What is healthy living?

Hello everyone! Wow! I’ve just been really overwhelmed by all your support and love! I’ve been getting lots of encouragement from everyone around and it’s just been incredible! So thank you thank you all of you 🙂

I’ve been getting a lot of questions recently about health and nutrition in general. Most predominantly, everyone definitely wants to eat ‘healthier’ but are confused about what healthier means. Most of the questions centered around “can we ever eat… (ice cream/ milo/ cakes) ever again?”. “Just fruit and veg? Omg, that is such a sad existence! Are you serious?!”, ” THEN WHAT TO EAT?!” coupled with resigned sighs and a lot of frustration and and the eventual ” I rather die early but happy than live life like that.”

I’ll be doing up posts soon to answer your questions so hold your horses!

But first, let me reiterate that I’m not saying you can NEVER have a cookie or cake, or Char Kway Teow, or Fried Carrot Cake or anything ever again and that you must eat only fruit and veg. In fact, there is absolutely nothing you cannot eat.

It’s not about never having cake again during a birthday or having a mid week blow out meal with the pals, I am more concerned about the day to day.  Every day, for breakfast, lunch and dinner- what will you be having and how good would that be for your body? I’m worried about people like my parents who grew up eating rice and dishes and noodles and all these cheap, yummy hawker centre food and who suddenly face confusing information that suddenly it’s all not good for them. I’m worried about young children whom I come into contact with each day whose parents are so busy working that it’s much easier to buy back dinner from the hawker centre (cheap and tasty!) than to slough it out at the stove after a hard day’s work only to have your lovingly prepared food rejected and abandoned in favour of chicken nuggets and potato chips.

Healthy food does not mean bland. It may be a little rough in the beginning because your tastebuds are so used to factory made, chemical laden foods and are so desensitized that it takes a lot of fat, sugar and sodium to consider a dish flavourful but if you just scale down and try cutting back on these three, you’ll find your tastebuds sharpen, along with all your other senses. I used to drench my meals in different sauces last time but since eating healthier, my tastebuds are so sensitive that food that is lightly spiced tastes amazing and hawker centre food in Singapore just throws me off whack. I’ve really come to appreciate food in it’s natural form- the sweetness of a crisp apple, the slight saltiness of eggs, mhhhm 🙂

Also, there is not one-size-fits all approach to health and nutrition. I am 25 and lead a largely sedentary life. I’m out of the house from 8:30am in the morning till 11 at night. I work 7 days a week. I drive to most places instead of walking. My work largely involves me sitting/ standing and talking. I’m trying to fit exercise in in the form of stair climbing and walks but I don’t exactly move that much in general. I am also extremely sensitive to carb products and sugar and I don’t move around that much so I don’t eat grains that often. Eating a hot fudgy cake or even rice out of proportion to the rest of my meal would send me craving for more food. I’ve experimented different combinations, high carb, low carb, high protein etc and found that what works best for me is tasty, hot food that spans the entire spectrum of food available. I omit nothing from my diet but my daily diet consists largely of carbs in the form of vegetables, light protein and a lot of plant based fat like coconut and nuts. My meal ratios are usually a large percentage of fat, followed by protein and carb. Experiment and find out what works for you. We could all do with less animal fat, sugar and salt but how much of carb, protein, fat, minerals and vitamins you eat is really specific to your daily life.

Secondly, I honestly do not care about body size. You can be ultra skinny but malnourished and you can be really big and malnourished. You could eat really healthily and still be malnourished, one would never know right? My acid test for health is strength and vitality. It doesn’t matter how you look but how you feel going about life. Is waking up hard to do? Do you often feel lethargic and uninspired? Do you feel breathless after walking up a couple flights of stairs? Do you eat really ‘healthily’ and exercise frequently but hate what you see in the mirror and secretly pinch your tummy rolls. Do you cry in bed at night? Wish life was different or you were somebody else? Does the weighing scale indicate how you would feel for the rest of the day? Do you need a 3pm afternoon nap after lunch? Do you need coffee to keep you going? Are your children lethargic, always looking for sugary products and unable to concentrate in school? Does life just feel too hard and too stressful for you? If your loved one was hanging at the edge of a pit would you be strong enough to save him/her?

I have a long way to go to build up strength but it pains me to see girls around me shying away from exercise and proper nutrition because they are afraid to bulk up. I know the look they are going for, I’ve seen their thinspiration photos.

The collarbone, ribs, the thigh gap, the legs. I know girls who are obsessed with every part, believing that they will never be perfect till then whittle themselves down to bone.

Strength and health > body size, absolutely. You may still have bits sticking out here and there and you may not be a size 00, but really, who cares? (Then again, if you are a size 00 or a size 24 and can pull yourself out of a burning pit and don’t do the junk, whoohoo, that’s great too)

I really dislike putting up pictures of female bodies because I think that just makes us objectify them even more. I don’t want you to swing the other way and look at the previous pic (shown above) and compare it with the bottom pic shown here and think ‘Oh the first pic is so gross! She’s too thin!’ Your reaction to anybody’s body shouldn’t be she/ he’s too – something. If you feel compelled to say anything about the person’s health, get to know that person a little more, talk to that person, learn that person’s mental state and see what you can work out from there.

Please don’t look at these kinds of pictures and say things like ‘fit in the new skinny’. NOTHING is the new skinny, okay? Exercising is for your heart, the lovely blush colour in your cheeks- never solely for calorie burning ‘to get a certain body’. There is nothing worse than over exercising and putting your body under such terrible strain.

To be honest, wating right and exercising
wouldn’t make you super skinny, if that’s the look you are after. But it
will give you greater energy, make you happier, live life fuller. It’s
hard to live life and be excited about things when you are afraid to
meet up with people because you have so many food items on your
restricted list or it clashes with your gym time. Go out and live! Try new things!Blend up a smoothie today! Be adventurous! Be the amazing person you were born to be. Go out and love somebody today 🙂

I can’t wait to hear about the person you would soon become 😀