Your friend's diet plan is not your diet plan

Last week a patient told me her friend had lost 6 kg on a diet chart, so she had started the same chart. She had the photo on her phone. Someone else's name was still printed on top of it.

This happens every week. A diet chart travels on WhatsApp faster than any advice I give across the desk. And I understand why — it worked for someone you trust, and it is free.

But a diet chart is not a recipe. It is closer to a prescription. It was written for one person's body, one person's reports, one person's routine and one person's medicines. Take it off that person and it stops being the same thing.

Two women at the same weight are not the same body

Put two women on the weighing scale. Both 68 kg, both 5'3". One carries more muscle. The other carries more fat around the middle. They burn different amounts through the day, they hold water differently, they handle sugar differently.

The scale gives you one number. The body underneath is telling two completely different stories.

And that is before we come to age, thyroid, haemoglobin, vitamin D, how much she walks, how she sleeps, and what she was eating before the plan started.

A plan starts from where you already are

This is the part people miss. Your friend's plan was not designed in the air. It was designed against what she was already eating.

If she was eating four roti at dinner and the plan brought her down to two, that is a real change for her. If you already eat two, the same plan changes nothing for you — or it pushes you so low that you are hungry by 10 pm and the biscuit packet opens.

Same chart. Opposite effect.

Where a copied plan actually causes harm

Most of the time a copied plan simply does not work and three months go by. Sometimes it does more than that. These are the ones I see:

• A high-protein plan built on dal and paneer, followed by someone whose kidney reports are already borderline. Nobody checked the creatinine, because nobody knew there was a reason to check.
• A very low-carb plan, followed by someone on insulin or a sulfonylurea. The dose has not changed but the food has. That is how a sugar drops too low.
• Milk and dahi stopped, because the plan did not have them, in a woman whose calcium and vitamin D are already low. Ragi and til help, but the calcium in them is not absorbed as well as the calcium in milk. Dropping dairy without replacing it properly is a bad trade at 40 and a worse one at 50.
• A fruit-heavy plan when the sugar is not yet in control.
• A long fasting window, in someone who takes thyroid medicine on an empty stomach and then cannot eat for six more hours.
• Raw salad twice a day, given to someone whose stomach already bloats, or who has IBS, or a gall bladder problem. Good food, wrong gut.

None of those plans were wrong. Each one was right for the person it was written for.

Even the blood sugar response is personal

There is solid research on this now. When people were given identical meals and their blood sugar was tracked continuously, the responses varied enormously from one person to the next — the same bread, the same banana, one person's sugar climbing sharply and the next person's barely moving.

So when your friend says "rice does not suit me", she may be completely right. About herself.

What you can safely take from anyone's plan

I am not telling you to ignore your friend. Some things are true for almost everybody, and you can start these today without any consultation:

1. Protein in every meal. Dal, dahi, egg, paneer, chana, fish, chicken. Most Indian thalis are short on this, not on carbs.
2. Half the plate as sabzi and salad. With some colour in it, not only cucumber.
3. Eat something within two hours of waking. Skipping breakfast and then eating a heavy lunch is what creates the afternoon slump.
4. Whole grain in place of refined, some of the time. Not everything at once, and not all bajra.
5. Ten minutes of walking after dinner. The smallest thing on this list and one of the most reliable.

That is the copyable part. What is not copyable is the quantity, the timing, the substitutions — everything that depends on your reports and not on hers.

If a plan is in your hand right now

Do this instead of following it:

• Note what actually appealed to you in it: the meal ideas, the structure, or simply that she stopped eating after 9 pm.
• Get the basic reports done — CBC, thyroid, fasting sugar and HbA1c, vitamin D, vitamin B12, lipid profile. Add ferritin if you are tired all the time.
• Bring the plan and the reports together. Half the consultation is already done if I can see what you want to eat and what your body is doing.
• Tell your friend it worked for her. That is worth something. It is just not a prescription.

Your friend's plan is proof that the right plan works. It is not proof that hers is the right one for you.

General information. For your own health, please talk to your doctor or dietitian.