The General Motors Diet

After reading about this very unusual rapid dieting method on the net, I decided to undertake this diet from the 27th of October and am into the fifth day as I am writing this. In the first four days, I have lost about 2 kg. Today, I may not get a chance to take my weight as the hospital duty is off. This may also be the case tomorrow. However, I plan to stick to the diet as much as possible, and check my weight on Sunday, when I go back to the hospital for the start of a new week.

This diet involves a set routine. The expectation is that your body gets detoxified, the taste buds get primed afresh, and you lose anywhere from between 5-8 kg in seven days!

My room-mate Dr. Afzal is my silent partner in this self-improvement project. He does feel a little inconvenienced as I am not around to make the usual foods for him, but I cannot help him in that! My compliance with the diet is about 85-90%, and I do tend to cheat wherever possible.

My younger daughter Hannah did plan to join me (from Mumbai) but backed out as her exams are near. However, she continues to be a facilitator and I converse with her daily to share my experience and to hear her encouragement. 

Some of the expectations were that the diet may cause headaches due to dehydration, weakness due to the reduced calorie intake and so on, but I am happy to report that I haven't had any problems so far. I am functioning normally, getting good sleep and am able to walk about half an hour each night as part of my diet + exercise routine. 

That's it. I will try and upload the details elsewhere and send a back-link here to let you all know the actual experience.

Random thoughts

One of the good things about being on call is that you don't have to sit in the out-patient department and deal with the kids and their parents from eight to four. The bad thing, of course, is that once the out-patient duty hours are over, you are liable to be called for any emergencies from the evening until the next morning. The reverse is true when you are off-call. You do need to attend to the out-patient flow, but once the duty hours are over, you are totally free and cannot be called even if the sky falls down on your village.

This is my off-call week; however, I worked the whole week, seeing patients in the out-patient clinic. I also took a lecture for the staff members on "Team work in health care" (this was on Monday). I made mutton biryani on Tuesday, and Dr. Afzal and I had the biryani over the next few days. Along with the biryani, I had also made tomato soup to eat with the biryani. 

Today, i.e. on Thursday, I drove to Taif, from where I am writing this entry today. As usual, I am at the Ahle Saif hotel here. I had a very good Skype session with our study group on account of the fact that the internet signal is very strong here in Taif. After this, I went to Vitamin Palace for my dinner cum dessert. This was a special meal because today is Diwali as well as the night before the start of the new Misri year (1436) - so I ordered a shawarma plate and a big glass of fruit salad with vanilla ice cream.

I intend to spend one night more here in Taif. Then, I plan to return to the village of my work.

Slowly increasing my level of study

If there is one thing today's youth teach me, it is how to be persistent in your efforts. Of course, my friends already know that I am a tenacious son of a gun, but when it comes to studying, I tend to put it off until "later". This has led to days and weeks passing by and my exams coming nearer and nearer, but I am still not there in my seat and reading something that will help me pass the exams. 

During the last 24 hours, I was in touch with a couple of my friends who appeared for the last exams of MRCPCH in Hyderabad India. They were both rueing the fact that all it would have taken them to pass were an additional 5-6 marks ... but as they could not get those marks, they both failed to clear the exams and will likely re-appear in the next session.

For one of those two friends, it was the first time, but for the other, it was the second time he failed to pass. Now, all this might not matter much, but the fact is that the examination fees for this exam are very high indeed. For my January exam, I will be paying over 125000 rupees. Plus I would be travelling to India for the exam. And staying in a hotel for 5-7 days. You can well imagine the kind of expenses I am talking about! 

How my study graph looks like

During a Skype chat with my first friend, I got adequately psyched up to download a few useful documents and have begun to read them in right earnest. However, a few of my old habits prevent me from reading well, in particular, my fetish for playing a few games on Facebook and elsewhere, both on my laptop as well as my smartphone, which, by the way, is a Samsung Galaxy Note 3. In addition, I have to continue to cook, wash clothes and do all the other necessary activities as I am in a foreign land. 

So let's see how this goes ... thanks for reading, and bye for now.