Barefoot Vegan Mag Jan_Feb 2017

Tell us about yourself and how you
came to be vegan…
I think the first thing that made me switch my diet was
when I was about 18. I was on holiday for a week with
my friends. It was a week of very unhealthy living and I
came back and my brother was in hospital and no one
had told me. It turned out that he had diabetes and my
father has always said that he was the healthy one in the
family. He always went to the gym; he followed the
men's health lifestyle of a high protein-low carb diet,
something that we believed to be very healthy back
then. And he's only five years older than me, so he must
have been about 24 when he got diabetes. Some of my
other family members had high cholesterol and cancer.
Cancer was just popping up everywhere around me.
I went vegetarian and then I went vegan. I began
talking to my parents about how they used to live. I
started to read about how our lifestyle has changed so
much from how it was even in my parents’ generation
and that this can be a factor in the high cancer rate. I
realised that our body and health is affected hugely by
what we eat. We can have a generic predisposition to
being obese, having heart disease or cancer, but if we
adjust our lifestyle we can limit those genes from
expressing themselves. It's about taking our health back
into our own hands.
How would you define self-care? And
how does that show up in a practical
way in your everyday life?
Self-love is being selfish in a sense, but being selfish has
a really negative connotation in society today. But we
need to get rid of that because being selfish can be a first
step to being self-less. When you can cater to yourself,
you start to be able to be better equipped to cater to
other people without feeling so overwhelmed because
now you are running on full fuel. How this looks in my
everyday life is apparent in what I choose to eat.
Obviously I go out. I don't stop my social life from
existing, because that is also a part of self-love. I have
friends, I have a social life but on a day-to-day basis I
only consume organic food. I only buy from local shops
when I can and that is how I see me loving myself. I
want to consume certain foods because I see my body
and my health as being very important. It deserves the
best food that I can provide.
You’ve mentioned before that
vegetarianism is quite common place
in many Indian communities, but a
lot of Indian families that come over
to the UK or to other Western
countries leave their previous
lifestyle behind and it begins to
become detrimental to their health.
So from your perspective, what are
some of the biggest health challenges
that are facing your community?
In terms of disease, cancer, heart disease and diabetes
are the top three threats to my community. It's so
common amongst us and I think it’s one of the risks of
being an immigrant. You literally leave everything that >
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