Nivedita Basu, Senior VP at Atrangii Group, feels health and wellness are not only about an individual’s physical health, they’re about an individual as a whole. She said, “Health and wellness have to do with mental and physical health. You need to exercise, you need to do basic steps.”
“A health watch is a mandatory thing in every person’s life, but mostly it is mental health, and that is the reason why everyone is suffering from these diseases,” she added.
Nivedita also feels that people sometimes blindly accept anything that’s been referred to as healthy to them, like in advertisements or restaurants. “We just need to go to a restaurant and store and ask them what the healthy replacement is." There is no validation of what they have mixed. We blindly pick it up and think we are going to be healthy and slim. I don’t think we really go back to see whether it is genuine or not, we just believe in the ad and go ahead,” she said.
She further confessed that it’s very rare for her to check the ingredients of any food item that she is buying, as she generally goes by what’s mentioned on the packaging. “I genuinely see the products that are selling, but mostly, like I said, if it says it is healthy or it says brown rice, I pick it up blindly. There are so many times when my friends from the health industry actually come and say that you don’t know that this is mixed with this particular product. But I still trust the words of the seller, who says healthy products,” she said.
But she agrees that certain products or ingredients can do harm rather than benefit the consumer. She said, “Some products are useful in somebody else’s case but can be harmful to you, so one needs to identify their own body. There is no one universal diet that everyone can follow to become slim. Everybody is different, and I think one needs to understand their own body. More than a dietician, I think one themselves needs to understand.”
And though she watches a lot of nutritionists and fitness experts, she doesn’t follow anyone blindly. She added, “I overall see what they are saying and just follow it in my own way. It’s not like I blindly follow, but yes, I follow a lot of things. AI kind of identifies on social media, and they show me stuff about what people are doing for this, what comes in healthy cooking, eating, so yes, I do follow them in my day-to-day life.”
Nivedita emphasised that social media has taught her to accept herself the way she is, instead of buying the idea of slim.
“Being slim is not a great thing. Sometimes healthy people, plumpy people look sexy, and have more strength than a person who is slim fit and goes to the gym. I would say, on the contrary, that social media has opened our minds to the fact that being slim is not generic. I think it’s being healthy and having core body strength to sustain things that’s bigger.”
