Back in 2023, during an event, Bollywood actress Anushka Sharma revealed something intruiging about her eating habits. When asked if she could eat the same food every day, she responded candidly, “That's not a difficult thing for me because I do eat the same thing almost every day sometimes. Especially, when I am filming a movie, I eat the same thing. So, there have been times when I have had khichdi and begun bhaja for a month straight for dinner. That's all I have eaten. Or idli sambar for breakfast for six months straight.”
While Anushka's dedication to her routine is certainly admirable, it raises an important question: is eating the same food every day truly beneficial, or could it have some downsides? And more importantly, is this kind of diet right for everyone? To shed some light on the subject, we spoke to nutritionist Anupama Menon, on whether this approach to eating is a fad or a sustainable choice?
The Mono Diet: What is it?
Menon explains, “The Mono or Monotrophic diet is a fad with absolutely no scientific backing. It involves the use of a single food that is eaten all day for months. For instance, eggs are eaten 4-5 meals a day, every day for an extended period of time. Or milk as many times a day for 3-4 months.” For this, you just need to pick a singular food of choice or convenience and eat that for a stipulated period of time until you achieve the weight loss you have set out to achieve or get bored of the diet or become weak and cannot take it anymore, whichever of these comes first!
Risks and downsides of a mono diet:
This diet has no pros except that you will see extreme weight loss based on the food that you choose to “mono eat”. Menon elaborates, “It could make you lose muscle, make you deficient in important nutrients, couls cause anaemia or malnutrition, could affect your mental health and mood, could affect your menstrual cycle and could cause a host of other problems in varying degrees based on what you choose to eat. Besides, after gathering all the will power in the world to execute this kind of a diet, at the end of it, the risk that you will regain all the lost weight is almost 100%. Always remember, what you do to lose weight will have to be 70% of what you maintain to keep the excess weight away.”
Using the mono diet concept smartly:
But like with everything, this diet could be used as a concept, differently, such that it does not impact your health in the long run. To break a plateau, or to give your weight loss journey a push as you just start off. Here’s how to approach it without jeopardising your health:
Menon suggests, “When you are stuck on a plateau, use this diet (for example: fruits only/ curds and vegetables only/ chicken and veggies only/ rice and vegetables only) for two days in a week to dodge your plateau and shake the weight down on the scale.”
If you can amass a little more determination, you could do the mono diet for 4 weeks as below:
Week 1: 6-7 days of the mono diet, 1-2 days of normal healthy diet
Week 2: 4 days of mono diet, 3 days of normal healthy diet
Week 3: 2 days of mono diet, 5 days of normal healthy diet
Week 4: 7 days of healthy diet
Exercise considerations while on the mono diet:
“The advantage of progressively losing the Mono Diet will reduce the risk of weight gain from the weight loss you may achieve in the first 2 weeks. Also make sure that when you are using the alternate forms of the Monotrophic diet above, you do not exercise hard, relax, take it easy and walk if you would like to for about 30 minutes a day, nothing more than that. High intensity exercise on the days you are on a low calorie diet could push the body into starvation mode making it difficult for the body to lose weight,” Menon concludes.