cooking practices. But this was followed by an equally sizeable bunch of pages that warned readers sternly against gluttony, and underscored how important it is to keep an ideal weight by following veganism, intermittent fasting and/or diets like Keto, or whatever. And then punishing the body with expensive workouts. The regrettable indulgence in tasty food may result, we are warned, in diabetes, congested arteries, osteoarthritis, colon cancer and god knows what else. So, poor readers gulp their saliva back and feel miserable whenever uncontrollable desires for hearty meals cross the mind, mother said.

Obviously, the media or the publishers of bestsellers on special recipes, history of royal repasts and lavish temple bhogs do not see the contradiction. A mixture of information overload, lack of time and a deep atavistic fear of losing that lovely, dimpled flesh has ensured that what older folk considered good hearty food becomes the new no-no.

Books on food have continued registering a high even when sales of fiction and non-fiction are reportedly dropping. So, food is probably now like pornography for a schizophrenic society where the rich first overindulge, and then, like Roman nobility, throw up. Books on really good food are mostly savoured in privacy, but are no longer discussed in civilised company where socialites with hourglass figures body-shame their matronly counterparts routinely.

And this has also turned dieticians’ clinics into confessionals. “Is it not enough to have halved my consumption of red meat, forgone desserts, walking up and down staircases and to the colony grocery?” you ask, humbly.

“No, it’s just scratching the surface,” the stern-looking anorexic dietician with a lantern jaw will tell you. If you actually dream of having those Malaika bottoms or Shah Rukh abs, your lifestyle has to be dramatically different from what it is today. And this is non-negotiable.

That will be Rs 1,500, thank you.

Does a perfect health card mean an entire rebuilding of the good life or can we, who have crossed over to the other side of 60, continue in our bad ways? Must we be varying our love for comfortable couches, nice cars and fancy restaurant-hopping holidays with 40-minute punishment sessions in expensive gyms, with snooty coaches who look down their noses at all that celluloid and spare tyres?

Fifty years ago, after crossing 50, parents of grown-up kids might not have been demolished by terms like the “ravages of time” applied to somewhat flabby midriffs and sagging jaw lines. Expectations then were low, but in the age of Botox, Ozempic and liposuction, it is getting harder to accept ageing as inevitable with good grace and a resigned shrug.

Too bad, for the grandchildren at least, who no longer get to nuzzle close to cheerfully plump grannies for a basic comforting human experience many of us recall with love and warmth. Can a lean, mean granny, who offers you granola bars and carrot sticks instead of homemade pinnis or gajar ka halwa oozing butter and sugar, and cooks brown rice with poached organic veggies, denies you fruit juice from cartons for fresh home-squeezed lauki/carrot juice instead match the ones who cooked you hearty biryanis in pure desi ghee and added a dollop of home-churned butter to your paranthas?

Nobody asked grannies then to cook what they did, but they soothed away all those nasty breakdowns in the making, hovering around their well-laden tables like battle axes and standing between leisurely meals and the clock summoning you for those unwelcome music lessons, homework and/or a demanding parent.

True, there are social norms today that treat women who have stalled the natural ageing processes like honorary male warriors. But that is according too much honour to war. Perhaps we, the midnight’s female children, will be at ease with ageing only if we stop obsessing over the near-impossible goals of what we should look like, and appreciate our non-flat stomachs with stretch marks and our dimpled thighs as byproducts of unique life-giving and nurturing experiences that we share with all women.

Of course, changing media images would help. But that is not enough. What we need is more of old-style natural togetherness, especially among women who are working outside homes. We need places within workplaces where women of all ages can unwind and swap jokes and information like homemakers do in traditional watering holes of their own. Like most groups of the newly-empowered, women’s faith in looking good by others’ standards is yet to be shaken. And we have not quite absorbed facts such as the rising incidence of brittle bones, anorexia and heart ailments related to fad diets and increased smoking and alcohol intake among women.

Then, there is the economy-size guilt trip when we feel exhausted at the end of a long working day. Perhaps, our mothers and grandmothers did not give us healthy eating habits. Look at Madonna, the magazines say. Well, good for her, but can we please stop being competitive all the time and accept our own body as unique. We’ll perhaps at that point discover that there is actually much more to real fitness than measuring tapes and weighing scales. And even the Lancet magazine accepts that now.