Chef Anahita Dhondy’s Healthy Eating Mantra For Girls Who Love to Eat

A nibble here or a bite there – portion control or even intermittent fasting seem to be the tagline of most diet plans.

However, restrictive eating is not something your can sustain over a long period of time. It can also backfire if your overzealously take your healthy eating into the crash-dieting territory.

So, if pizza is your bae, you can still keep up your fitness levels the healthy way. Take it from celebrity chef Anahita Dhondy who works with delicious food all day!

 

“Dieting is temporary thing and you cannot forever be on a diet. But it’s a different thing when it comes to being on a diet for losing or maintaining weight. I just feel like they don’t really last in the long term because you might do them for a few months but after a point you will feel like returning to your normal routine,” she says. So, here are her own health tips that the foodie in you will absolutely love!

Eat throughout the day

“I feel I am lucky as I am working in a setup where there’s food all around. But I recommend in the mornings, when you’re having your tea or coffee, don’t have it empty stomach, as it’s not a good idea. Make sure that you have something with it. If you’re avoiding carbs then have it with your tea or coffee, as it’s the best time because your carbs will get absorbed very quickly. So if you’re having a toast or a banana, make sure you have it in the first half of the day. So I’d suggest having tea or coffee with some kind of carbs or eggs,” she says.

Chef Dhondy shares her own simple meal plan that is all about healthy, non-restrictive eating. “At twelve, you can have a fruit or something with yoghurt. I prefer having rice for lunch and roti for dinner. So, for lunch I eat rice with one katori each of sabzi and dal for lunch. Then, at four I make sure to have a small cup of tea with something such as a biscuit or a sandwich,” she says.

Chef terms the two hours between 6-8 pm as ‘dangerous’ since it is when you are at your hungriest, usually after work. For most of us dinnertime rolls in around at ten.

She suggests either taking your meal earlier or munching on healthy snacks such as puffed rice, namkeens, nuts or makhanas as a pre-dinner snack.

Move, move, move

While her personal meal plan is all about conscious eating, Anahita does advocate keeping on your feet.

She says, “When you mindfully snack like this you realize that you’ve consumed a lot throughout the day but you’re actually burning it out by making sure that you workout at least once in a day. I do about ten to fifteen thousand steps in a day so, that’s the workout for me,” says Chef Dhondy.

Count nutrients instead of calories

Eat everything and in moderation, after all variety is the spice of life!

“I try to make sure that there’s nutrition through whatever I am eating. It could be some cuisine today, Indian tomorrow, Lebanese the day after or just eating out. Even though dining out is always easier, if you don’t make conscious choices, you might end up eating unhealthy. You don’t want to consume food that is too rich or fatty with oil floating on the top because that’s going to get in your body. In the end it’s all about conscious eating and not blindly putting stuff in your mouth,” she says.

Touché to that! What are you going to put on your plates today, then?