Note: This is a guest post authored by Usama Sulaiman.
At first glance, Serve to Win appears
to be made of the same material autobiographies are made of. Catchy title, a
guy with a famous name standing smiling, ready and confident, all cement the
idea of an autobiography. But if you miss reading the full title or if don’t
read the blurb properly you might be led astray and end up having a book which
is absolutely not what you expected.
--- In 2011, Novak Djokovic won a
breathtaking ten titles, three Grand Slams and forty-three consecutive matches.
Remarkably, less than two years earlier, this champion could barely complete a
tournament. How did a player once plagued by aches, breathing difficulties and
injuries on court suddenly become the number-one tennis player in the world?
The answer is astonishing: he changed what he ate.
In Serve to Win, Djokovic recounts how
he survived the bombing of Belgrade, rising from a war-torn childhood to the
top tier of his sport. He reveals how changing his diet transformed both his
health and game - eliminating gluten made him feel instantly lighter, clearer
and quicker.
Now Djokovic has created a blueprint
for remaking your body and your life in just fourteen days. With weekly menus
and delicious, easy-to-prepare recipes, he’ll help you on your way to shedding
extra weight and finding your way to a better you. ---
---
Serve to Win: The 14-Day Gluten-Free
Plan for Physical and Mental Excellence
161pp | Bantam Press
Rating : 3.5/5
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Serve to Win is the kind of book you should/shall find in the Health
and Fitness segment rather than in Sports or Biographies in a
bookstore. Obvious as it is from the blurb above, it talks about health and
diet and fitness and shows you how to become the better version of you by
asking you to change your eating habit for two weeks and seeing and
experiencing the improvements yourself later.
The book starts with a little introduction
by the author informing about how in 2010, when he suffered a terrible defeat
in the quarterfinals of the Australian open, he was at the lowest low of his
career and yet, just 18 months later, he was at the very top and realising his
dream for good. But it is not all game technicalities and diet talk if you are
thinking of that. The first chapter opens to the bombings in the dead of night
in the neighbourhood of his hometown of Belgrade, Serbia. He recounts how NATO
forces bombed the town for weeks and weeks, night after night and how lives
changed all around him. He recounts how even in the face of destruction, people
found a way to live life, found reasons to joke and smile, and for keeping
their love for sports alive. He recounts how in a place where nobody knew or
cared much about tennis, he kept working and working towards the realisation of
his dream, which after many failures he did realise, and how his diet had a
pivotal role in doing so.
Djokovic tells how he was introduced to
a Gluten-free diet just like how he proposes it to you in this book. He
took a fourteen day test and saw such definite and evident results that he
never went back to his old diet. He stopped eating Gluten containing food,
which as he explains, is the substance mainly found in wheat and other grains
which makes food made from such grains doughy and holds them together and also
the substance which if you are intolerant to (a lot of people are, to varying
levels), can make you feel tired and drained and can affect your metabolism
even when you are eating ‘healthy’ home cooked food.
Novak paves the way for you to avoid
Gluten, gives you motivation to do so, tells you what to eat (and when) and
helps you understand your body well while he serves his dishes. The book shifts
between his life events and advices, insights and information which he gives
you in order to excel on the path to health renovation and revolution. The
narration is fluid and doesn’t bore you, except for the recapitulation of how
eliminating gluten proved one of the most rewarding things he ever did.
There are some nice things about the
book that would make you feel good and maybe someday even draw you again to
pick it up and read it again just for those things. But sadly, those things are
not contained in the paragraphs which talk about gluten free diet. While Novak
doesn’t leave anything hanging in there by giving you detailed information
about what foods do contain gluten and which not and a list of recipes towards
the end of the book and more importantly, a lot of enthusiastic encouragement
which does fill you up to try the diet, the main reason for the book’s
existence is not fulfilled. Which is to try and incorporate a Gluten free diet
in your own life.
Like the book asked and as a
responsible reader (and reviewer) I took the Gluten free challenge. I stopped
eating wheat or any other grain in any form, didn’t take sugar unless feeling
absolutely dying by the lack of it, excluded milk products and red meat. To
give you a good overview, I stopped taking any form of bread, cookies, cereal,
sugar and foods containing sugar like chocolates/sweets, milk, curd and other
milk products, red meat, fried foods, packaged soups and juices, noodles, rice,
and a whole lot many products which contained gluten for a good six days (after
which I had enough). I live in North India, and if you’re an Indian, you can
imagine what was there left for me to eat. Next to nothing. I was perennially
hungry and since you can’t find a lot of foods suggested there in the book for
Gluten-free living easily here, it is simply too much work to dig out gluten
free foods for continuous practical implementation of the diet. Like Djokovic
himself said, gluten is everywhere. Moreover, I realised (during and after
those six days) that I am not much gluten intolerant, as I felt more weary during
the diet phase than before and after it.
So to come to a conclusion, I would say
that as a book, as a recount of a successful journey, Serve to Win is a
likable read. You would feel positive and energetic just reading the book but
when it comes to the incorporation aspect, keeping in view different ethnic,
geographic and economic variation of the masses, it is hardly a ‘diet for
everybody’, contrary to the writer’s opinion.
Serve to Win is like a swimming coach or a trainer who
motivates you, tells you that you can really swim if you tried the technique
right, shows you how he does it with elan and then goes ahead and asks you to
jump straight into the deep pool, without giving you many swimming aids. You
are thrilled. You want to do it. But at the same time, after the first dive in
you realise it’s more thrilling an idea than the execution.
I would still suggest it to anyone who
is in for a light read and/or who wants to try something new. Theoretically and
practically. Although I liked reading the book, I give it 3.5/5 for the reason
explained above.
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