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Penguin Books Ltd - Yaana Gupta

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105 pages

English

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Do you look in the mirror and dislike what you see? Are you always trying different diets? Do you feel guilty if you overeat? You re not the only one. For sixteen years, model and actress Yaana Gupta struggled with her body and the way she felt about it. She tried every diet, worked out constantly but the fears remained. In How to Love Your Body (and get the body you love), Yaana writes about how she got the balance back in her life and learnt to love herself. Using her own experiences, she gives you easy to follow eating advice and the real lowdown on food from the right portions to eat to being healthy on the go. She also gives you great tips how to understand the nutrition labels, the great dabba trick and the best snack to eat when you get a late-night hunger attack. Finally Yaana teaches you the greatest lesson of all how you can learn to love and accept your body. Because without it, she argues, no weight loss will ever make you happy.

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Publié par	Penguin Books Ltd
Date de parution	13 décembre 2011
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9788184756395
Langue	English

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Extrait

YAANA GUPTA
How to Love your Body
and Get the Body You Love

PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
About the Author
Dedication
Dear You
Part 1: All about Me
My obsession with losing weight, what it did to me and how I got back on track
Part 2: How to Get the Body You Love
My hard-earned lessons about learning to eat right and exercise
Part 3: How to Love Yourself
Exercises for your head
Goodbye
Acknowledgements
Appendix
Copyright Page
PENGUIN BOOKS
HOW TO LOVE YOUR BODY
Yaana Gupta is a model, actress and singer. She was one of India s top models, the face of Lakm and a Kingfisher calendar girl. Most recently she was a finalist on the TV show Jhalak Dikhla Jaa . She is currently recording her first album.
To India, my eternal Love, and all its people
Dear You
We don t know one another, but I am going to tell you something I have told hardly anyone. Not even my own parents know. Nor do the people who were closest to me for years such as my husband and boyfriends. This is how private this secret was for me.
But things have changed over the years. I have changed. I now know that the thing I was hiding was a problem and not just some weird part of my personality. It is a problem many people suffer from and it can be pretty serious and may require professional help. I have suffered from it since I was sixteen, but today after all these years I am ready to come out of the closet and tell you:
I have an eating disorder.
Unless you have suffered from an addiction you may not realize how difficult it was just to write this down. It s quite huge, I tell you. But it also feels immensely liberating. By saying it out loud I am finally coming to terms with it and lovingly accepting this problem to be part of me. So let me say it one more time:
I have an eating disorder .
There I ve said it! And now it s out. Wow! I am proud of myself! Yay!
Now my dear friend, let me tell you why I wanted to start this book by telling you this. I did it because I know I am not the only one who has suffered from an eating disorder. And my talking about this openly could perhaps help many of you out there who have a similar problem. But more important, I know I have an eating disorder, and the way I overcame it has important lessons for all of us. Most of us have an unhealthy relationship with food and our bodies. We are never satisfied with the way we look, we feel guilty when we have indulged and we label foods as being good or bad . That s why you re reading this book, isn t it? To get the secret mantra to looking amazing because you are not completely happy with yourself. The other day a friend of mine, laughing about being neurotic about her body said, You know, we all suffer from eating disorders. She s right in a way.
I am not so different from you. I may be a well-known model and appear on TV and in films but I am also insecure, I also feel imperfect and I also have issues in life. Just like you, I don t like some parts of my body. Just like you, I have looked in the mirror and thought I wasn t thin enough. And just like you, I have read up on and tried countless diets to try and look as perfect as I want to be in my head. My eating disorder came from the pressure to always look amazing in front of the camera and from my fears that I didn t look thin enough. And now that I have finally come out of it, I can see that while it is important to look good and be fit, it is as important to learn to love yourself. And this is where you should be too, how you should feel about yourself.
You can never feel attractive and sexy unless you accept yourself and your body. I may have always been model-thin but it was never enough for me. I worried constantly about gaining weight and that fear dominated my life. So you can have a diet book that teaches you how to lose weight, but it will never be enough if you can t look in the mirror and like yourself. This is what my eating disorder taught me. How we eat, what we eat and the way we look, all happens in our head. That s why this book is not just about ways to reshape your body but also about ways to reshape your thinking. And that s why I wanted to start by telling you all the crazy issues I had about food; reading about it must make you think about the way you look at your own eating patterns as well.
We ll then move to the next part where I give you all my hard-earned lessons about eating well and being healthy. As you will see from part one, I made a lot of mistakes and these really affected my health. In my need to stay thin, I over-exercised and under-ate and it greatly affected my immune system. I am still coming out of it, and it may take me years to be totally free of it. It will take as much time as it takes to totally reprogramme my mind. I realized that the role of food in our lives is to give us pleasure and health and that I needed to focus on these two things rather than on looking hot. Having gone through every diet in the world, I finally came to some basic principles we should follow and I talk about these in part two, which also talks about exercising effectively. But as I have said, the most important part of this book is about what happens inside your head and so in part three I look at ways you can learn to love and accept yourself. This is the most important lesson of all: stay healthy, look after your body and accept it completely. Over the years, as I am slowly overcoming my disorder, I have learned to finally love and accept myself and I hope this book will help you towards that too.
Part 1
All about Me

Photograph by Waseem Khan
My childhood
I was born in Brno, the second largest city of the Czech Republic, a small country that lies amid Germany, Poland, Austria and Slovakia. Some of you may know of it as Czechoslovakia. However that s like ages ago and lots of things have changed over there since then. So if you hear someone still calling it Czechoslovakia please do the Czechs and Slovaks a favour and correct them.
Brno is a very cute place with a small and beautiful old city centre. On a sunny day, it looks very romantic and you will enjoy strolling around the streets admiring the buildings. On a grey day, however (and there are plenty), you will probably just want to quickly get inside a tram or a bus and get home. For me, this is one of the strongest memories of my childhood, waiting at a bus stop, freezing (as I was somehow never adequately dressed) and complaining about the cold!
I had a wonderful childhood, though. Well, almost wonderful. Like if I could take out the fact that my parents got divorced when I was seven years old, and my sister then became a chronic drug addict and we thought she was going to die. But despite all this, it was still quite nice. I handled it somehow. I was also good at lying to myself, so when my parents finally separated I used to just think that it was better that way. But what could I do apart from repressing my feelings? It wasn t easy to lose a dad but it was better than hearing my parents scream at each other. My sister Veronika, who was two years older, didn t have it easy either. But at least we had each other and I cherish that tremendously.
I suppose it was thanks to these stressful circumstances that I was the way I was-shy, reluctant to speak, running to hide behind mom s skirt. She says I was so shy (or maybe scared) that if she left me at the playground and went away, she would find me still standing in the very same spot when she returned an hour later. I don t remember this but I do remember how she used to tell me, Yaana, you will never be able to eat in public! Not even bread! Look at you! (Yes, I used to make quite a mess eating. And that has not changed. I have this unique gift of spilling things on myself whenever I eat or drink. It must be some kind of gravitational force I possess. And the gravity gets even stronger whenever I wear a white dress; strange isn t it?) But I was a cute little thing, a short, plump baby girl, with round cheeks who never threw any tantrums. So as long as you gave me my doll and fed me, I would quietly play the whole day in some corner.
Once I grew a little older I joined the primary school close to home and another life started. Studying never really interested me but what did interest me were boys. Well, not boys really but a boy. Always one at a time, as of course I would never want to distribute my love. I considered love to be my life s purpose. What is the point of living without love? I used to say as a ten-year-old.
Then when I turned fifteen, my world changed once again and it was all thanks to my best friend Dita.
Dita and modelling
Dita was a tall, gorgeous-looking blonde, with long legs and just the perfect measurements to become the next top Czech model. I was a much shorter, cute-looking thing, who wasn t really interested in reading fashion magazines or learning the latest make-up tricks. I would instead pack my backpack and go hitchhiking across the countryside with my friends, carrying just the bare minimum-a sleeping bag, a guitar, a knife and few cans of goulash. At night, we would find a place somewhere in the wilderness, light up a fire, cook a goulash soup, play the guitar and stare mesmerized at the stars.
However, my friend Dita was the biggest influence in my life at that time. She always got straight As, was extremely popular and had an answer for everything. She was even dating an older, extremely handsome boy who was the object of adoration of the entire female population of our school. So you see, Dita deserved some serious respect and I, who was much less popular, was in awe of her and thrilled to be her best friend.
Since Dita s dream was to become a fashion model, she often talked about it and made it sound as if it was the coolest thing in the world. So I slowly started getting interested. I had no idea who Cindy Crawford or Kate Moss were at that time but I was willing to learn quickly and she was more than willi