Wonder world of berries… rich in thinning polyphenols, soak in water, pulp, drink, strain first if your wish and use up the berry pulp in soup or sauce!

By Tara Narayan

Eating is Fun / Eating is Yuck! – A variety food column

HelP! Old age is no age to put on weight! i’m
heavyweight but i don’t ob￾sess about my weight over much…and then again when a baby blue kurta i feel good in felt indecently tight, i be￾gan to think oh no, i better lose some weight or i’ll be in real trouble now. Or so I’ve been telling myself lately for I’ve no desire to fall sick and end up in any hospital old or new where a lot leaves to be
desired. And if I fall sick who is going to look out for me with any TLC…. so the bot￾tom line this Shravan-ka-ma￾hina is to lose at least ten kilo
and see if I can get down to my perfect teenage age weight of 55 kg more or less.Of course, easy to say, hard to do. So these days I’ve been reading about how to feel right, think right, eat right,
sleep right and the rest of it – to lose weight! If you know what I mean. Why is it that some people never put on weight no matter how much
they eat, while many put on weight just by looking at food! Which is nonsense as
far as I am concerned, I’m forever taking an interest in some food or another and have a tendency to eat my blues away. There is so much
to losing weight in mind and body, heart and soul. What is the easiest way to get back into some shape? The latest I’ve been reading up tells me I should go drink some polyphenol blends like
maybe the delicious red wa￾ter in which cranberries have been soaked! So why not red
water in which our humble Garcinia cambodia or kokum have been soaked…the fruit this year was frightfully ex￾Eating is Fun / Eatinis Yuck! – A variety food columnpensive and I know some folk
know how to preserve the fresh fruit but I haven’t got around to doing it. But there’s kokum sherbet (sweet) and agal (salty) in the market and
Konkan homes use the first to quench thirst and the second to tart up a curry. The fruit of the kokum is considered to be the traditional fat buster of the Konkan coast homes and afternoon meals will wind up with solkodi or kokum water
spiked with chopped green chili, green coriander leaves, pinch hing. Solkodi comes in various flavors of cumin seed or thymol seeds or some other digestive ingredient. Kokum
tival is plain kokum diges￾tive water, solkodi acquires more richness if combined with freshly squeezed coco￾nut milk. Can be delectable,
very delectable when gently and finely made, not just any￾how without your mind in the
making of it. BUT to return to polyphe￾nol blends i hear these are just rich berry squeezed wa￾ters for example aronia ber￾ries, mulberries blueberries, acai berries, cranberries, the wild places of the world are alive with berries and i may as well include the Konkan coast carvanda berries and many more, just do a count
of them…. just wash, crush soak in water, strain and cheers. Enjoy on the icy rocks if you wish and here’s to woo￾ing weight loss if you drink a glass of berry water morning and night!
Berry fruit is reportedly rich in what is called the
thinning polyphenols which spark your sossegad or lazy mitochondria back to life. Mi￾tochondria are the engines of the cells of body beautiful. The
more oxygenated and natu￾rally alkaline the food you eat the better you feel like living instead of dying all the time! From the sound of it drinking
these polyphenol extracted waters are sort of giving your weight loss program some kind of CPR treatment, kick start your metabolism. There
are nutraceutical products inthe market with names like Metabofix which boasts that it
is the world’s only rapid me￾tabolism boosting formulae “containing 26 unique poly￾phenol extracts.” It contains all kinds of fat-burning diges￾tive enzymes to…er…bring dead or dying mitochondria back to live and hey presto,
weight loss happens. Metabolic fat burners are
ingredients like cinnamon bark, shilajit extract, black pepper fruit, etc. according to a Journal of Agricultura& Food Chemistry” the metabolic-burning extracts “block formation of new fat
cells known as adipocytes.” It seems if we go on a crazy food enjoyment binge on and off we build up hundreds of new fat cells even in a bloody
day! First we overeat, and then we go on eating binges. Classic syndrome to perdi￾tion on the body beautiful front.
All this reminds me in tra￾ditional Ayurveda one is ad￾vised to alkalinize by drinking lemon water, black raisins wa￾ter (soaked overnight), freshly
squeezed aonla juice, turmeric milk, and much more. Do your own homework and share
some of it with me here if you wish, I welcome it. Okay, no more weight loss talk, it is giv￾ing me a headache