Strategy on living healthy with the South Asian diet

Number one, I would say cut down the amount of consumption because people, you know, they look at somebody like me and they think I'm ill. Seriously, people think that if you're thin, if you're slim, then there is something wrong with you. And traditionally, the bigger you were, the healthier you were regarded. So that mentality still exists unfortunately. And so the first thing we probably need to concentrate on is the diet, the amount that you're consuming, you need to cut down on that, you need to increase your physical activity. Of course during Ramadan that probably won't be a good idea but generally speaking you need to increase your physical activity. You need to, long before medication comes into all of this, a healthy lifestyle would hopefully mean that you would reduce your chances of getting diabetes and other health complications. Physical fitness, when you talk about physical activity, people often have this image of going to a gym and trying to build muscles and so on, and of course that's not the case for me personally. For 20 odd years now, I've been just doing walks, nothing but walking. And that's done really lots of good to me, I know that. Also, variety in diet, cutting down on complex carbohydrates and adding more vegetables and salad and fruit. in that order, I guess. That would be something that I think we could talk to people about, you know, replacing your two chapatti with one chapatti plus, you know, vegetables and whatever. Cooking wise in curries and so on, using healthy oils, cutting down on the amount of oil. It doesn't have to be soaking in, you know, in oil for something to be good for you. Cutting down on salt and sugar. Those are the things, again, most, I'll tell you from personal experience, I haven't, long before I became diabetic, I didn't have, I gave up sugar during my student days. I love sweets, but in my tea and coffee I'm talking about. And people, even today you get these different types of teas and coffees, masala, chai, and so on and so forth, 99% of the time they come with sugar. And, you know, so people, it's just a way of life that if you don't have sweetened in your, you know, if you don't have sugar in your tea, it's pointless drinking it. So again, education in that sense as well, trying to get people to change their habits. You know, you can make it if you, if you can't do without sweet, then you can put but sweeteners or something like that in your tea. And those, I think, things that we could talk about in order to change the eating habits.