Decoding Healthy Eating With Celebrity Nutritionist Kinita Kadakia Patel

I had the opportunity to interview one of India’s most sought after nutritionists, Kinita Kadakia-Patel, to ask her about how she brings health, fitness, and FUN into her daily life and into her clients’ lives. I really enjoy Kinita's perspective that health and wellness is not a quick fix, and it is quite literally a shift in the way you think and feel about yourself.

Kinita Kadakia-Patel is the founder of Meal Pyramid, Mumbai-based fitness and nutrition consultancy. She is an award-winning Sports Nutritionist who works with leading sports teams, organizations and schools. Her clients include numerous international and national athletes, celebrities, models and prominent industrialists. She has an MSc in Dietetics with research in sports nutrition along with certifications from The Oxford College (London), Sports Dietetics Association (Australia) and International Sports Science Association (USA).

Besides being a practicing sports nutritionist she is also an author, a lecturer at ACSM, columnist and a mother.
 

Read on snippets from her interview to find out what she has to say about eating healthy.
 

“A fitness enthusiast myself, I have always tried to challenge myself with different workouts and complement the same with a complete nutrition plan. I realised while studying and with a decade-ful of working experience, if one wants to workout, ‘diets’ don’t work. They leave you hungry, irritable and lethargic. I believe in  staying fit and healthy by achieving sustainable results through a combination of exercise with nutrition.That’s when I became passionate about practising sports nutrition and eating clean and healthy.”

“My journey began couple of decades ago when I enrolled myself to study nutrition and dietetics at SNDT Mumbai. I went ahead from there to complete my MSc and further on continued to keep updating myself with many other degrees and courses in the field of sports nutrition.”

“With my personal history of having an overweight childhood, studying nutrition came to me as a blessing. When time was to choose a field for further education I decided to study nutrition and implement what I learnt in my own schedule. Ever since I never looked back.”
 

She eventually founded MEALpyramid which is a nutrition consultancy service where she guides people to achieve their body targets with nutrition and fitness advice.
 

“My passion is fitness and nutrition and when your work is your passion you never get tired doing it. I don’t need to push myself to go to work or wake up on a Sunday morning to teach. I love what I do and I am constantly hungry to learn more. It’s a man’s world out there in sports but I have no complaints. People have only been supporting and motivating.”

Her new book “The Athlete in You" is a guide to eating, playing and performing like an athlete. Don’t get confused by the title, it is not a book to become an athlete. It is a book telling you to adapt the positive benefits of being like an athlete.

This book will benefit you in your daily routine activities like fighting fatigue, better work performance, upping the training intensity or dealing with stress eating. It is an wholesome approach towards achieving body transformation in a sustainable life changing manner.
 

“Most diets have one goal which is to decrease body weight, it’s not even about body fat so much, it’s simply weight loss. Most diets do this by cutting out calories, often eliminating entire food groups from the diet or replacing meals with shakes. Result is fatigue, poor performance, inability to workout better and binging out of vengeance”

She recommends to not remove any food from your diet completely. Let it be a wholesome plan parallel to a workout regime. This way you will observe irreversible results.

“Make a beginning. The challenge is to pre-plan your meals to prevent you from cheating and wearing the socks to head for your workout. Just these two things will help you structure your life better and get you on a routine towards getting your results.”
 

“I strongly believe one should ‘Learn’ to eat right. There are people who can tell you what to eat but the success is in educating yourself about what to eat. Once you know how you respond to a certain food, you will invariably land up make the right choice.”

For more information, please visit the website.