Life as a Diabetic Indian feat. Chef Harsh Kedia

[00:00:00] Did you know that India is one of the world leaders in diabetes and diabetes is one of the leading causes of deaths? Because that's kind of the point. That is the point of this new podcast. We want to make you think

[00:00:20] Think about the world, think about your body and think about science And today we are talking with Chef Harsh Kedia. Harsh is a diabetic chef I'm not saying that he's a diabetic chef. That's literally his brand name and Harsh has been living with diabetes since he was 14 today

[00:00:39] Let's hear about his journey and his lived experience as a person with diabetes and learn lots of interesting Amazing things about what he does with his sugar-free brand. Hi, welcome to the podcast. Hi, Tanaya

[00:00:52] I'm super excited and a little nervous to be here with you in the episode I'm so excited to see you. We've been telling this for so long Three years to be precise. Oh lord. So in three years, this is the biggest question

[00:01:04] I want to ask you and this whole podcast is going to be about this. Okay What is it like living like a diabetic in India? Expensive. Oh my It is expensive like

[00:01:16] You know, it sounds funny and it's fun to sort of think of it in any other perspective But if you draw like demographics if you draw like different kinds of people and you just put it all On one single benchmark after like a lot of research and studies

[00:01:30] I have we've sort of derived to certain numbers like to live with diabetes in India The average amount of money that you've to spend is 15,000 And diabetes does not come per month. Oh my lord and per person

[00:01:41] And diabetes does not come with privilege and these are purely medical expenses This can be from your metformin to your insulin to your pump to Chodi though It's from your blood test to your doctor visits to everything that you can think of under the under the sun, right?

[00:01:57] So this is one of my most deeply disheartening Conversations I have with a lot of people that diabetes does not come with privilege Type 1 kids can be right from the most underprivileged households to like rural population Where there's little to no knowledge about living with diabetes

[00:02:14] So for the longest time when I was living alone when I was quote unquote financially independent I had to park aside 33 percent of my monthly salary to my diabetes expenses And there's not even accounting for devices like cgms that I can wear and roam around

[00:02:32] So living with diabetes in India is expensive Because there's not much of subsidy also that sort of comes in or Facilities that are available Free of charge Damn no, I mean I think that's it's very good to start off on that very real note because

[00:02:50] Whenever we think about diabetes we think of it as like a very privileged condition Which brings me to my kind of my next question, which is you were diagnosed at a young age

[00:03:02] So and let's work on this assumption that nobody knows the differences between type 1 and type 2 and you know maturity on the diabetes all of that Tell me your diabetes journey. How did you figure out what what happened to you? How did you learn that this is happening?

[00:03:14] How old were you? I was 14 when I was diagnosed and my doctors call it an accidental diagnosis case, which is very funny I mean now that I look back at it. It's very funny

[00:03:25] My mother crying in one corner of the house in my maasi crying and I was just sitting and tripping I was like what the hell happened in this house. So my diagnosis was accidental because I just come back from school and I was really like tired and

[00:03:39] 14 15 year old hush was like a sight. I was five feet five and hundred and six kgs So I was like really short and really fat and My lifestyle was a quite bad

[00:03:50] but that was every second kid in every third house of like a household in a teahouse and city In an urban household where all our literal jobs in our day was to sit in like a vehicle go to school eat

[00:04:04] Study eat come back eat sleep get up eat and sleep again. Essentially that was our entire lifestyle, right? So that day I'd added the whole element of Checking my own glucose level. So my maasi was visiting she wanted

[00:04:19] To check her glucose picked like her finger picked to check her glucose levels because she was just like My feet are hurting my fingers are hurting my limbs can't be kept straight I'm feeling very weird. I'm feeling out of it. So I was just like

[00:04:35] So before checking her glucose levels, I checked mine. I mean I checked mine mine was like 208 or something And this is a random test So I asked my maasi to promise me to not tell my mother and the first thing she did was she called my madra

[00:04:50] She's like So My mother was eight years diabetic that time. So mom has had it for 20 years. Dad has had it for a little less than me So we're all pretty much diabetic and that's how my diagnosis happened

[00:05:05] And the problem with diabetes diagnosis in India is that it's very linear It's like you may sugar level I have So my sugar level it now your sugar levels are x you're under a certain age. So you're bound to be type one

[00:05:20] But that's wrong. Yeah, you can be a type two juvenile diabetic You can also be a type 1.5 juvenile and you can be a type one when you're 40 years old

[00:05:29] So this whole conversation was something that was never spoken about earlier back then and being diabetic and slow death was just very Synonymous I'm talking even 10 years back. There was no knowledge whatsoever available about food nutrition, etc

[00:05:44] So the first thing when I went to my doctor and I asked of course, I went with mom and then the doctor's like Beast points for bear the spine chamay and my mother was just zapped. Yeah, naturally. She's just like

[00:05:56] It's a little bit. You go to minceman. How did they say to the doctor and my the doctor's like I got in there and I don't have to go. So my mother's like a little taken aback

[00:06:04] She's like, why would you say that maybe the dhawayu pay who doctor aren't salo and for all of us It came as a shocker because I would have been the first consumer of insulin in my family

[00:06:13] Went to another doctor consulted again and the doctor said conduct a c-peptide test This is another test that is absent amongst a lot of our endocrine specialists across the board

[00:06:23] Even in urban cities c-peptide essentially helps you understand how much your pancreas function on a fasting or a postpartinal Level right at that point of the day Nobody asked us to get it done. So when I actually got my c-peptide I still had 50% functioning pancreas

[00:06:38] Which meant metformin could have helped me. Yeah So which is when my accidental misdiagnosis from type 1 went to actual being type 2 Which over the years came down to type 1.5 It was strange, but I'm glad that I was able to learn so much about myself

[00:06:54] To be able to sort of help other people today with what I know with little knowledge that I've gathered to put it out there

[00:07:00] No, but you're doing phenomenal work. But before we get into that, let me just quickly explain what all of this is for people who don't know What this is so the pancreas are an organ in the body that make a hormone called insulin

[00:07:21] Now in type 1 diabetes the main thing that does happen is that Incident production capability come up In type 2 Production, but your body kind of stops listening to this insulin. It just goes like not listening and type 1.5 which is maturity onset is

[00:07:39] The complexity of it how it works. It's an interaction of both of these things How it works? Is it an autoimmune condition is the body attacking itself? We don't exactly understand but there are different kinds of diabetes and all diabetes is not the same

[00:07:53] The different ways it happens they're different not happens. I would say there are different ways The insulin stops interacting with your body properly basically class monitor insulin I feel like that is such an important conversation that we tend to miss in this that these conditions are so

[00:08:21] Hyperspecific to your body in the way your body tells you that this is happening or the way your body tells you that hey something's not the way It's meant to be right now and if you were to be I don't want to sound like one of those

[00:08:33] Happy nature people but if we listen a little bit more to our bodies, we would learn so much more just Cue into your body signals, you know, we all some people feel hunger differently. Some people feel Hypoglycemia differently

[00:08:45] So hypoglycemia is when your blood sugar falls a little bit lower and you don't feel the energy some people feel Sweating some people feel dizzy chakkar. I know generally you So I find it very very challenging is a concept that

[00:09:02] You've lived your life as one, you know one kind of harsh And the next day you wake up and you you have to mold into a different harsh And then how you molded the different harsh into your whole life

[00:09:14] How did that journey happen? How did you know just tell us a little bit about what you do by the way before we get into this And then how did that journey happen and how it how your diagnosis impacted the formation of that in the first place

[00:09:27] so essentially my work journey slash What I Came around the whole diabetic chef idea or like working with diabetes sort of came together When I started visiting a lot more doctors because The whole Diabetes cure is equal to doctors only Happened when

[00:09:49] People didn't really know the concept of what a nutritionist was or like how dietitians really or nutritionist dietitians Consultants really help you Navigate your medication. It's the parallel of A therapist helping you with your medication control for psychiatrists

[00:10:06] A dietitian or nutritionist can really help you control your medication Or help you sort of navigate your way better with your health with diabetes, right? So there was not too many people around me that time who had

[00:10:19] The knowledge about what a nutritionist or a dietitian is apart from like a few Celebrity dietitians who are available and the whole idea was dietitians is equal to celebrities ka khana You know what I mean? Yeah, that know how was missing severely

[00:10:33] So whenever we'd go to a doctor or a doctor would be like don't eat a b c d e And don't consume x y z So it was a little difficult for me to understand what I can actually eat

[00:10:45] Me ka khaun instead of ka nahi khaasittham. Yeah, so I'd always go to like these multiple doctors I think we had gone to about eight doctors back in 2013 14 To just ask

[00:10:56] Doctor harj ko ka dena hai, ka nahi dena hai of sort one doctor recommended us to go to a nutritionist Like a dietitian and then we were like but dvaisi diko jade to haa kachya kyu karna hai, you know what I mean

[00:11:07] And khar ka hi to khaana hai and then Sooner later we realized that it is imperative to go to nutritionist and dietitian and understand So 10 years back when I went to a nutritionist for the first time

[00:11:19] I actually realized that there's a lot of things that you actually can consume Which is misconstrued as what you can't consume So started started putting those things together and like I'd mentioned earlier It was very difficult for me to go out with family

[00:11:32] And now I was at a certain age of life where I was supposed to start going for birthday parties and like Go to events and school stuff and you know fun things and hang with friends So there was a friend's birthday and I was just like

[00:11:47] My mother called the father of the birthday girl and told her that He to haa harj ko aake bheti ke birthday peh be jre raha hai But aap usko please cake mat offer karna And chips mat dena and then kuch bhi fried ho gata mat dena

[00:12:00] And then I sort of used to overhear these conversations and out of like a sentimental Connect with how my mother felt It sort of blocked me from consuming most things so I would eat and go to birthdays

[00:12:11] But this birthday I was like no I'm going to make myself a cake and take So then I fetched out notes from like my nutritionist doctors and I was like writing down ki Mä kya use kar shtakta ho kya nahi kar shtakta ho And then again

[00:12:23] Conventional marwadi household So cooking was a big no-no for me anyway So I somehow convinced my mom that I'm going to make a little Birthday gift for my friend and day for her And then I ended up making a sugar free cake Oh wow how old were you?

[00:12:37] 10 saal ho gaya haj 10 saal ho gaya I was 15 years old that time And my friends birthday gift that time was a birthday cake that I made And it was completely sugar free I think I might have added meh dhanata as a mix for a blend

[00:12:54] But there was no sugar which was primarily the contention that Even today we fight as people who are living with diabetes or Who are surrounded with them So jab bana ke ke turned out to be very nice

[00:13:05] Like to me it was like the best thing I've ever touched Like felt like had in my hand Oh that's so cute And then when I took it for her friends birthday she saw it and she's like oh my god What the hell is this?

[00:13:16] This looks like a plastic bag And I said cool don't cut it Excuse me? Yes her father got a fancy 3 et over fondant cake But you made it I'm very cross on 15 year old Harsh's behalf But it's fine I was quite overjoyed that time when she said that

[00:13:32] Cause I put the cake on another table And then I cut it myself And then I ate it and then everyone saw me enjoying it And they were like we want to eat what you're eating So the cake I had made got over in 6 minutes

[00:13:44] Versus the cake that the Birthday party had and then everyone's like how did you make it What is there in this My mother has diabetes My grandfather has diabetes Blah blah blah So I said Tikyal make for you and bring So in school to make friends

[00:14:01] As an obese kid I thought making food for them would be easier So one day one girl came up to me and she's like Oh to tom kana banana chaatya You want to become a chef but you're a diabetic Who do you think you are a diabetic chef?

[00:14:13] And that's literally how the brand name came up Wow I love that This is so empowering So at the age of 15 a school insult turned me into like a brand Or a diabetic chef I love that I took it back and I was like wait

[00:14:25] So now I'm going to use this to write a blog And I didn't know how blogspot or any of that work back then So I started a Facebook page called a diabetic chef So if you go onto Facebook and check It's established in 2013 10 years back today

[00:14:37] We lost a bunch of followers or whatever Hacking or whatever happened in Bijad Like 5-6 years ago But that's how the page started And the page was essentially used to share recipes Of cakes, desserts, food that I used to consume Just click photos and post

[00:14:51] I remember one red velvet cupcake recipe that had gone viral Where it had like more Australian followers than Indian followers Oh wow It had 23,000 likes and it was nuts It was nuts That one particular That was the magic of social media Yeah

[00:15:05] Where I just felt like this is what I want to do for the rest of my life I want to click photos of like recipes I make in my kitchen and post I love that view And then nobody knew who a diabetic chef was

[00:15:17] It was an anonymous blog because it was a type of house Eventually through school A friend's mother called me And she's like Can you come and teach me how to make cupcakes I said, sure, I'll come And then I thought that classes and stuff I get money

[00:15:32] Went to a house, taught her I carried my oven with me to a house Wow Yeah, it was quite hectic I put it in like a A bag of clothes Like I made a bag of clothes Potlily and I had taken it with me and carried it back

[00:15:45] And when I came home I told my mother I taught someone how to bake today She's like, it's good but how much money did I give? I said, nothing And my mother said, you should have asked for something

[00:15:53] That's when the first learning of life came to me from my mother She said, if you're teaching anyone anything, don't do it for free So that's the first class I took To taking home orders To like school friends and this and that And then Yeah

[00:16:08] It's been ten years So from like my home kitchen to school orders To pop ups in school To go to university That's how it all started Like I was transforming my Lifestyle disorder into like a more productive hobby for myself

[00:16:23] Which I didn't overturn into a full-time job for me today This is like such a lemons into lemonade story But honestly it makes me so happy and it's so heartwarming to hear this Because I think a lot of kids relate to being bullied Or being sort of ostracized

[00:16:39] For reasons they can't control necessarily And then to take that slur and to make it your brand And to empower yourself like that is just one of my favorite stories ever Thank you so much for sharing all of this with us

[00:16:51] It's been such a pleasure to chat with you and learn about all of this And I hope for the people who are listening That somebody finds some resilience and some hope over here Because you're a star and I love you so much Thank you, I love you too

[00:17:03] You're the cutest