There are some childhood memories, for me,
the tropical torpor of the village of Kuala Belait, in Brunei, where wearing a
newly acquired jacket which made me sweat heavily, I would run after
butterflies. These memories do not arrive announced but their sudden arrival
does portend a sense of disequilibrium. I have firm ideas about thinking about
the past and the future. I hardly think of my school days or friends from those
days.
Was that a protective mechanism?
Was it to forget incidents or geography or
people that you no longer wish to be associated with? Things becomes clear from
those times when I wish to extend my memory, and now I know that it has worked
out to be a good defence mechanism for the kind of vagabond life I have lead,
with chameleon like frequency all over the world.
There are people in your life, who came,
left a strong imprint and walked away to find destinies of their own. I am
lucky to have had many and they appear on my Gratitude List very often. One
such was an Australian friend of mine, LS. She once drew a graph of a
sinusoidal wave on a piece of paper. She then explained to me, most people lead
a life of ups and downs and it is the normal way. You have chosen to just ski
on top of the top of the waves, so that you can avoid the banality of everyday
ordinariness and also not experience the beauty that comes with the mundane art
of living. Did I make the waves of that sinusoidal wave come as closely as
possible that I can surf over them? And not fall into an abyss?
Let us take travel for instance. Even
before I became a Doctor, I read an obituary of a GP from England. I was not
interested in his work or care of his patients but one sentence struck me, at
that time, like a thunderbolt. Dr So and So took time to travel and had been an
amazing 95 countries around the world! Wow! What a traveller, I thought to
myself and secretly wanted to be a traveller, keeping 95 as my target. The
first 10 came very quickly, and then it began to slow down, after 40 countries,
unless you had moved to a new geographical region, visiting more countries
becomes difficult. Fortunately, I moved from Australia to Europe to America
back to Australia, thus covering a fair bit of the world. When Asia opened up,
and the travel there became easier, more places were visited. I am not a stamp
collector, to go somewhere and said I have been there, I want to know a country
intimately and try to visit them repeatedly, for example, I have been to
Argentina more than 15 times, but so have I to many others, including Myanmar.
Why do I mention this? Perhaps this was the
peak of the sinusoidal wave for me for a considerable part of my life.
Fortunately the interest in my profession never waned and was polished by
further postgraduate studies in Medical Anthropology. Now, after many years of
travel, I don't think I have had any two week stretch of time, that I have been
idle and not been on a train, bus or plane, usually the latter.
The sense of morose that arises, like
recently when I was marooned in Miami waiting for an Indian Visa, it almost
makes you feel you are wasting your life.
I began reading a great little book, aptly
titled, Casablanca: Movies and Memory by the well-known French Anthropologist,
Marc Auge.
He escapes into the movies for memory,
including the smell of theatres of the left bank of Paris growing up. I don't
exactly escape into travel, since I don't remember the places or have a sense
of déjà vu, but then again I am surfing the peaks of experiences and perhaps
looking for more peaks than troughs.
It is so important to have corresponding
friends. In the olden days of snail mail, one wrote long letters to friends and
waited eagerly for enticing, stimulating replies of equal length to arrive by
mail. I used to cherish those letters and walked around with an enhanced
feeling for days that followed.
For the past ten years, instead of friends,
I have acquired a country! Cuba where the stimulating exchange has no end, like
a sweet bakery in the sky. It coincided also with the availability of Internet
and email whereby the communications became superfast and one can spend hours
each day as I do, dedicated to thinking or creating in my mind various lives
that I can lead secretly.
In Miami, I am lucky to have many things
and amongst which is an erudite friend, in fact a colleague from Medical school
days. He quit medicine because the quotidian practice of it, directed by
heartless administrators acting on behalf of the pillars of capitalism, was
contrary to the ethics he was taught and believed in. We both have the luxury
of time to read and discuss, not only matters of medical interest but also
about very many other things we share an interest in.
His email to me this morning triggered this
output from my brain.
I got this
cartoon from our weight watchers leader. It's sort of describes the condition
that I am in now in which I have in a de facto sense become on a maintenance
program. I do very well during the week but on the weekends I indulge too much
and then I like the stability of good quality home cooked food during the week.
It's an interesting question for the
anthropologist. I think it describes the lives of many people. If you can
figure out the answer please let me know…
What a great metaphor I thought.
Look at movies, Marc Auge would argue.
There are no mundane moments, it does not show anyone sitting down to eat an
ordinary meal and enquiring each other how their day went. It goes from
excitement to excitement, anger and frustration. In cheaper versions, Soap
Operas, one sees the faces to go with it, with its exaggeration of emotions.
Sound and voices add to the exaggeration, especially if the soap operas are in
Latin American Spanish or Brasilian!
The success of the magic of movies in
depraved places like India or the success of soap operas in a country like
Cuba, has to do with the fact that they know that they are not going to watch
mundane things on the screen to which they are subjected to each and every day
but magic awaits them on the silver screen (or HD TV that covers walls!)
I am not suggesting my friend lives a
mundane life but his eating behaviour is such a good metaphor for the lives of
people in Miami or elsewhere in the western world. In poorer or less educated
societies the story is very different. There are no minutes left to ponder over
the mundane moments of life, there is no memory but only oblivion.
Thinking about diets and weight loss, which
is a multibillion-dollar industry in America, here are some sensible
suggestions from a professor from Colorado who has been involved in this
research. Since I see exclusively American Indian patients, our advice is
culturally relevant and sensitive and also guised in symbols of their lives and
spirituality. So I wont include it here but quote the professor that is
relevant to most Americans and Europeans and Australians.
First, weight loss and weight
maintenance are two separate things. “We’ve learned that losing weight and
keeping it off are very different and, for each person, the best diet for
weight loss is not the same as the best diet for keeping it off,” Wyatt said.
If you want to lose weight and not
regain it, you must use different strategies during each phase. In both phases,
but especially during the keep-it-off phase, Wyatt recommends eating foods that
you like and that are compatible with your lifestyle.
“Physiology and metabolism may play a
role” in how you respond to a diet, “but the way you grew up and cultural
factors are just as important,” she said.
“The second biggest item we’ve learned
is that exercise is the most important thing for keeping it off once you’ve
lost weight. I tell my patients that in their initial weight-loss phase, diet
is doing the driving and exercise is in the back seat. After that, physical
exercise is in the front seat with diet in back,” Wyatt explained.
“We’ve also learned that while diet
and exercise are important, just as important is your mind set — that is, why
you want to lose weight, why you want this transformation. It’s a holistic
approach.”
And finally, the most often neglected
piece of the puzzle is tailoring your diet plan. “Matching the diet you choose
to your activity level is important. If you are an athlete or have an active
lifestyle, you can choose a diet with more carbohydrates and calories, a lot
more sugar. But if you have a desk job or a sedentary lifestyle, you’re better
off with a low-carb, low-sugar diet,” Wyatt said.
In addition to the three recommended
diets already mentioned, the other diet plans that have been scientifically
shown to be effective include Weight Watchers and Jenny Craig. Meal-replacement
diets where you have a shake or a frozen entrée for one of your meals “have
some good data, as do the low-fat, plant-based diets,” Wyatt said, noting that
the latter also show good outcomes when it comes to heart disease.
“These are not exhaustive lists,” she
added, but simply examples of the varied weight-loss paths.
As for popular or trendy diets, you
“can argue about each one, but for a dieter to lose weight they must eat less,”
and most such diets do reduce calories consumed and will work for some people,
Wyatt said. That’s true for the Paleolithic diet, she pointed out, where “its
general principles are fairly solid.”
But she cautioned that one difficulty with
the Paleo, gluten-free and other diets of the day is that “people can’t adhere
to them” — and that’s the key for any long-term plan.
Thinking about Casablanca, one of the
earliest movie memories that have stuck along with Orfeo Negro (Brasil, Marcel
Camus, France), I will be arriving in Casablanca in six days time. Alors, not
to go to Rick’s Café but to await a Qatar Airways flight to New York arriving
there on the day the Traditional Kickapoo like to call the Occupation Day! Americans call it Thanksgiving. Yes, they did
get a Great Continent.
i remember watching Orfeo Negro on a saturday afternoon at a movie theatre in Brighton, Melbourne, inciting in me a lifelong passion for Brasil and its music and its people and its culture.
