New Delhi Belly

Welcome to the Harmful Eating and How to Eliminate It podcast. I’m Karen Bartle, behavioural change and resilience health coach, and thanks for tuning in to today’s episode where we’ll be unravelling a topic I’m very passionate talking about, an enigma called resilience; what it is, why we need it, and what happens when we don’t feel we have it.

Harmful eating comes in many guises but typically falls into 1 of 2 categories: either we’re consuming something or too much of what’s not right for us, or we’re consuming too little of the right things that could be good for our health and well-being.

When we are doing either, especially when it’s a conscious behaviour that we know we know better about, there’s typically something missing, something that we need but don’t currently have much of, and that’s resilience!

When we talk about resilience, we’re talking about our ability to cope with life’s ups and downs, continuing forward and remaining optimistic or hopeful despite it being difficult or unpleasant, and bouncing back from the challenges we are facing by accessing previous skills and resources, or by developing new ones to cope with the current demands of the situation.

Stressful life events such as moving home, changing jobs, planning a holiday or important event, starting a family, dealing with disease, illness or injury, going through a separation or divorce, or coming to terms with the death of a loved one, can all test our resilience to the max, especially if the issue is severe, chronic and enduring.

Building resilience helps us to not only manage current challenges of everyday life, but also to develop better skills and habits that will help us to deal with future similar potential events throughout the life cycle. Resilience is important for our mental and physical health; the greater our resilience, the better equipped we are to manage common responses to stressful events. The better we deal with stressful events, the lower our risk of developing mental health conditions such as anxiety and depression which can exacerbate a current physical health problem or trigger a new one.

I’ve had my fair share of having my resilience tested over my lifetime, but especially so over the last 12 years where I’ve faced medical and psychological trauma, travelled the world as a backpacker with my partner navigating our way through 26 countries in 7 continents over 9 months whilst making our way to starting a new life down under without any predictable roadmap.

When we’re coping well it’s a smooth process, we feel secure in our convictions, no self-doubt or avoiding situations or people that make us feel unsafe. We reduce our overwhelm and emotionally cope with the challenges we’re facing by slowing things down, feeling we have time for things, taking our time to think things through, engaging in behaviours we know are good for us and will enhance our ability to cope rather than harm us, we become more accepting of setbacks and when things don’t go our way. We’re also more likely to seek out positive support and accept help from others when it’s offered rather than thinking we should or must be able to cope by ourselves or else it’s a sign of weakness or a flaw we have. When we’re resilient, we also tend to use another form of coping called problem focused coping, where we feel we have the ability to influence our destiny and change either ourselves or the situations we might find ourselves in for a better outcome.

When we left the UK in 2012 to emigrate, we decided to roughly plan a world travel itinerary over 9 months on our way to starting our new life down under which was to take us to every continent and over 26 countries. In a very short space of time, we had 2 properties to sell, one of which had a lifetime of personal belongings, furniture, car, and artefacts to be completely cleared by giving everything away or selling it. Anything that couldn't fit into a couple of backpacks had to go!

For the last 2 days having only just sold and cleared our properties in time, we were still conducting training and stayed in a hotel and on a houseboat on the canal. Our adventure of being completely outside of our comfort zone had already begun and we were extremely excited!

Our first destination was India. We had a visa and a plane ticket but that was it. No accommodation, no contacts, and no one to greet us at the airport. On landing in New Delhi, we experienced the biggest culture shock we never could have even imagined. “Where are you staying?” Asked the guy checking our passport and credentials at security. “Staying?” we said, to bide us some thinking time. “Yes, what hotel are you booked in with and how will you be getting there?”. I knew there must have been a YHA somewhere so quick on my feet said that’s where we were staying. He didn’t look too convinced and if he had questioned us any further, I expect we would have been marched out of the airport the same way we came in.

On leaving security we were clueless and felt so very lost and what to do and which way to go. When we conducted our training or had travelled to other places without a plan in the UK, we would arrive at the airport and there would be a helpdesk or a range of options to book hotels and other places to stay. Not here!

We walked out of the airport and were faced with a barrage of taxi drivers vying for our custom so we jumped in one who had a pricing machine running and asked him to recommend somewhere to stay that was fit for English backpackers.

On the way there, well, for anyone who has ever been to New Delhi you’ll know that it has to be experienced to really believe it. The rules of the road seemed non-existent, the noise and pollution was overwhelming and how we arrived there alive and in one piece was beyond us.

Our driver thought nothing of scraping a car on route without stopping or weaving between other vehicles within a gnats whisker. It was truly frightening! When we arrived at the hotel we were exhausted from the journey from the UK and went straight to bed. The next morning, we ordered breakfast in our room. Reception came to take our order and we found ourselves unable to open the door. The lock had broken and we were locked in! The staff member was unable to open the door from the other side either and had to send someone via a small bathroom window which had to be removed to let one of the guys through.

An hour and about 6 guys later, having been shown and transferred to another room, we had our breakfast! We stayed in the room for the day sleeping off our exhaustion and had a wonderful meal in the hotel for a ridiculously cheap price – curried veg, fried rice, etc. We had a feast again that night and the next morning we ordered parantha and pickles for breakfast.

The hotel hired us a driver to show us the sights of New Delhi for the day. The traffic was as lawless (and fun) as ever and our driver was stopped for an alleged road offence and fined or rather bribed by a policeman. We stopped at a garage for Indian snacks on our way to touring various temples and shops including the beautiful and extraordinary Lotus Temple.

We arrived back for another lovely Indian delight in our room and booked flights to Kerala in south of India leaving New Delhi the next day. ‘No Delhi belly yet’ we wrote in our journal.

The next morning, before leaving for the airport to fly to Kerala to spend time in a homestay before having a trip on a houseboat. Paul said “I think Delhi belly might have struck, it could just be acid though.” His usual relief wasn’t having any effect and he considered taking his backup more powerful antacids but which reduce immunity by making stomach less acid (so bugs can breed) and also reduce effectiveness of antimalarials which we were taking.

He could only stomach toast for breakfast and then realised Delhi belly had definitely struck. We managed to get to the airport and of course shouldn’t have been travelling on planes if we were sick. Paul was getting more and more ill and vomiting at the airport, but somehow, we made it to the airport in Cochin which was a 1-and-a-half-hour taxi ride to Kerala.

With Paul needing to be near a bathroom we had no choice but to book into the nearest hotel and that’s where we stayed, slept and made constant use of the bathroom for the next two days drinking only bottled water. I thought I had escaped it but oh no I had got the same bug and in no time and was suffering the same.

There was no pharmacy in Cochin so we were making up rehydration fluids with sugar, salt and bottled water. After a couple of days recovering from the worst of it, we managed to visit a pharmacy on our way to Kerala and took some loperamide.

We were warned in the books before we left for our travels and by the hotel staff in New Delhi to not eat street food and definitely not drink anything unless it came out of a sealed bottle. We took the risk with this convenience store in New Delhi as we had no other food and our driver advised it should be okay. We weren’t sure if it was this or the meals we had eaten at the hotel that had caused us to be sick, but we were feeling incredibly weak and dehydrated even despite scores of empty bottles of water piling up in the corner of the room.

Paul got us some loperamide for controlling and relieving our symptoms of diarrhea. It was interesting watching him trying to communicate and gesture with the pharmacist at a kiosk about what symptoms we had as he had no ability to understand or speak English!

The Kerala home stay and house boat trip was a welcome break and time to recover and get our health and energy back. It was a far cry from New Delhi and we hoped we wouldn’t have to arrive back there anytime soon. There will be more harmful eating escapades no doubt coming to the podcast in future episodes, as you can imagine this was only the start of what was to come!