After The Indian Express exposed the eavesdropping on Pranab Mukherjee’s office, the finance minister brushed it all away, saying the Intelligence Bureau had investigated his complaint and found nothing serious.

That spies could easily walk in and out the finance ministry is scandalous enough. (Were they insiders, and if they were, aren’t we compromising national security by not identifying them and punishing them?) And for our finance minister to say it was just a trifling little matter seems even more scandalous. He first sought a secret investigation and then called in private sleuths to check what was happening. Obvious question: Why didn’t he call in the home ministry’s detectives? (Possible answer three paras on).

Also, is the government trying to hush it all up? One explanation being given out is that adhesive was found under the tables, but it was just some chewing gum. Really? And why would anyone stick chewing gum at 16 strategic spots, and in rooms where India’s top financial policies are discussed and decided? Three chewing-gum adhesives were stuck in Pranab’s room alone. And why were there grooves on those blobs?

Who could have spied on Pranab-da, as he is called in Delhi’s political circles? Were his bosses keeping an eye on what he was doing? And does that explain why he doesn’t want to talk about it? We list some suspects.

P Chidambaram: The BJP believes Home Minister P Chidambaram was up to some mischief. Now, if that were true, it would be logical to conclude that the battle within the cabinet for the No 2 position is being fought behind the scenes, and that the contenders aren’t shying away from employing dirty tricks. Pranab is now the undisputed No 2: Sonia Gandhi’s trusted man for all seasons, and Manmohan Singh’s ready deputy. Why is the No 2 position so coveted? Well, parliamentary elections are due in 2014, and if the UPA wins again, and Manmohan Singh decides he has had enough and would like to retire, No 2 could become the prime minister (if Rahul Gandhi remains on the sidelines, that is). So. Pranab and Chidambaram are also known adversaries, prompting the BJP to make the exaggerated charge that a civil war has broken out. (War within a party is a factional fight, and not quite the same as people of a country killing each other). India Today reports Pranab bypassed the home ministry because of the “fault lines within the government”.

Party bosses: Many in Delhi say Chidambaram couldn’t have ordered surveillance on Pranab without permission from someone higher up, and that means Sonia Gandhi. The finance ministry is a high security area, and not everyone can walk in. The Gandhi family is vaguely wary of Pranab since 1984, the year Indira Gandhi was assassinated. Pranab was then No 2, as he is today, and the family’s grouse is that he projected himself as next-in-line prime minister. The job went to a reluctant Rajiv Gandhi, who didn’t give Pranab a cabinet position. Pranab then quit the Congress and floated a party of his own. It didn’t make any headway. He came back in 1990, and has been a family loyalist since. But suspicions persist, and could have prompted the bugging of his ministry. Journalist D P Satish uses an analogy from princely times to describe the relationship: “Pranab is the dewan of the Congress family. A dewan enjoy huge powers, but he can never be king. It is customary for the royal family to keep a close eye on its most powerful minister.”

Foreign powers: This isn’t as far-fetched as it seems. The Indian government has off and on arrested its own employees on charges of spying. Did someone in some overseas capital get inside information on what India’s finance ministry was thinking at a particular point?And did this country hire Indians working in the finance ministry to place mics so that they could eavesdrop on Pranab’s conversations? Is a larger espionage project afoot to collect information from India’s top leaders? If Pranab can be snooped on, is Prime Minister Manmohan safe? What secrets could have leaked out from Pranab’s office, and who could have benefited is not clear yet. What is stunning is the way the cabinet is taking it all in its stride. No wonder ministers aren’t outraged by private citizens’ complaints of snooping. If powerful ministers in this country are under surveillance, why would they want ordinary citizens spared?

Big business: Lots of very sensitive tapes have come into the public domain recently. They implicate not just the Rajas and the Radias, but also the country’s business icons. It’s possible top ministers clandestinely released these private phone conversations to the media. In the dirty tricks department, what the government can do, the private sector can do better. If the government spies on corporate houses, they can spy right back. Could our business icons have sent undercover agents to find out what was happening behind closed doors? Any advance information from the finance ministry is worth millions at the stock market. Did someone make a killing somewhere using inputs from the country’s financial policy makers? Were the snoopers looking for tip-offs about tax raids?

Political rivals: The BJP has started beating the UPA with the ‘breach of security’ stick. Pranab’s rivals may be tying to dig up enough dirt to keep him out of the top position. But all that’s within the party. Would the opposition BJP snoop on him this way? Theoretically, yes. It’s all possible in the cloak-and-dagger world of Delhi politics, but that party wouldn’t be demanding an investigation so loudly if it were involved in this murky business, would it? Sushma Swaraj has described the incident as India’s Watergate, but we’ll have to wait and see if it brings down the mighty as Watergate did in the US, or if the investigations will go anywhere at all. First Post isn’t surprised by all this: “If the No 2 man in the government, the most powerful cabinet minister in the UPA government who heads several sensitive ministerial committees, can be monitored illegally, it also means that it’s a free-for-all in Delhi’s power game.”

Questions, questions, questions. What’s your conspiracy theory?

Is Turkey the Key?

Of the countries I’ve visited, my favourites happen to share important features. They are all large but not intimidating in size, with proportionate populations. They have a varied landscape, a mostly temperate climate, and enough fertile land not only to feed themselves, but to have evolved exceptional cuisines. They are old civilisations possessed of the cultural self-confidence that comes from having been centres of empires, without the hubris or smugness of perpetual victors. I’m thinking of Spain, France, Turkey and Iran, and would have added Italy to the group, had its citizens been less loud, rude and vain. Turkey, despite all its gifts, and a convenient location straddling Asia and Europe, went off the world’s radar for decades. The Orient Express stopped running, and was replaced in the popular imagination by Midnight Express. Indians, who now flock to Istanbul and Cappadocia in the thousands, had little connection with Turkey between the collapse of the Khilafat movement and Mallika Sherawat’s item number in Guru.

The Khilafat movement: we all read about it in school texts; we learned Mahatma Gandhi supported it; but we never understood what it was really about. Which is not surprising, since I have problems wrapping my mind around it even as an adult. Khilafat activists protested against British rule in India because they felt Britain was mistreating the Sultan of Turkey. You might think there were enough complaints to be made against imperialist behaviour locally, what with millions paid out of the Indian treasury to aid Britain’s war effort, and the Jallianwala Bagh massacre; but Mohammad Ali, Shaukat Ali and Abul Kalam Azad were more concerned about the chap in the Dolmabahçe Palace. That’s because the Ottoman ruler, who controlled Mecca and Medina, was the Caliph, or Khalif, symbolic leader of the world’s Sunni Muslims, the latest in a line extending back to the Prophet’s companion and father-in-law Abu Bakr.

At its peak, the tri-continental Ottoman empire encompassed all lands bordering the Black and Red seas, much of the Mediterranean coast and a substantial chunk along the Caspian sea. Turkish rule extended to Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli, Cairo, Jerusalem, Damascus, Baku, Baghdad, Sanaa, Athens, Sofia, Belgrade, Bucharest and Budapest. As the list makes clear, Arab capitals wracked by unrest these past few months were once Ottoman territories. By the beginning of the twentieth century, however, the empire had atrophied and its administration decayed. At the outbreak of the first World War, the Ottomans allied with Germany and Austria-Hungary. The opposing Entente powers eagerly drew up plans to dismember the Sultanate, an effort led, needless to say, by the British, who love drawing dividing lines on maps (Scratch a contemporary border dispute and you’ll find a line drawn by a Briton).

The winners of the World War almost had their way. Through the Treaty of Sèvres, much of what is now Turkey was either given to Greece and Armenia, or parcelled out into Italian, British and French zones of influence. The Sèvres agreement would have led to decades of unrest, except that a brilliant General named Mustafa Kemal ignored the Sultan’s orders and fought back. He rallied Turkish troops and defeated Armenians in the east, French forces in the south and Greeks in the west. The allies were forced to negotiate a new treaty in Lausanne, creating an independent nation with borders closely matching those of today’s Turkey. Mustafa Kemal, later to be honoured with the title Atatürk, meaning Father of the Turks, went on to abolish Ottoman rule in favour of a secular republic. This was a catastrophe for the Khilafatists and millions of Muslims around the globe for whom a world without a Caliph seemed inconceivable. Ever since then, radical pan-Islamist movements have promoted the idea of a new Caliphate.

The republic of Turkey did all it could to distance itself from its imperial history. Atatürk commanded that Turkish be written in the Roman script rather than the traditional Perso-Arabic one. The fez was banned, as were headscarves in universities and government offices. After the Second World War, the nation became part of NATO. Though less than 10% of its territory was in Europe, Turkey saw itself as part of that continent rather than Asia. This made qualifying for the football World Cup considerably tougher, but Turkey set itself the loftier goal of qualifying for EU membership.

Unfortunately, the Turkish brand of nationalism and secularism was frequently enforced at gunpoint. Authorities forbade discussion of mass killings of Armenian civilians during the first World War, and tried to squash Kurdish and other minority identities. Atatürk had stressed the need to befriend neighbours, even reaching out to Greeks he had fought; but that legacy unravelled when right-wing Greek Cypriots took over the government of Cyprus. Turkey invaded the island to protect the Turkish population, and the affair ended with a partition in which the southern Greek side was recognised as the legitimate government by the world at large, the northern side by Turkey alone.

At negotiations for full membership of the EU, Turks would be asked, What about the Armenian genocide? What about Kurdish rights? The fact that Bulgaria, hardly a paragon of liberalism, gained full membership of the EU, made Turks wonder if Europeans simply didn’t want a Muslim nation in their Christian club, and were using civil rights as an excuse. When Cyprus was admitted to the European body in 2004, many Turks gave up hope of ever being full-fledged EU citizens.

At the same time, the country’s internal politics led to a shift from its Western focus and hardline secularism. A moderate Islamist group led by Recep Erdoğan, the Justice and Development Party (AKP), won elections after a string of constitutional battles. It liberalised the statist economy and rode an economic boom to two more election victories, the latest coming a little over a week ago. Like India, Turkey had punched below its weight in international fora for decades, weakened by internal troubles. The AKP pitched Turkey not as a wannabe European country, continually slapped on the wrist and sent to the back of the EU queue, but as a Eurasian leader. Critics call the new foreign policy neo-Ottomanism, and view the moderate Islam of the AKP as the thin end of the wedge that will ultimately destroy the secular Turkish state. I am more optimistic. Although I find all communal parties distasteful, I believe the Ottoman’s empire moderation in religious matters and Turkey’s modern liberal civil society will keep fundamentalism at bay. Since the Turkish population is over 99% Muslim, and overwhelmingly Sunni, there’s little scope for sectarian strife arising from the AKP’s policies. The Turkish form of secularism, with its restrictions on headscarves and state control over religious preaching, was neither desirable nor sustainable anyway.

A number of Western analysts are troubled by Turkey’s friendship with Iran, and its worsening relationship with Israel. Prime Minister Erdoğan’s recent words and actions with respect to Syria ought to ease their fears. Erdoğan, a personal friend of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, threw open Turkey’s borders to Syrian refugees, set up camps to house them, condemned the “savagery” of the Syrian crackdown, and asked Bashar al-Assad to fire his younger brother who has led the assault against protestors. When was the last time you heard such a clear moral line being taken by a leader against a friendly neighbouring regime? It’s a sign that, following the Ottoman empire and Atatürk’s Republic, which served as models to be emulated in earlier eras, Turkey could be the guiding light for newly emergent West Asian and North African democracies in our time.

Congress to Nitish Govt: slaughtering Muslims not “good governance”

Weighty issue for Muslim lifter from America

Jun 13, 2011

Kulsoom Abdullah took up weightlifting a couple of

years ago when she was looking to get stronger. She quickly grew to love
the sport, entering local competitions and even allowing herself to
imagine one day making it to the Olympics.

But her dream was crushed last week. Abdullah, a 35 year old from Atlanta,
Georgia, was barred from entering the US championships next month
because her Muslim faith requires that she cover her arms, legs and head
– which violates international rules governing weightlifting attire.

“I’d hate to think that just because you dress a certain way, you can’t
participate in sports,” Abdullah said. “I don’t want other women who
dress like me to say, ‘I can’t get involved in that sport’ and get
discouraged.

“It would be nice to have an environment where it wouldn’t be an issue
of how you dress or having different beliefs and faiths.”

The debate over the attire of Muslim women in sport is not new.

Last week, the

Iran women’s football team had to forfeit an Olympic qualifier in Jordan
because the players wanted to wear the traditional hijab headscarf.
Fifa defended its decision by saying the scarves are banned for safety
reasons; the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called Fifa
“dictators and colonists who want to impose their lifestyle on others”
and vowed stick up for the rights of the Iranian players.

Muslim
women have competed in other sports, such as athletics, wearing
neck-to-ankle bodysuits and the hijab, most notably Roqaya al Gassra of
Bahrain, who made it to the semi-finals of the 200 metres at the Beijing
Olympics.

“What we hear all the time is, ‘You’ve got to empower
Muslim women around the world’,” said Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for
the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which has taken up Abdullah’s
cause. “Well, how can you empower a Muslim woman more than being a
weightlifter?

“She should be encouraged and helped along in this process.
There shouldn’t be arbitrary roadblocks placed in her path.”

Some sports’ rules designed to keep an athlete from gaining an advantage
could run foul of a particular religion. Swimming, for instance, has
banned high-tech bodysuits that led to a rash of world records, ruling
they compromised the integrity of the sport. Now women can wear only
shoulder-to-knee suits that leave their arms and lower legs exposed.

Abdullah, however, made it clear that she is not trying to gain any sort of
competitive edge. When first starting out, she was allowed to enter
local meets wearing attire that made her comfortable: loosefitting
exercise pants, a tightfitting long-sleeve shirt with a T-shirt over it,
and the headscarf.

As she attempted to move up to higher-level
competitions, she ran up against International Weightlifting Federation
(IWF) rules, which forbid suits that cover either the knees or elbows
because judges must be able to see that both have been locked out to
complete a lift.

But Abdullah said a tightfitting shirt allows
judges to get a good look at her elbows. And, if it meant ensuring a
level playing field, she would be willing to wear a leg covering that
conforms to her religion but allows the judges to determine whether she
has completed a lift. Considering all the advances in athletic apparel,
that should not be a major issue.

Abdullah got a bit of good news last week when USA Weightlifting
agreed to take her case to the IWF this month. If the IWF agrees to
alter its rules, she might still get a chance to do some snatches and
clean-and-jerks at next month’s US championships.

While she is not yet lifting at an Olympic level, she has not given up

on that dream.

“She’s not seeking any kind of advantage. She’s seeking to maintain her
religious principles,” Hooper said. “In an atmosphere of goodwill, these
things can always be resolved.”

Five Fruits to keep you Cool this Summer

These
are time of scorching heat. Sun is ruthless and the heat wave
unsparing. But these are also the time when exotic fruits bloom in
plenty.

And these fruits can have an immensely chilling effect on us.
But the problem comes when an entire generation falls for Coke and
Pepsi and gets estranged with the bounties of nature. People are quite
oblivious about the health properties of these fruits. And even if they
know, few care about procuring them.

  IQSoft recommends these five summer fruits to beat the heat this summer:

Black Plum or Jambul

The fruit is useful in spleen enlargement. The seed of the fruit is
well-known diabetes. It reduces the quantity of sugar in the urine and
quenches the maddening thirst. The fruit is also a good source of
antioxidants.

Litchi

The luscious litchi/lychee or Chinese Hazelnut is a very delicious
fruit. People eagerly wait for its arrival during the summers. May-June
is the best season for the fruit. This sub-tropical fruit has very good cooling, demulcent and aphrodisiac properties. It is also a good thirst-quencher.

Mango

It’s not for nothing that Mango is called the ‘King of Fruits’ in
India. The vastly delicious fruit is a storehouse of vitamins A and C.
The ripe mango tones the heart, improves complexion, stimulates hunger,
improves vision and is greatly helpful in liver disorders, loss of
weight and physical abnormalities. The popular mango powder (amchur)
made from green/unripe mango is very beneficial in scurvy and pyorrhea.

Muskmelon

Muskmelon is a popular tropical fruit which is readily available during
the summers. The fruit contains Vitamin A, B, C and minerals like
magnesium, sodium and potassium. It has zero cholesterol and is safe for
blood cholesterol patients. When consumed with jaggery, it helps in the
curing of skin diseases. It greatly reduces the body heat when consumed regularly.

Watermelon

The succulent, scarlet-red watermelon is a delicious and health-building
fruit. It contains large quantities of easily assimilable sugar. Being
an alkaline fruit, it can be easily enjoyed by persons with acidosis.
Its juice quench the thirst like anything. Rich in vitamin A,B, and C,
products based on its juice can serve as wonderful cooling drinks. The
fruit is also beneficial for combating hypertension.

3 Everyday Food Ingredients That Make You Fat

There’s
a lot of ingredients in your food whose name you can’t even pronounce.
Those chemicals, disguised as food in your nutrition label are the
tricky uns worth thinking about – most calorie-loaded loads are always
rich in chemical additives, preservatives and artificial ingredients.

However, there’s also the simpler everyday villains in your pantry.

IQSoft tells you about the simple things in your food that will make you fat.

1-Monosodium Glutamate

Known as MSG, or Ajinomoto (the name of the company that produces it),
Monosodium Glutamate is described as the “essence of taste”. And if your
potato chips are flavored,
they contain MSG. MSG tells your brain that the food you are eating is
tasty by exciting your brain cells. It also enters your brain that is
known to correlate to obesity and other disorders (including short
height and sexual issues)

Which in turn will makes you fat.

Secondly, it may also increase your pancreatic insulin, another reason behind obesity.

Directly injecting MSG into rats has increased their appetite and induce obesity.

What contains MSG: Maggi Noodles, along with a lot of other packaged
noodles. MSG awareness is the reason behind the “MSG-free” you might see
on new “Health soups”It’s also in your chips, your salad dressing, It
goes by names like Accent, ‘Aginomoto, ‘Natural Meat Tenderiser,
Hydrolysed Vegetable Protein, and is in ALL your fast food (especially
McDonalds and KFC)

2-Sugar

Sugar, especially of the
refined variety is not good for you. It’s carbs which you may not burn,
and it also spikes your appetite. On nutrition labels, it might be named
as flour, corn syrup, dextrose,Carob powder, Dextrose, Fructose, Fruit
juice concentrate, Maltose.

“Most people probably have no idea
how much sugar they’re taking in,” said Jo Ann Hattner, a San Francisco
registered dietitian who teaches nutrition courses at Stanford
University School of Medicine.

Sugar, by itself isn’t bad. It’s too much of it – more than 12
teaspoons a day. With your nutrition label in front of you, remember
that 4 gram = 1 teaspoonful of sugar. This should include your daily
consumption of juice, chocolate, lemonade, biscuits, and even your ketchup (yes!). Incidentally, if you eat ketchup everyday, you might be eating close to 200 grams of sugar every week.

3-Sugar Substitutes

If sugar is bad for you, surely an alternative to sugar won’t be? Right?

Wrong!

Aspartame, responsible for “over 75% of adverse reactions reported to
the US Food And Drug Administration…” is present in anything that begins
with ‘Diet’ or substitutes sugar, including Diet Pepsi, Diet Coke, Nutrasweet, Equal, Chewing gum, breath mints

Aspartame causes carbohydrate cravings – specifically cravings for the sugar content.

Trick yourself into not Smoking

Just like nicotine snuck into your system, you have to use the same wily ways to trick it out of your life.

There’s a lot of easy ways of doing this. Get your notepad (or notepad app) ready.

Don’t Buy a Pack

if you buy a packet of chips,
you’ll want to eat most of it (if not all). While it’s not
chip-addiction we’re cracking down on, the formula is the same. If you
buy one cigarette , you’ll channelize your laziness (into buying another
one) to actually reduce your time between cigarettes.

Smoke only Half a Cigarette Each Time

I don’t have to explain the 50% off on your health.

Remove the ashtrays

The tradition of easing into your comfy chair with a cigarette and a
ashtray- nix it. Throw away your lighters too. Make smoking a chore, an
annoying bodily necessity.

Enlist Fellow Quitters

Peer pressure got you into smoking, now use the same devilish social
conditioning to have the pressure of your fellow man’s expectations of
you. You can pool in your anti-smoking resources and motivate each
other.

Exercise

It’s a simple chemical reaction. Smoking => Nicotine => Dopamine in your brain => Happiness. If you’re already feeling good after enjoyable exercise (it can even be jumping with your kids, as long as you love it)

Change your Brand

You’re overriding the love you have of a specific blend of tobacco with something your throat will chemically dislike.

Smoke Alone

If smoking was bonding time
with fellow addicts, smoking alone will force you to have less of a
reason. On a deeper level, it will show it’s reality as an addiction.

Write down each Cigarette Smoked

“Pressure“
motivates a lot of clicks of the lighter. Write down the things that
made you want to light up in the first place. Start addressing those.

Smoke Free Zones

Libraries, cultural centers and cinema halls are all places where
smoking is banned. Hang out at such smoke-free zones – the entertainment
options will distract you from smoking.

Top 7 Foods to Help you Quit Smoking

A major change in your lifestyle cannot happen without changing your life holistically.

We have told some cool ways of sneaking the butt out of your reach and explored the relationship between smoking and weight gain, and this seems a good starting point to pay more attention to foods’ role in reducing, and then quitting smoking.

Reduce Cravings for Cigarettes

Avoid sugary foods, red meat, coffee and alcohol.

Sugar, because it precipitates an eventual crash from the sugar high,
andy you’ll crave another high. Red meat makes cigarettes taste good –
just ask smokers. Coffee’s buzz (and subsequent drop – leading to a
craving for another source of caffeine) and alcohol’s neurobiological
effect on your brain makes you crave a cigarette. And when you’re
drinking, you might not be able to remain firm in your resolution to not
smoke.

1-Apples

Maybe 2-3 apples a day. Apples contain
pectin, which reduces your blood toxin content. In adverse cases, it is
known to use an apple-only diet to completely purge the bloodstream diet
of the toxins from cigarettes.

(Above is Charlize Theron doing it all wrong!)

Apples are also crunchy and sweet, and appeal to smokers who need something to do with their mouth.

2-Cinammon

There are many ways you can use cinnamon as a quit-smoking aid.

cinnamon

Simply inhaling deeply on a cinnamon stick mimics the deep drag on a flavorful cigarette.

Secondy, cinnamon boosts brain activity, reduces nervous tension and memory loss – all the temporary side-effects of quitting smoking.

Cinnamon is also good for, well, everything. Your blood, your stomach – cinnamon is a tonic for most things.

3-Ginger and 4-Garlic

Ginger is hot stuff – literally. It makes you sweat out your toxins.
Garlic stabilizes your fluctuating blood pressure when you quit.

6-Milk and Other Dairy Products

Can you imagine smoking after a glass of milk? It sounds uncool. And, it’ll make your cigarette taste bitter.

Plan your daily dose of Horlicks around your regular sutta break.

6-Vegetables

Carrots, celery, broccoli, cucumbers are all foods that that can delay
your urge to smoke with their sheer crunchiness. They can make
cigarettes taste awful and are also known to reduce cravings for
nicotine

7-Salt

A weird tip that works – lick a wee bit of salt with the tip of your tongue. It’ll extinguish your urge to smoke

Tata Manza clocks an incredible mileage of 46.33 km per litre to join Limca book of records

The Tata Manza (Quadrajet Aura ABS) has clocked an incredible mileage of 46.33 km per litre. This feat has been…

The
Tata Manza (Quadrajet Aura ABS) has clocked an incredible mileage of
46.33 km per litre. This feat has been achieved by Narayanan Menon, a
resident of Coimbatore who has zoomed into the Limca Book of Records.

Narayanan R Menon, Managing Director of Aromen Engineering Company and a
proud owner of the Tata Manza has been certified for the remarkable
drive on the Coimbatore- Avinashi by-pass on 25th of May 2011. Menon’s
Tata Manza covered a long stretch of 72.3 kilometer on road by consuming
only 1.58 liters of diesel, which translates to an incredible mileage
of 46.33 km per litre.

A mechanical engineer, Menon himself does not credit an amazing mileage
to a ‘magic foot’ rather a combination of good driving and car
maintenance. For a country where fuel efficiency is a significant factor
for automobile ownership and with fuel prices increasing, the feat
certainly bodes well for the mileage conscious customer.

Top 10 Foods to Reduce Belly Fat

Not only does belly fat make your abdomen bulge out, it also poses grave risk to of diseases like hypertension, diabetes and stroke. While you should obviously give up oily stuff and junk food, you must incorporate these foods in your diet to get rid of a bloated belly.

Obese people find it the hardest to deal with the fat stored in and around the abdomen and the waist.

Not only does belly fat make your abdomen bulge out, it also poses grave risk to of diseases like hypertension, diabetes and stroke. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), men who have a waist more than 40 inches have heightened risk of heart diseases and diabetes.

The most common reasons for the accumulation of fat in the tummy are hormonal imbalance, excessive eating, intake of large quantities of alcohol, sweets and chocolates and lack of exercise. Stress is also one of the prominent reasons for the storage of fat in the belly. Stress triggers the secretion of a hormone called cortisol. Excess of cortisol stimulates the storage of fat around the waist. Then there’s another factor of improper digestion. Due to malfunctioned digestion gastro problems arise and this leads to a persistently puffy belly. As we add years, our efficiency of burning calories goes down, so sluggish metabolism also sets off the buildup of fat around the midsection.

If belly fat is one of your problems and you still thrive on a typical diet full of oily, starchy foods and carbs, it’s time for you to treat this article as a wake-up call. You would need to change your diet drastically. First of all, you should avoid eating two to three hours before bedtime to control the belly fat. At the same time, incorporate foods which can help you overcome the problem.

Here’s some information on foods which you should consume if you have a bloated belly.

Eggs: They provide good quality protein which in turn helps overcome hunger pangs.
Beans: Beans like black gram (chana), green gram (chana), chick peas and green moong bustle with fibre and proteins. They help you shed pounds and improve muscle tone.

Oat Meal: Befriend the good ol’ oats if you’re battling belly fat. Start your day with oats cooked in water or consume them with milk. They’re high in soluble fibre and low in fat.
Vegetables: Green vegetables are rich source of vitamins, minerals, antioxidants and fibre. Consuming vegetables for dinner without chapatis and/or rice is helpful in shrinking the waist size. What’s more, most green veggies have only 30-60 calories per 100 grams.
Barley: Barley has a considerably low glycemic index and contains lots of soluble fibre. This helps in diminishing the circumference of the waist. Regular consumption cuts down the risk of cardiac diseases and type II diabetes.

Green Tea: Polyphenols present in the tea help boost metabolism. Green tea is less processed and contains higher levels of anti-oxidants. It greatly suppresses the appetite.
Milk: When we say milk, we’re not recommending full-cream milk. In fact, make sure you stay away from that. Go for non-fat milk which has the same amount of calcium and protein as full-cream milk but contains less sodium and helps prevent water retention. This reduces bloating.

Yogurt: It’s oozing with calcium and protein and has very less calories (80 calories in a cup of low-fat yogurt).The beneficial bacteria present in yogurt boost immunity and aid bowel movement.
Tomatoes: The luscious red tomatoes contain only 20 caloriesper hundred gram. They are rich in fibres, lycopene and potassium. They avert water retention, thereby also preventing bloating of the belly.

Olive Oil: People realise that veggies are good for health but many find their taste boring. Add a small quantity of olive oil. This will improve the flavour of vegetables and make them tastier. But its real benefit is that it can help you lose the hateful flab around your belly.