Rujuta Diwekar’s The PCOD Thyroid Book has a cover which says it all: Compiled from ‘Women and the Weight Loss Tamasha’, Four Strategies to Counter PCOD and Hypothyroid and Including FAQs with Detailed Answers. In the course of this book, nutritionist and fitness expert Diwekar examines PCOD and hypothyroidism and their causes and symptoms, and suggests lifestyle changes to help get over these.
The good: if you are completely clueless about the topic, and do not have the support of a competent endocrinologist and nutritionist, this might help get you on track. It explains the human (especially human female) body and how hormones work in fairly easy language (of particular note is an unusual and interesting explanation of the menstrual cycle, likening it to a dance performance—odd though that may sound, it was the main highlight of the book for me).
But there were many drawbacks, of which the greatest for me was the language. Diwekar uses an irritatingly frivolous style (yes, I will call it frivolous, rather than merely conversational) which, for me, reduced the credibility of the content. When you have emoticons sprinkled liberally through a book, when the author addresses her readers as darling, sweetie, aunty and deviyon, and when every page is littered with Bambaiyya (‘ya’, ‘bole toh’, ‘samjha kya’ and so on), it gets in the way. Here is an example of the sort of language that really got my goat: … ‘calorie-rich’, what does it mean? That it’s NUTRIENT-RICH! Oh, I have to stop screaming and stop being rude. So sorry for lacking the tact to say it in a more appropriate manner…. That’s fine in a blog, but in a book that’s attempting to make me change my life, I find it annoying.
What’s more, I found a lot of this content simplistic: how easy is it, for instance, for the everyday person to set up a farm outside town and grow their own food? The theory, too, that all ‘traditional’ Indian food is good for you because your genes are used to it sounds suspect to me (considering, for instance, that common ingredients in a lot of Indian cuisines today, like potatoes, tomatoes, chillies and peanuts didn't even arrive in this country till about 400 years back, how used to can our genes have got to them?)
And this is the sentence, recommending the consumption of white rice and referring to its widespread use in rural communities, that most maddened me with this book: (about villagers who eat white rice): Ever checked out their sizzling waists and six packs?
Has Diwekar ever heard of rural malnutrition? Of entire communities living close to starvation levels (if not starving)? This is mockery, no less.