Eat your way to beauty
Reviewed by Aradhika Sharma

The Beauty Diet
By Shonali Sabharwal. Random House Rs 250. Pages 324.

The picture of Bollywood Diva, Hema Malini and her daughter, looking lean and fit on the cover of the book, is attractive enough for the reader to reach out for it to at least look at it. A few pages into the book, one realises that it’s a well written self -help book, though a bit tough in its recommendations. The regimen that Shonali Sabbharwal recommends in The Beauty Diet — Eat Your Way To A Fab New You promise to make any ordinary woman ‘into Katrina Kaif’, provided of course, the person is as dedicated and tough as the star herself.

Shonali is a diet and lifestyle counsellor and chef to some of the fittest Bollywood beauties. Her clients include Hema Malini, Neha Dhupia, Esha Deol, Ahana Deol, Jacqueline Fernandez, Katrina Kaif, Tabu, Shekhar Kapur, Kabir Bedi, and Dalip Tahil. The Beauty Diet is her first book, in which she attempts to bring the celebrity diet to the common people.

According to Shonali, a healthy person is one who eats right, has the right emotions, the right thoughts and the right exercise routine. She feels that you choose your own lifestyle and your choice would decide if you are healthy or not. She does make recommendations on what is good for the body and feels that a healthy body, fed and exercised properly, will result in a more active person, whose body and mind can shun many lifestyle diseases. Of course she has a diet, in fact several, to recommend.

Shonali admits that her work is not a ‘very easy’ book probably because she realises that health is not automatic and nor is it a laughing matter. There is a section that tells you what not to eat, for example, in which she strongly recommends saying ‘no to dairy’ in any form. Also to say no to sugar, animal proteins, salt. That may leave you wondering about what you are allowed to eat? Plenty, according to Shonali- grains, vegetables, greens, Spirulina, legumes, fish, beans, Miso. There’s plenty of choice, actually. Apparently, the author is India’s only practising counsellor/chef and instructor in macrobiotics and so she recommends a macrobiotic diet. In simple terms, a macrobiotic diet is "choosing the right foods and cooking styles and putting them into practice."

The book includes various sections which includes telling the reader about how to do a basic detox to cleanse the body. She also tells how you can make your skin glow, hair shiny, and teeth healthy. If you have a tummy, it’s not an insurmountable issue, if you follow Shonali’s methods. She doesn’t ask you to starve but dishes out recipes and portions that are quite adequate to see you through the day. The book also tells you how you can eat food that will help you look younger and uplift your mood, to make a happier person of you. The Beauty Diet includes diet charts, recipes, real-life stories, and celebrity experiences.

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