Nutrition

Build most of your meals from real, single-ingredient foods with protein at the centre and vegetables filling the plate, and your appetite, energy and weight start to look after themselves.

7 protocols

A story to start

Sameena teaches Class 8 science at a school in Lucknow, and by the time she gets home at four, she is starving. There are five people to feed. Her younger son has gone vegetarian, her husband wants kebabs, and the children beg for instant noodles. Most days she runs on sweet chai, a staff-room samosa and a packet of namkeen on the way home. At 41 she feels foggy by noon, and the scale keeps creeping up.

She did not want another diet. So she started with water: a big glass before her first chai, and a steel bottle on her desk. Then she swapped the namkeen for roasted chana and a guava. At dinner she began serving the dal, egg bhurji or paneer first, and filling half her plate with lauki or palak. She went back to setting dahi every night, and a glass of jeera chaas became her lunch companion.

Six weeks on, Sameena is not perfect. Sheer khurma at Eid and a Sunday biryani still happen, and they should. But the afternoon slump has eased, the namkeen packets have vanished, and her children now raid the fridge for the black carrot kanji.

The protocols

1Make nine in ten bites real foodBuild at least 90 percent of what you eat from single-ingredient foods such as vegetables, fruit, dal, eggs, chicken, fish, rice, oats and atta.Every meal, every dayMediumGood evidence 2Drink most of your water earlyDrink about 530 to 710 ml of water as soon as you wake, before your chai or coffee.Through your first ten waking hoursEasyGood evidence 3Put protein at the centre of every mealAim for 30 to 50 grams of protein at each meal, from foods that give a lot of protein for few calories.Every main mealMediumGood evidence 4Fill half your plate with vegetablesMake vegetables the second building block of your diet and fruit the third.Lunch and dinner, plus some fruitEasyStrong evidence 5Make friends with the right fatsGet most of your fat from unsaturated sources such as olives, avocados, nuts, seeds and oily fish, and cook mainly with olive oil.Most meals and snacksEasyGood evidence 6Feed your gut with fermented foodsEach day, enjoy two to four small helpings of fermented food that is low in sugar, such as plain curd, chaas, kefir, kanji or sauerkraut.Two to four small servings a dayEasyEarly evidence 7Get your omega-3s from fish or oilEat fatty sea fish such as sardines or mackerel once or twice a week.Fish once or twice a week, plus a daily supplementAdvancedGood evidence