5 DELICIOUS DINNER RECIPES to support your weight loss: https://www.chefaj.com/5-delicious-low-fat-dinner-recipes
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Shikha Merchia, MBBS, MD, DipABLM is board certified in Internal Medicine and a diplomate of the American Board of Lifestyle Medicine. She is a primary care provider who counsels patients on lifestyle changes to manage illness including: diabetes, hypertension, hypercholesterolemia, obesity and its related conditions since 2004. She’s a graduate of Christian Medical College, Ludhiana, India.

She has completed:
1. Plant Based Nutrition course from eCornell Center for Nutrition Studies with Dr. T. Colin Campbell
2. Harvard Medical School’s Culinary Health Education Fundamentals (CHEF) Coaching. An evidence-based program focused on culinary coaching with a novel approach to improve nutrition that combines culinary training, health coaching principles, and telemedicine tools and resources.
3. Complete Health Improvement Program (CHIP), a powerful disease reversal solution. It disrupts rising chronic disease rates and has driven positive health outcomes for tens of thousands of participants nationwide. This proven approach enables participants to make fundamental lifestyle changes and lowers key risk factors within 12 weeks.

She has been featured by MamaSezz.com a Whole Food Plant Based Meal delivery service. https://www.mamasezz.com/blogs/news/shikha-merchia-lifestyle-medicine-doctor And on the platform, https://www.womenwhowin100.com/ as guest speaker on weight loss https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KH67lE8bDlc
She is a speaker for the Non-Profit, Indian Circle of Caring, in Massachusetts where she speaks about chronic lifestyle disease and the relationship with diet and lifestyle in South Asian people.

She has partnered with the Non-Profit, Jiviniti, a research foundation with a qualitative research program focused on low-income women and women of color in underserved communities. The research explores the relationship between their food choices, resilience, triggers, and barriers
against healthy lifestyle changes. The research project GAIA is still underway, but was conducted in 2021 to explore people’s food choices and its impact on the severity of the COVID-19 infection.
Dr. Merchia is a lifelong vegetarian who started following a plant-based diet in 2020 and transitioned to a whole food plant based diet, soon thereafter. Her husband, a board certified Ob-Gyn and Urogynecologist, also sharing this interest became board certified in lifestyle medicine. They and their three daughters have subsequently adopted this way of living and diet.

Dr. Merchia created @doc_inthekitchen to showcase her interest in cooking and creating recipes. One of her recipes was featured in the CHEF coaching Newsletter of the institute of lifestyle medicine at Harvard Medical School.
She draws inspiration for creating recipes from her parents, who have been collecting and experimenting with recipes since she was a young child. Her mom taught herself to bake eggless cakes as they did not consume eggs. Growing up in spite of disliking milk, she had to drink at least 2 glasses a day as it was considered an essential part of their diet.

She started eating eggs in medical school as there was no alternative breakfast available. Coming to the US as a young physician in 1997 and starting residency, a year later and becoming pregnant with their first child, she took to eating quick cafeteria food and consuming sweet beverages, mostly Coca-Cola, just to keep up with the stress of it all. In her in-laws' family, they loved fried foods and dairy based desserts, which she began consuming as well. The entire family then experimented with an Atkins style vegetarian keto diet for a year, and then fell back into their regular pattern of eating.She was bordering on overweight off and on and tried a few different diets within the vegetarian realm.

Seeing Chronic lifestyle diseases in the Clinic and hearing of family, friends and community members developing diabetes, heart disease, cancers and many of them dying from these, further inspired her to dive deeper into studying about healthy diets. In 2020, she chanced upon the Food Revolution Network, a virtual summit and heard all the speakers and subsequently registered for the Lifestyle Medicine conference hosted by the Institute of Lifestyle Medicine at Harvard Medical School a month later.

COVID Lockdowns, as hard as they were, provided her with the unique opportunity to really focus on this subject and study and expand her knowledge and apply the changes to her own life. She has been counseling patients in the clinic, using the ACLM's handouts, and creating resource lists as well as simple recipe guidelines for her patients.
She does not leave any opportunity to counsel patients on lifestyle change…