This December, the husband and I will celebrate our 10th wedding anniversary. I’ve also been wedded to Mint since before we launched in February 2007. For three years I’ve worked hard to ensure that your favourite magazine holds at least a (pleasant) surprise or two every Saturday. My favourite colour has been black for as long as I can remember. I sound consistent, right?

Holy cow: She’s even in my dreams.

My orthopaedic surgeon doesn’t think so.

In the last four months his unique combat tactics have squelched a lifetime’s anti-insurgency movement against milk. “Please tell him he’s my favourite person,” my mother said last week. “He’s managed to make you do what none of us ever could.” I duly SMSed the good doctor who replied: “Please thank her. It will be good if you start thinking like this too.”

Hrrmph. I’ve introduced milk in my diet—there’s even a carton stacked in the office fridge. I eat paneer almost every time I go out for a meal. And for someone who’s never eaten yogurt in her life, I can now smoothly empty the contents of a 400g pack without gagging and in one sitting (provided I camouflage its taste with blackberry syrup or mango pulp).

Yet every time I go back to my orthopaedist, he’s disappointed because I still haven’t experienced that a-ha! moment. That dairy discovery if you will. I still haven’t acquired my own life-altering milky halo, though recently, when I met my mother-in-law after several months, her first comment was, “All that milk is really showing in your face.” The meaning of that statement became clearer when my father-in-law reported later that she said I had put on some weight.

So every month my doctor and I say our lines. He interrogates me on my dairy consumption, my exercise routine, and whether I’m eating almonds and fruits every day. After that he asks me the Big Question: So how do you feel? And I reply, fatigued. Fed up. Heavy. Fat. “I’m telling you doc, all that milk is screwing with my hormones.”

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“Us vata types can’t drink milk!” my Ayurveda expert friend declared horrified as she listened to the details of my new diet. “He just doesn’t have a holistic approach,” she added. “Mix some protein powder in milk,” my mother-in-law advised. “Your fatigue will disappear.” I made notes for my next meeting with the doctor.

Meanwhile, I’m following the Consistency Doctrine because, as the doctor said at our last meeting, “You are just not consistent.” So these days I maintain a little calendar which should ideally have the following entries—W, BE, D, M2— every day. That’s Walk, Back Exercises, Dahi (400g) and Milk (2 glasses) every single day of my life.

“Consistency is killing me,” I SMSed the doctor recently. “Isko hi jeena kehte hai to yuhin ji lenge...”

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