Enjoy the Journey to Lose Weight with Deepika Chalasani
Deepika Chalasani, clinical nutritionist, mind and body transformation coach, is the Co-Founder of Fit4Life India, an integrated nutrition and wellness organization for Indians that provides complete solutions, addressing health and wellness challenges of individuals by working on their overall wellbeing.
With a career spanning two decades, Deepika has worked with organizations and individuals across multiple sectors like IT-ITES, hospitality, retail, FMCG, pharma, manufacturing, and financial services to accelerate performance and bring sustainable change.
Deepika’s entrepreneurial journey began in 2012, when she, along with her father, C Subba Rao, Co-Founded Fit4Life India. She transitioned from a high-profile corporate career into the world of nutrition to battle her obesity-related issues healthily & sustainably, reverse her metabolic disorders and contribute to a healthier India by helping her father share his wealth of nutrition knowledge with Indians across the globe.
As a clinical nutritionist and mind-body transformation coach, she has worked with over 2000 individuals, ranging from children to senior citizens from diverse backgrounds which include homemakers, professionals, businessmen, junior, mid, and senior corporate executives, students, children, and people with varied sexual preferences and over a couple of thousand Indian families globally with a healthy active lifestyle. Her youngest client is a 7-year-old, and her oldest client is 78 years with several co-morbidities and with 90 units of Insulin.
She curates a customized program that focuses on the client´swellness orbit, which includes nutrition, physical activity, sleep, and stress and helps them attain a better level of wellness. She designs the program by understanding the client´s current nutritional status, health condition, lifestyle, profession,favourite foods,etc,and their desired outcome. She plays a vital role in helping them revisit and question their limiting belief systems, dysfunctional values frameworks, blocks and mindsets and therefore helps them change their mindset to support their health journey.
Along with scientific methods of nutrition, she uses principles from the fields of Neuro-Linguistic Programming more specifically Meta models and Milton Models, Psychometrics, Psychotherapy, Enneagrams & Mindfulness to accelerate change and achieve desired health and weight loss goals.
Besides being India’s first Mind-Body Eating Coach, she also holds prominent certifications in therealm of nutrition, mind, body, and holistic well-being. Some of these include a Fellowship in Clinical Nutrition, a Post-graduate diploma in Nutrition & Dietetics certified by Ministry of HRD, Weight Management, and Lifestyle Specialist, Fitness Nutrition Specialist, Certificate in Food & Nutrition, Diploma in Nutrition & Health Education; Trainer, Master Practitioner and Coach in Neuro-Linguistic programming. She has 3 masters, in economics, human resources and psychotherapy and counselling.
Her own Journey of Weight Management
Talking about her own journey of weight management, she says that during her first pregnancy at 31, she gained 25 kilos. At that time, she did not bother much about weight gain as she thought it was a temporary phase and would lose weight after the delivery. But that did not happen. By the age of 39, she had tried different strategies and solutions available in the market, the ordeal of weight continued. She also faced some health problems like borderline diabetes, blood pressure, cholesterol, knee pain, fatigue, psoriasis, etc. Due to this reason, she was having mood swings, irritability which in turn was impacting her relationships at home.
She realized that she has to lose weight and decided to study nutrition. Her dad was her biggest inspiration to lose weight. “If he could lose 20 kilos at the age of 60 and maintain the weight for 10 years then I could too,” says Deepika. After studying nutrition, she understood food in terms of nutritional composition and bought variety in her food. She also realized that humans have different equation with food. For example, men and women look at food differently. Men typically want to drown themselves in food whereas women want to fill themselves up with food. Due to these reasons, they do a lot of stress eating, binge eating, and emotional eating. During her weight management period, she devised ways to enjoy all her favourite food, exercise adequately and improve her equation with food. After around 18 months, she not only lost over 25 kilos but also reversed her health condition.
Since she is a foodie herself, she loves to include different food items in her meals like cakes pastries etc. “Once I lost weight, I realized that you can lose weight by eating all your favourite foods. You can lead a normal life and yet lose weight but there is a journey to it. I wanted to share the journey with other people as I see many people struggling with it. And I want to help them manage their weight by changing the way they look at food,” she says.
Fit4Life India Gives Scientific Nutrition Plan
Deepika talks about the nutrition plan and says that we provide scientific nutrition plans to our clients. Here, we study our client’s blood report and look at his food habits. We also analyze what is causing them problems and how we can help them fix the problem. There are some foods that suit us and benefit us. We look at all these parameters and create a ‘Me Plan’ with our clients for them. We are not very prescriptive unless there is a serious health condition. In that case,we give coaching to them instead of telling them to eat something without any reason.
Fit4life India over several years has successfully helped thousands of Indian families across theglobe with:
- Sustainable weight loss
- Reverse/reduce metabolic disorders like diabetes, BP, Uric Acid, PCOD/PCOS,Thyroid,etc.
- Improve digestive and gastro-intestinal health with issues such as migraine, IBS, food into lerances
- Inflammatory and auto-immune ailments like rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis,etc.
- Improvedthefitnessandrecoverylevelsofmanyathleteswhoactivelyparticipatein
marathons, swimming, and iron man competitions.
- Emotional eating, comfort eating, binge eating, congenial goal setting to achieve weight and health goals.
They give exercises to their clients and ask them to do no more than 30-40 mins exercise every day. They also provide videos wherever required.
Great Decision Maker
As a leader, she has consciously hired women only in her organization as she wants to give back to society and empower women in her own little way. Earlier she used to work from 10-6 pm, but 2020 changed the way of her functioning. She has allowed her employees to have flexible working hours and have also allowed them to work from home. She also hires young girls freshly out of college of nutrition who have a spark in them and then teach them nutrition. She also runs a profit sharing program where she allows her employees to have a share in the profit she earns through them. This not only motivates them but also gives them a sense of individuality.
“The vision of our company is to make India healthier through tradition and western progressive research and we are able to combine both,” she adds.
Talking about the challenges faced by female leaders, she says that we can either look at it as a weakness or as a strength. Women have such an innate level of leadership that men can never match to it such as intuition, perception, and nurturing capabilities. At different ages, women have different priorities. Women can choose how aggressively they want to be in their career or how slow they want to be in their career. These choices men do not possess, they have to be aggressive as they are the bread earner of their family.
Some Helpful Tips to Stay healthy and improve Well-being:
Being healthy internally is very important for a successful career and personal life. Here are some tips from the expert which will help you improve overall well-being:
Make a Routine: Making a routine will help you take care of nutrition, physical activities which in turn will help you sleep better.
Plan for the week: Making a plan for all your meals during the weekends will help you plan for the next week.
Diversity of Food:Having a diversity of food is the key. You should have fruits, green vegetables, nuts, and proteins in your day-to-day diet.
Deepika says follow this for a week and see how well you perform. Don’t give in, don’t give up and don’t quit and most importantly, enjoy the journey. If you are not enjoying the journey you will not lose weight. You can also include your favourite food in your plan but reduce the calorie intake.
You can follow Deepika Chalasani on instagram: @deepika_chalasani, Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/deepikachalasanifit4lifeindia
You can also visit her website: https://www.deepikachalasani.com/