How to eat well, minus the nonsense

Most of what you read about food is trying to sell you something. A powder, a bar, a blood-sugar monitor, a fear, a fix. This guide isn’t. It’s the way we actually talk to our clients about eating, boiled down to the handful of things that matter and stripped of the noise.

It won’t tell you to eat like your ancestors, or warn you off some ingredient, or promise you a body in twelve weeks. It’ll ask you to understand a few principles and keep them for years. That’s the whole game.

Start honest: overfed and under-muscled

Here is the statistically probable truth for most of us. You are eating a little too much. You are carrying too little muscle. You are consuming too much oil, too much rice or wheat, and drinking more calories than you realise. You are not eating enough protein, enough vegetables, or enough fruit. And you are almost certainly underestimating how much you eat and overestimating how much you move.

None of that is an insult. It’s just the water most of us swim in. The war on “obesity” gets framed as bulging waistlines, and the antidote as eat-less-move-more. But that framing sets you up badly. Slashing food alone leaves you smaller and weaker, not healthier. Fat loss and weight loss are not the same thing. The goal is to carry more usable muscle and less fat — and that needs decent food and the skill of strength, not just a deficit.

Treat food like money

We have a relationship with our body. With food, we have a transaction. You pay for it, you eat it, and your body pays the long-term price for the choice. Romanticising that transaction — calling it a relationship, or something too sacred to quantify — leaves you worse off. So quantify it.

That means, for a while at least, actually measuring what you eat, by volume or by weight. Not forever, and not obsessively. Just long enough to learn what a portion really looks like and to stop lying to yourself about it. A ten-rupee measuring cup and a spoon will teach you more than a fancy continuous glucose monitor ever will. The gadget is expensive and noisy. The cup is cheap and honest.

Think of it as playing offence: measure your food, stock your fridge on purpose, plan your meals before you’re hungry, cook with a fixed quota of oil for the day, box your snacks in advance. Defence — reading labels, begging a waiter to cut the salt, restricting portions on a surprise meal out — is for the occasional curveball. Live mostly on offence and the odd curveball won’t hurt you.

We go deep on how to balance the plate in Portfolio theory of eating — carbs as your liquid cash, fibre as the currency that keeps you regular, protein and fats as the productive assets. Read that alongside this.

Protein first

If there is one thing to fix, it’s this. The ICMR estimates most Indians get under 40 grams of protein a day. That’s far too little to hold muscle on your frame, keep your bones and joints robust, and age well.

A reasonable target sits somewhere in the 50 to 150 gram range, depending on your size and goals — think roughly a gram per kilo of bodyweight as a floor. For a 70 kg person, 85 to 110 grams is a sensible aim. But don’t try to leap there overnight. If you’re eating 25 grams of low-quality protein today, forcing 90 grams tomorrow just guarantees you’ll quit. Start at 50 to 60 grams, make it stick, then climb. An imperfect plan you actually follow beats a perfect one you abandon.

The reason protein is hard for us specifically is that our staples are inefficient at delivering it. A simple way to judge any food: how many calories do you eat to get 10 grams of protein?

• Skim milk: about 100 calories for 10 grams.
• Eggs: about 115.
• Milk: about 190.
• Dal: roughly 160 to 180 (before the oil you cook it in).

Rice, wheat, millets, fruit, oil and full-fat dairy are all thirsty sources — you have to eat a lot of calories to get a little protein. The efficient foods — eggs, skim milk, low-fat paneer, cottage cheese, tofu, lean dairy, Skyr — either don’t show up on our plates often enough or get crowded out by grains and oil. So try to keep your foods near the 180 to 200 calories per 10 grams mark, and consciously shift some of your rice and wheat toward eggs, dal, tofu and leaner dairy.

One swap we now push hard: bias your dairy toward its leaner forms. Whole-cream milk, full-fat paneer and full-fat curd carry a big share of their calories as fat, which drags their protein efficiency down. Move toward skim milk, low-fat paneer and low-fat yoghurt — and where you can, toward ultra-filtered milk. It’s filtered to concentrate the protein and strip out much of the sugar, so the same glass gives you noticeably more protein and less lactose. For most clients it’s one of the simplest high-leverage changes on the list: same habit, same routine, better numbers.

The researcher worth knowing here is Rajavel Elango, whose work underpins most of what we recommend. His three questions, which we’ve written up in World protein day, are worth committing to memory: how many grams are you eating, what share of your calories is protein, and are you adjusting for the lower quality of plant sources?

One habit that keeps the numbers honest: hold a clear line between your protein sources and your indulgences. A date-and-nut bar with a whisper of whey is a treat, not a protein source, and quietly counting it as one is how people convince themselves they’re hitting a target they’re actually missing by half. When you tally the day’s protein, only count the foods genuinely pulling their weight — eggs, dairy, dal, tofu, meat, an honest scoop of whey. Let the treats be treats, and pay for them out of a different budget.

On whey and supplements

Whey isn’t magic and it isn’t villainous. It’s a convenience tool. It’s a byproduct of cheese-making — the liquid left when milk is curdled, filtered and dried. Nobody is “manufacturing” it in a special way; the big brands mostly import the same protein from Europe, the US or New Zealand and repackage it here. You can’t meaningfully make it at home either — the liquid you squeeze out of paneer has a gram or two at best.

So when is a 20 to 25 gram scoop of whey useful? When your food selection makes hitting your protein target impractical, especially at the lower calorie intakes most of us should be eating. It buys you time while you fix your habits. That’s it. It’s a shortcut, not a foundation.

The same clear eye applies to everything sold to you. Which brings us to the noise.

How to read the marketing

Once you start paying a premium for your health, the single most useful skill is calling out marketing for what it is. A few patterns to recognise:

Protein-washing. Take a food that’s mostly cheap fat, refined carbs or salt, add a little protein, and slap “high protein” on it. Whenever you see that claim, ask three questions: what percentage of the calories actually come from protein, where are the rest of the calories coming from, and how much sodium are you swallowing to get there? Thirty grams of protein isn’t a win if it rides in on 1,200 mg of sodium.

“High protein” that isn’t. You need 350 calories of makhana to get 10 grams of protein — same calorie density as white rice, and not remotely low-calorie once it’s roasted in ghee. Most date-and-nut “protein” bars carry less protein than a single egg. If that counts as high protein, the word has lost its meaning.

Trust me, I’m authentic. No. A company is a company, and it will say things to sell you things. The moment someone — a brand, a charismatic founder, an influencer you like — is trying to make a buck off you, your feelings about them have to go out the window. All that counts are the numbers, and the numbers need scrutiny. Nobody’s likeability milked the cow.

Eat local, eat ancestral. Chillies, potatoes, tomatoes, tea, coffee — none of these were “local” to India a few centuries ago. What’s foreign today is a staple tomorrow. Processing isn’t inherently bad, either: a factory can fortify a food or isolate its protein in ways your kitchen never could, while your kitchen can control the salt, oil and hygiene in ways a factory never will. Judge food on what it does for your body, not on its passport.

And ghee, since someone always asks: it does not lubricate your joints. No food is piped to your knee as oil. Eat it because it tastes good, sparingly and measured — not because of a health halo.

Micronutrients worth minding

No single diet reliably delivers every micronutrient in an optimal dose, and this matters more as we live longer. A few are worth attention, and a sensible multivitamin or targeted supplement can close the gap. Always run supplements past a doctor first.

That’s the short version. For the full rundown on each — calcium, magnesium, zinc and iron, with doses, forms, and the one you should never self-supplement — see Micronutrients that matter.

Enjoy food without the guilt

None of this means fear. Phobias about a monthly can of diet cola, or a square of sugar-laden chocolate, or an “insulin spike,” are their own kind of unhealthy. The pragmatic move is to normalise micro-portions: a three-spoon scoop of ice cream dragged out to six, enjoyed and done. Food is also memory — sharing a scoop with your kid isn’t a nutritional event, it’s the point of some meals. Enjoy the smallest portion that makes you happy, and learn to walk away content.

This matters most for children, who are watching. By eighteen, the average child has shared 20,000-odd meals with family. That’s 20,000 lessons in how to serve yourself what you need, savour a bite, and stop. They learn eating by osmosis, not by lecture. Show them well.

Pragmatic beats perfect

There’s an ideal diet — precise calories, 105 grams of protein, 50 grams of fibre, 500 mg of EPA and DHA. And there’s the pragmatic one: aim for 80 to 110 grams of protein, eat three or four cups of vegetables, pop an omega 3, eat the oily fish when you have it. Chase the pragmatic version. The ideal is a destination you approach through a long line of good-enough days.

The trick is to learn the principles, not memorise a rigid plan — because the plan will break the day the cook quits, work explodes, or you move house. If you understand that your 100 grams of paneer can become a scoop of whey in a pinch, or your three eggs can become half a tub of Skyr, you improvise instead of collapsing. Status quo beats reversed gains.

What success actually looks like

Not kilos lost. Not a before-and-after photo. Not inches. Those are just downstream signs of habits you managed to keep. Success, to us, is when you understand that training is a decades-long practice, that food is a transaction worth monitoring, that sleep and peace of mind are not optional, and that the goal is to hold muscle while the fat comes off. It’s watching the trajectory, not the scale on any single morning — and increasingly, being able to spot the nonsense yourself.

That’s the job. We’ll be there for the rest of it — every morning you show up, and every time someone tries to sell you a shortcut, standing next to you calling it what it is.

The numbers and targets here are general starting points. In coaching we work them out for you specifically — your size, your foods, your constraints.

---