Only cabbage soup for a week is the way to shed five kilos, said the ‘Cabbage soup diet’. Skip all your meals and drink water alone for five days said the ‘Water Diet’, and promised a loss of 20 kilos by fasting. Another took it a step ahead and said stick to ‘Tapeworm diet’ and gobble up few worms so they can absorb all your nutrients! The cotton ball diet (wherein one fills their tummy with cotton balls to avoid hunger!) and so on...this list of grueling ways one can torment their body in the name having the ‘perfect body’ is almost endless.
With an aim to promote healthier lifestyles rather than obsessing over body shapes, the world is going to be observing ‘International No Diet Day’ on May 6. The idea is simple — to learn to accept the way you are. Although lesser in number compared to those working towards a ‘size zero’, there have been many actors, models and nutritionists who have been speaking about embracing the body the way it is, than forcing it into jeopardous diet fads.
Actress Khushbu Sundar is one such personality, who has never given in to industry demands regarding how an actress must look. “It’s important to accept one’s body as it is, till you are in healthy parameters. Size is just to impress the society and inflate the self ego of getting into designer labels now. One should learn to accept everybody, irrespective of the size, with grace. Some are obsessed with today’s modern techniques to get an hour glass body and that is dangerous,” Khushbu opines.
Recently, a calendar shoot by renowned photographer G Venket Ram, titled ‘Love Every Body’, which aimed to look at people beyond their bodily appearances, caught people’s attention. Chennai-based model and actress Mallika Chaudhuri, who conceived the concept along with her friend Roshni, says, “As an actress you are told to diet, and I made myself try every kind of diet out there. I may not have what the industry thinks is a perfect body, but in my eyes, my curves are much more perfect now, after I’ve started listening to my body and not giving in to any fads.”
Body positivity is extremely important in today’s world. Even the term ‘plus size’ which depicts that anybody over a certain measurement is is below the norm impacts the youth and conditions them to believing they have to look a certain way. Imagine a world where people are confident about their physique and don’t evaluate another person by the amount they weigh,” Mallika adds.
As someone who has trained a number of actors like Arvind Swami, fitness expert Timothy Bello, who runs fitness centre ‘The Den’ in the city, believes that trusting entirely on the weighing scales and going in for extreme crash-diets is highly dangerous — “There are many misconceptions that exist regarding how people think they can drink only water and lose weight. What people forget to realise is how these steps can be fatal, by denying the body of the nutrients it requires. One must take the overall health into consideration, and not to fit into a particular size.”
Kanika Dhillon, the script writer for the Anuskha Shetty-starrer Size Zero (that dealt with body acceptance) puts it all in perspective. “The battle in our society against body shaming has just begun and issues related to discrimination based on body sizes are just coming to the fore. It will take a lot of courage to bring in a change in the mindsets of people. Many actresses still feel judged if they display a little body fat on screen and we must remember that cinema is only a reflective of the society we live in, and the unrealistic expectations are changing slowly, but surely.”
