The 7-day reset,
then 28 days

The week's new habit: half the area of a 23 cm plate is vegetables at every main meal, and you serve yourself onto that plate rather than eating from a serving dish.

The target being met: a plate's worth of vegetables and a pulse at every main meal, and protein arriving at roughly 1.2 g/kg for the first time. For a 70 kg reader that is about 84 g of protein a day, which this week's menus reach through fish five times, egg three times, chicken twice and a pulse at every plate. The mechanism is energy density: lower it and intake falls at constant food weight (Rolls, 2009).

The week's new habit: the cooked grain goes on the scale before it goes on the plate. Once. After a week your eye is calibrated and you can stop. The portion this book works to is 125 to 150 g of cooked rice per main meal for most adults — 48 to 58 g dry — which is a quarter of a 23 cm plate and roughly half what a Kerala lunch usually carries. Two rice meals a day at that size come to 250 to 300 g of cooked rice, inside PURE's middle bands. Someone doing physical work can carry 200 g without apology.

The target being met: glycaemic load falling while the grain stays. Low-GI eating delivers roughly 0.3–0.5% off HbA1c across 54 randomised trials — larger than any spice in this book (Zafar et al., 2019; Ojo et al., 2018). Measured in Kerala itself, red rice puttu came in at a glycaemic index of 38 and matta rice at 38, against 45 for a whole-wheat roti, with HbA1c falling 0.93% over the trial (Pavithran et al., 2020). Polish is what matters: parboiled rice runs at a GI of 57.6 unpolished and 79.6 polished. This week rotates the grain deliberately — matta, ragi, millet, wheat, oats, the chilled rice method, and rice-with-dal — so that no single form of starch carries the whole week.

The week's new habit: the oil is weighed into the pan, not poured, for all seven days — and the salt cellar is either measured or swapped.

The target being met: sodium falling and saturated fat falling, with flavour held. Kerala's own state survey measured salt intake at 6.7 g/day against WHO's 5 g target, in a state where only 12.4% of people with hypertension have it controlled (Sarma et al., 2019). The DASH pattern lowered blood pressure by 11.4/5.5 mmHg in people with hypertension with no change in salt and no weight loss at all (Appel et al., 1997), and DASH at low sodium came in 11.5 mmHg below a typical diet at high sodium (Sacks et al., 2001). Sodium reduction alone gives −3.39/−1.54 mmHg, and the gain is non-linear: most of it arrives in the step below about 2.3 g of sodium a day, which is the step most Indian households never take (Aburto et al., 2013).

The week's new habit: one implementation intention, written down, for every social eating occasion in the week ahead. The form is fixed: when X happens, I will do Y. Not "I will be careful at the wedding" but "when the biryani plate arrives I will eat the chicken and leave half the rice, and I will ask for the salad by name". Chapter 31 is the full treatment; this week is the rehearsal, and it deliberately contains a hosting day and a feast day rather than avoiding them.

The target being met: the whole set, held across a week that includes celebration. Protein at 1.2–1.6 g/kg, fibre high, sodium down, a pulse on every plate — and one leaf of sadya inside the four weeks, on purpose. DiRECT's remission gradient tracks sustained average weight loss, not perfection: nobody who gained weight went into remission, but losing 5–10 kg over a year bought better than one chance in three (Lean et al., 2018). One feast does not move a sustained average. Four unmanaged weeks do.