A nutritionist has debunked the widely-held notion that late-night eating is a major cause of pot belly.

Speaking to Jonnie Hughes on the health segment of the 3FM Sunrise Morning Show, Nutritionist Fred Amese said “people tend to say that when you eat late at night, you would get pot belly; it is not true.”

He went on to clarify that the problem is not about the time you eat. The problem is about the duration between your last meal and your sleeping time.

“So you can say oh for me I eat my supper at 6pm. I don’t eat late at night. If you eat at 6pm and 6:15pm you are sleeping and someone eats at 11pm and sleeps at 1am, you the one eating at 6pm has done nothing. You would develop a pot belly and the one eating at 11pm would not have a pot belly” he explained.

He stressed that the issue about late night eating is not about the time per se. It is about the duration between the time one eats and the time the person goes to sleep.

“So don’t worry yourself about oh it’s late I won’t eat. If it’s late and you are hungry, eat. But make sure that you wait enough, move around, do some brisk walking, etc” Fred Amese stated.

The nutritionist also noted there are some people who sit in front of their television to have  their supper and fall asleep immediately for the television to even end up watching them instead of them watching the television.

“Such people would develop pot belly even if that eating is done at 6pm” he cautioned.

Here’s the truth: I’ve had sex with some men who didn’t deserve to have me. To be honest, I didn’t have the greatest of reasonings. I did it for some very poor reasons.

No matter how many times I try to ignore or forget about it, I have to take ownership of the choices I’ve made. And despite what happened, I know I’m not the only one who made choices like these. 

I was trying to convince him to date me. 

I won’t deny that there were sparks between us and that made me feel special. However, I knew he wasn’t looking for anything serious. I was settling for something that wasn’t there because I liked the temporary happiness he gave me. I thought sleeping with him was going to change his mind and I tried to convince myself that he will change his mind. But I was wrong, and I was left heartbroken for trying. 

We were dating. 

I thought sleeping with him was part of the relationship that I’ve signed up for. The insecure voice in the back of my mind convinced me he’d leave if I didn’t give him sex. Even though I wasn’t ready or didn’t really want it, I always gave him permission to my body. Sex felt like a chore, not a luxury. 

I was feeling insecure. 

I slept with people just because I wanted to feel pretty, valued, and wanted — I needed a reminder of my worth, and I thought meaningless sex would give me all I was searching for. Instead, it made me feel worse about myself. The voids I filled while they filled me sickened me the moment it was over. Ultimately, I was left feeling like an insecure mess. It was a waste of a kill count number. 

I was drunk. 

It was a good night out with my friends, and I danced with someone I found attractive. We shared drinks, an Uber to his place, and his bed for the night. I woke up with instant regret from the sloppy sex from the night before. So I sloppily ran away from that memory the next morning. 

I was trying to distract myself from reality. 

I didn’t want to face my problems. To combat that, I got tangled in someone’s sheets for a blissful afternoon — it seemed like the right move at the time. The sex wasn’t always horrible, nor was it spectacular. But it did the trick even if it left me in a moment of sadness or confusion afterward. 

I was trying to get over someone.

Rejection hurts, we all know that. In my lowest of moments when I felt unattractive and unlovable, I wanted to feel wanted. And I found that in someone who only wanted me for a short moment. 

He was hot. 

Although it may not be a bad reason, sometimes you just want to conquer a quest. Sometimes it’s truthfully humorous when someone attractive finds you attractive, so you ask yourself, “Why waste an opportunity?” Sadly, there were times he wasn’t the greatest in bed and I was left disappointed. But at least I can say I banged a hot guy, right? 

Ultimately, my experiences reflected what I was feeling at that specific moment in my life. I wasted a lot of time and effort on these useless people who, truthfully, didn’t even care about me. I hated the feeling of being used, but I continuously put myself in that position only to get the same outcome. Nevertheless, it’s okay to accept your past and learn from it. After the continuous pattern I was putting myself in, I learned how horrible it made me feel so I changed my ways. And I know other people can too. You just have to be willing to change.

Delhi Metro network, a symbol of sleek, air-conditioned train travel in modern India, seems to have become a hotspot for public displays of affection.

Last week, a video of a young couple kissing on a train in the capital sparked a row after it went viral on social media. 

The video, which shows a woman lying on a man’s lap as they kiss, prompted the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC) to ask commuters to report any “objectionable behaviour” they noticed. 

The corporation also promised to “intensify the number of flying squads” to monitor such instances.

The video and the criticism it received online have sparked a fierce debate around moral policing and public obscenity in the country.

But the definition of “objectionable behaviour” is a slippery one. 

For example, some of the responses to the DMRC on social media are quite tame by most standards – a young couple sitting together with the woman resting her head on the man’s shoulder.

At the same time, no one thinks a train coach is an appropriate place for masturbation. Last month, a video of a man performing the act in a Delhi Metro coach prompted a stern warning from the Delhi Commission for Women. 

While a majority of people would agree that masturbation is not acceptable in public places, it can still be tricky to draw boundaries between sexual acts and acts of physical affection, especially when performed in collective spaces.

PDA (as public display of affection is often called here) has a long and convoluted history in India, a country dogged with the cliché of giving the world the Kamasutra – an ancient book on erotic love – while frowning upon onscreen kisses. 

In 1981, when then Prince Charles visited a film set in India, actress Padmini Kolhapure welcomed him with a garland and an unscripted kiss on the cheek. That made her famous as “the woman who kissed Prince Charles”, though she said in an interview years later that “it was no big deal”. 

But it could have been. In 2007, when Hollywood superstar Richard Gere gave Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty a peck on the cheek at an AIDS awareness event, he was accused of insulting Indian culture. 

Gere claimed he was trying to send the message that kissing was safe, but a case was registered against Shetty for performing an “offensive act” in public.

When Shetty was finally cleared of charges in 2022, the court said it seemed that she had been a “victim of alleged acts” of Gere. 

Over the past few years, onscreen kisses and acts of intimacy have become more common in Indian films and web shows.

But in a country as populous as India – where most young people still live with their families – privacy is always an issue. 

Couples seek out moments of romantic togetherness in gardens, parks and even in ancient monuments. 

In Kolkata, the grounds of the grand marble edifice to Queen Victoria have traditionally been a haven for courting couples. After dark, the police routinely blow the whistle to disperse couples sitting behind bushes, all under the stony gaze of the monarch who gave the world Victorian morals.

But couples who try to get close in private run into other roadblocks – some hotels in the country even insist on seeing marriage certificates before renting out rooms to couples. 

Ironically, same-sex couples often do not face the same problem in renting a hotel room that a heterosexual couple might. Men holding hands or walking with their arms around each other has never raised eyebrows in India the way it does in the West. Indians have been touchy-feely in public, even if they frown on PDA between a man and a woman.

Section 294 of the Indian Penal Code punishes anyone causing annoyance to others in a public place by obscene acts, including obscene songs or ballads. 

But the problem lies in the definition of obscenity itself. 

The great Urdu writer Saadat Hasan Manto was charged with obscenity six times, both in British and independent India. In 2017, actor Milind Soman was charged under Section 294 after he posted a picture of himself running naked on the beach to mark his 55th birthday.

Earlier this year, the idea of obscenity in India even became the subject of an acclaimed off-Broadway play, Public Obscenities, which explores queer relationships in Kolkata. 

The title draws from Section 292 of the Indian Penal Code. Its playwright Shayok Misha Chowdhury said in an interview that he was intrigued by what constitutes obscenity under the law, “what it considered taboo and what is declared erotic” and the “porosity of what is private and what is public”. 

While celebrity cases grab eyeballs, PDA has always been a battleground for young people trying to assert their freedoms against sections of the population that are opposed to the practice. 

It has led to vigilantism during Valentine’s Day and also counter protests such as the “Celebrating Love” event held by students at the engineering institute IIT-Madras in Chennai city to oppose moral policing.

Several court judgements have ruled that kissing in public is not an obscene act per se. A lawyer defending a married couple in 2008 said it can only be obscene if it “encourages depravity or annoys the public”. 

But it’s tricky to legally draw that line. As lawyer Saurabh Kirpal observes in the anthology Sex and the Supreme Court: “The law is shaped by society and in turn shapes it… The problem with changing the law is that the law is framed by the very people who represent society.”

That leads us right back to the Delhi Metro, where one person’s PDA might well be public obscenity for another.