Healthy Living in Singapore

$200 BLACKMORES GIVEAWAY!

HELLO FRIENDS!!!

I’m so EXCITED TODAY because it’s FINALLY March and I can share with you the deetz for this giveaway! I’m sure you must have realised by now that I LOVE doing giveaways and sending lots of nice and beneficial things to you guys so YAYYY!!!! SO HAPPY and EXCITED!!! 😀

Today’s giveaway is brought to you by none other than super famous brand Blackmores! Have you guys heard of Blackmores? They are Australia’s leading natural health brand specialising in providing lots of natural health solutions and supplements for healthier, happier living! I’m sure you would have seen their vitamins and supplements retailed in pharmacies or health supplement stores all over Singapore! And now they have their very own flagship store at Parkway Parade in Singapore retailing not just their products but with their award winning* Advisory Service to help you find products that’s best suited for your health needs!

Personally I’ve only tried their multi- vitamins before so I can’t say how effective ALL their products are but their brand is renowned, believes in natural ingredients and most importantly, and the biggest reason why I agreed to host this giveaway is because I love that Blackmores strives to be as holistic as possible- caring for the mind, body and even extending the care out to the environment as well.
A couple of months ago, Blackmores ran a campaign called #Blackmoresgogreen on Instagram to encourage people to be more aware of the environment and share practical steps in which to go green. I was immediately sold. Having a great brand is wonderful but to use that power and influence to spread the message of holistic living that cares not just for self but for the environment and people around? Well, that’s exactly what vegsmoothiebunny is about!

This time round, they are focusing on holistic living for the body and mind! They want you to play hard, eat well and sleep well which is EXACTLY what I always nag at your guys about advocate! Haha!

Okay enough talking, pictures of the stuff they so kindly sent over!

Eat well, play hard, sleep tight! I should change this blog’s name to this tagline! It’s exactly what I believe in !

JENG JENG JENG! ‘Play hard’ is a bottle of Executive B which ‘is a specially formulated combination of B-group vitamins and the
minerals magnesium and zinc – important nutrients to help meet the busy
person’s daily requirements. This formula is ideal for people who lead a
hectic lifestyle in a convenient one a day dose’. When life is stressful, you need more B group vitamins (new parents, students, workaholics- are you reading this?!) to support adrenal function and cellular metabolism as well as to support manufacture of serotonin which is a feel good hormone! If you are constantly tensed, stressed nervous or anxious, then you definitely need to look into increasing your magnesium levels!

Tied around it like a super hero’s cape is a stretchband! Yay! Stretching and low impact exercises for me please! 😀

The next factor to healthy living needs no introduction. I AM BIG ON EATING WELL and so is Blackmores! The included supplement here is Blackmore’s Probiotics 10 Billion which supports gastrointestinal tract immune system and healthy bowel functions.

Eat well guys- everything in moderation with lots of whole plant foods 🙂

And my favourite of the lot- sleep tight. This came with a lavender sachet which I’m gg to hide in my pillow. I am obsessed with lavender essential oil so this is perfect 🙂

Rest is the most important to me because you can try all you want but it’s in rest that the body repairs and heals itself. I especially love the idea of rest not just for its physiological benefits but because it’s a daily reminder that life’s healing and progress comes not just in the daily struggle and fight but in the willingness to let go, stay calm and allow nature and time to work its magic. Blackmore’s Sleep Sound Formula contains lemon balm, valerian and  magnesium to support and improve sleep. This, I’m definitely going to try this very week because truth be told, ever since starting my new job, the quality of my sleep has definitely declined. 🙁 Even though I try to go to bed early, I keep dreaming through the night and thus wake up feeling not 100% rested. Hopefully with increased light exercise and this formula, I’ll achieve better sleep so I’ll wake up each day a better and bright teacher all day, every day! 😀

Ta-da! So there you have it! I’m not giving away these products because Blackmores is big on Individuality and Customization. What I’m giving away is going to be suited only TO YOU! That’s right, FIVE lucky winners are going to win $200 worth of Blackmore’s services and products customized entirely for you and YOUR condition whether you are struggling with weight issues, low immunity, have digestive issues or brittle bones or just general well being! This $200 is made up of a naturopath consultation worth $100 and on top of that, winner will also receive $100 worth of Blackmores health products best suited for you determined by the naturopath AFTER your consultation! How cool is that!

All you have to do is head over to my instagram page and either repost my Blackmores photo or any photo and describe why you would like to embark on a holistically balanced lifestyle. Hashtag
#blackmoressg, #eatsleepplay and tag @vegsmoothiebunny in the post so I can see! 

So it’s post, describe, hashtag & tag. Got it? 😀

Contest runs 1-7 March so Go Go Go! Nothing like a brand new month to embark on more balanced living for a healthier, happier you!

I’ll be going for the naturopath consultation next week too so I’ll blog my experience after! Till then, don’t forget to play hard, eat well and sleep tight!

With love,
xx 
__________________________________________________________________________________
*Blackmores Advisory Service was recently
awarded the ‘Most Outstanding Industry Contributor of the Year’ by
Complementary Medicines Australia! The award honours and recognises ‘the
consistent and dedicated contribution of an individual or team to the
advancement and promotion of any aspect of the complementary health
industry in the last 12 months.’


*** Invited review 🙂 No monetary transactions were involved and opinions are my own.

Are you STARVING yourself?

When we think of starvation, images of sickly, frail, bony bodies come to mind. We see heartbreaking images on the internet of people in places with no access to food and water.

It’s no wonder that we glamourize abundant eating here in developed countries. An abundance of food everywhere is almost like a badge of honour to say that we’ve made it. Look at me indulging in my fried chicken and char kway teow and pizza and buritos! Check out my cosmopolitan diet, you guys!

Yet everywhere I look, I see people around me, right here in developed Singapore, starving, starving STARVING. And it’s killing me. It makes me so upset and angry at the same time. I want to shake my fist at the problem and childishly tell it to go away but of course it wouldn’t, certainly not just like that.

First off, let’s state that this has NOTHING to do with your body size. I DON’T CARE. You can be obese with a BMI of 50 or waif-like with a BMI of 10 or be perfectly defined as ‘healthy’ with regards to the BMI scale and you still could be starving. 

According the the Oxford English Dictionary, starvation is defined as:

suffering or death caused by the lack of food.

 And food:

any nutritious substance that people or animals eat or drink or that plants absorb in order to maintain life and growth.

which essentially, I would put starvation as suffering or death caused by the lack of nutrition to maintain life and growth.

I doubt anybody in Singapore is dying from starvation but are you suffering from a lack of nutrition today?

Are you suffering from or on the brink of suffering from diabetes, high cholesterol, osteoporosis?  I found a really great article here (“Are you starving yourself into obesity”) that I feel is quite telling of the future of our nation if we don’t encourage greater mineral and vitamin intake (from real food sources! Not just supplementation!)

When I go overseas and I eat an abundance of food, I always crave to return back to normal eating because I know that much as I enjoy it, the abundance of food I’m eating is not meeting my nutritional requirements at all. On my recent Bangkok trip, we loaded up on Pad Thai and fried chicken wings, fantastic pork intestines and rice and an abundance of every rich and yummy food you could think of.  I was eating up to 8 meals a day yet I knew I was starving. I was eating a whole load of items but they weren’t hitting my micro-nutrient needs. The sense of fullness I felt was from a bloated stomach and overworked digestive system rather than true satiety.

It amazes me that I learnt how to felt to be truly satiated only in my mid 20s. Before, I would eat a whole lot but never truly feel full. Well, I would think I was full but now on a diet abundant in nutrients that my body needs, I’ve finally learnt the feeling of true satiety. It’s not a sense of bloatedness or lethargy and I no longer crave to eat more of the same.

Have you ever tried an amazing dish that you just wanted to eat more and more of it till you are totally stuffed? Chances are the item in question is a product cooked with a perfect blend of quick digesting carbohydrates and fat that altars your brain to crave more. It’s a double whammy as well because not only do you crave to eat more psychologically, physiologically, because your body is only receiving carbohydrates and fat, it will send signals to eat more in hopes you might give it the nutrients it needs. My acid test for natural, good food now is if I can stop eating it. People are often surprised when I bring them to ‘healthy’ cafe joints like Balanced Living Cafe and they are full and unwilling to eat anymore despite them over ordering intitally coz they feared the salad is ‘not filing enough’. (This is probably why ‘unhealthy food’ is yummy to you. It’s yummy / makes you crave more of it because your body isn’t getting any nutrients, it never gets full!)

Let’s pause for a moment here and take a look at a diet that I copied wholesale from what one of my students told me he eats daily. He is 12 by the way and is obese and suffering from pre- diabetes which is in my humble opinion, totally unnecessary. I’ve tried to sound it out to his parents but they sighed in despair and say they have no time to take care of him and his grandparents show love by showering him with food.

Breakfast: milo/ white bread/ kaya
Snack: (he brings a lunchbox to school in an attempt to get him to eat ‘healthier’!!!)
Chicken nuggets with cut up prata slices and chili sauce
Lunch: Macdonalds meal upsized
Snack: All the soda he wants and chips
Dinner: Normal Chinese dinner but usually has some kind of friend food and 3 portions of rice. He does eat some veggies here
Supper: Instant noodleswith canned sausages (his favourite!)

All I see here is SO MUCH FOOD and the boy is starving away. He’s not getting anything! He’s constantly hungry and his parents just laugh it off and calls him a ‘growing boy’ with a ‘big appetite’. DOES THIS NOT UPSET YOU? Here we are living in such a developed, rich nation and we are starving our kids (and ourselves) out of LOVE? Oh the irony.

In other news, let’s move away to a typical office worker’s food intake:

Breakfast: Bread with egg and coffee
Lunch: Dabao-ed hawker centre Cai fan with rice and meat and veggie
Tea: Teh-O Siew Dai with a chicken pie
Dinner: Fishball noodles (soup- coz healthier option?)

Sounds pretty reasonable right? Is this office worker likely to be fat? I’d say no. OW here might be quite slim in fact, eats reasonably well and have no current health problems but a daily intake like that is almost devoid of fibre, minerals and vitamins that the body needs.

So if said OW here decides that he/ she needed to ‘detox’ (ugh, I hate this word) coz he/ she is feeling a little pudgy recently, he/she might decide to cut out carbs because that’s what everybody does when they go on a diet right?

So in an attempt to be ‘healthier’ and slim down, OW new daily intake might look like that:

Breakfast: scrambled egg and coffee
Lunch: Cai fan meat and veggies no rice
Tea: 1 slice of papaya
Dinner: Fish soup no noodles

Will he/ she lose weight? Of course! He/ She might even be the envy of all her colleagues who also strive to cut out carbs and whatnot because her/ his one week ‘detox’ was so successful! Will he/ she get healthier? NO. This ‘detox’ to get healthier is even more devoid of nutrients than her previous diet with the exception of the additional papaya. I see so many people around me on this kind of diets and it makes me want to wring my hands out in frustration. Yes you are eating, but you are still starving!

Getting healthier, guys, is not SUBTRACTION. It’s not eating less. It’s eating more! Eat more fibre, eat more calcium, magnesium, vitamins etc! Stop starving yourselves!

In another scenario, our dear friend OW here might be walking past her friend who is eating KFC for lunch. OW2’s daily intake might go somewhat like this:

Breakfast: Scrambled eggs with mushrooms and assorted veggies
Lunch: KFC chicken with a lunchbox of broccoli and brown rice
Tea: Fruit
Dinner: Homecooked white rice, veg and Fish

OW2 ate KFC for lunch- JENG JENG JENG! White rice! All these things people always say are ‘unhealthy’ and ‘bad’ But overall, her diet has more fibre, nutrients and vitamins than OW1. Do you see that it’s not about restriction but balance? That the more substances you eat that are devoid of nutrients, the more nutrition you need to eat? It’s not about the type of food you eat at all, it’s about supplying your body with nutrients such that it can work at its most optimal. If you eat a whole cake for Christmas, your next meal jolly well be a whole farm of broccoli. (Haha!)

So the next time you indulge in a feast (holiday season, guys!) or lots of cake and pastries and whatnot remember that you may not exactly be eating FOOD. You might just be stuffing yourself silly.

Which brings me to… the post holiday ‘detox’. 

 I’ve had so many email requests for a ‘detox’ plan. Readers send in their self crafted detox plan which consists of a few bunch of salad leaves and think they are going to attain nirvana and purity after that. Seriously, what is with this idea of perfection and internal cleanliness that people are so obsessed over?

If you over indulged on food one day, restricting your food intake the next day is not the way to help your body at all. You need to think of eating in terms of nutrients rather than calories! If on Day One you ate lots of Christmas cookies and treats and every thing, as a calorie counter, you might be tempted to eat nothing the next day and exercise intensively (exercising intensively also leeeches vitamins and minerals from your body so you MUST REFUEL!)  to return to a net zero. Don’t you see how unhealthy that is? If you do so, instead of your one day ‘detox’ effort to get healthier, you end up with TWO days devoid of nutrition or maybe even less nutrition than when you first started!

But if you look at your intake in terms of nutrition, you would realise that on Day One, you ate lots of sugar and fat with hardly any fibre or vitamins or minerals (no biggie, no need to beat yourself up over it) thus on Day Two, rather than completely restricting your food intake or eating the bare minimal, you might load up on lots of  (If you are eating ONE iceberg lettuce and dressing for lunch that is pure starvation. Don’t do it!) fruits and veggies and lean protein to balance the previous day and  re-nourish your body.

So the next time you see a friend eating a salad, don’t be too quick to judge and dismiss said friend as starving him/ herself. For all you know, the one starving here might just be… you 😉

How Exercise Made Me Unhealthier | Listening to my body

When I first started this blog, I was a total newbie to healthy eating and living. I’d come out of a really sucky time in my life and was just plain frustrated with being weak and tired all the time.

A couple of years before that, I had been broke, overweight, and very unhealthy. Fast forward a few years later and I was hovering at a BMI of 18.5. My knees knocked against each other when I slept in a fetal position, my hair was falling out and the most upsetting thing was that I still didn’t look like a model. Haha. I didn’t look fat on the outside but because I wasn’t eating enough I was your typical skinny fat girl. When I walked, I wobbled.

So in the beginning of this year (wow! This blog is 1+ years old already!) I decided to get serious with my health and do
‘healthy things’ like EXERCISE! and EAT CLEAN! and whatever living healthily entailed.

For a start, I decided to ‘invest in myself’ and purchase a personal training package because I didn’t
know a single thing about weight training or going to the gym. Below is my ‘starting point’ based on a Body Composition Analysis machine (therefore, take with a pinch of salt). You can see that I was barely clinging on to the 18.5 BMI and my muscle mass was barely 20kg. I huffed and puffed up the stairs but hey, I could fit into a size s skirt -.-

I’m not sure if you remember but some time during this year I took a huge break from blogging and any form of social media because in my quest to get healthier I totally derailed and got even unhealthier. I needed the break to really reevaluate my perspective on healthy living.

To cut the long story short, here are a couple of things that happened to me and what I’ve learnt from them:


1. I got stronger

With the introduction of the Personal Training sessions, there was no question that I would get fitter and stronger. I was SO PROUD of myself. My personal trainer was honestly pretty fantastic and had a ton of knowledge on fat burning and whatnot. With my Polar FT4 heart rate monitor, we torched almost 600 calories each HIIT session. At the peak of my training I was at the gym four times a week and blazing through my routines of multiples sets of burpess, lunges, hurdles, squats, planks pushups etc. For someone who couldn’t even do one modified push up, I was ecstatic with my ‘progress’. I looked forward to the day I would be able to do a pullup or 20x real pushups.

2. I started becoming obsessed with numbers and ‘healthy’ eating.

I was working so hard at the gym that I didn’t want to ruin it. I didn’t weigh myself at all nor count calories so I didn’t see anything wrong with myself or see myself as obsessive. But in reality, I looked forward to the next session to do one more rep, run a longer distance, get fitter and I saw myself as a ‘not giving my all’ if I slipped up. My phone started to fill with pictures of my heart rate monitor tracking the number of calories I’d burnt after each session, exercise logs, meal logs etc. In order to get to the gym on time and handle my insane workload, I didn’t have time to make my usual lunchboxes so I ate yong tau foo after each training session. I was SO careful to stay away from wheat, grain or anything like that. A typical meal after a 700 calorie burning session looked like that:

Did it occur to me then that it might be too little? Probably. But the thing about mental disorders is that you just can’t see it for yourself then, so blinded are you with your own little obsessions. I even got a little worried about the fishpaste in the toufu because.. perhaps it’s only flour? Unbeknownst to me, I was slowly falling into the abyss of orthorexia. And why couldn’t I eat sugar or flour or whatever not? What was inherently bad with these food? Was it because someone, some book or something told me I shouldn’t be eating it? Or did it really adversely affect me? I didn’t bother thinking about all these or the signals that my body was sending to me. All I wanted to do was to follow the rules of ‘healthy living’ and that meant exercise to be stronger and fitter and clean eating!


3. I binged ate

This was a no brainer. With the strain I was placing on my body, and the little I was eating during the day, I was constantly scarfing down food at night. At first I didn’t really notice. In the beginning it was perhaps maybe a pack of biscuits. Then it became a sandwich. Several weeks in and I was shovelling down instant noodles, packaged frozen food and cereal at 2am in the morning because I. Just. Could. Not. Sleep. Without. Food.

Let’s pause here and talk about two things.

Firstly, exercise IS A STRAIN. You stress your body which is good because some stress keeps your heard pumping, blood circulating and bones strong. But INTENSE exercise needs to be matched with INTENSE rest and INTENSE eating.

I didn’t understand this for the longest time. I constantly thought that 1200+ calories was enough for a person because that’s what all these health and fitness books told me. Just don’t go below 1200, they warned. 1200 was the magic number. I figured that I’d be ‘wasting’ my effort if I ate more than 1200. After all, wasn’t the main point of exercise and eating healthier to lose some flab? ( No, no, no, no!)

Think of a person who has intense activity in their lives. Let’s not talk about exercise. Let’s talk about a caveman whose job is to get the woolly mammoth home for dinner. He jabs, ducks, crawls, pokes, spears, whatever till he gets the woolly mammoth and then he feasts on the woolly mammoth and rests till he has to go out and get another woolly mammoth again. Such a cycle produces bulk and muscular growth. This is why there are huge proponents of intermittent fasting, high fat & protein and high intensity exercise for men/ women to gain muscles mass.

BUT I DON’T HAVE A WOOLLY MAMMOTH TO CATCH IN MY LIFE!

I am not a personal trainer, neither is fitness my life. Neither am I a full time health blogger. I’m not. I am a regular girl with a regular job and a regular life and I blog for fun. It is not sustainable for me at all to track my protein consumption everyday, to count my macros or my calories or to worry about all these little numbers. I just want to not huff and puff the stairs and I don’t want muscle wastage in my later years in life. That’s all!

Secondly, if you have a background of binge eating/ comfort eating, long term intense exercise is the LAST thing you should do till you right that problem (or possibly never). 

For a person who comforts eats when stressed, how is it that I totally missed out on the fact that exercise/ restrictive eating = STRESS. And for a comfort eater, ANY form of stress triggers the need to turn to your comfort food (lucky you if your comfort food is broccoli, but mine is a McSpicy Burger, thanks)

Also, I would call it binging because I was mindlessly shoving food in but I would like to point out that this was food my body needed. I have a lot of people struggling with eating disorders who follow me on this blog and they are constantly worried that they are swinging from Anorexia to Binge Eating Disorder in their recovery phase. I am highly doubtful that is happening. More likely, the ‘binging’ is simply your body’s way of making up for all the years of restriction.

4. Aches, pains and weight gain

My knee started to hurt insanely but professionals in the field all assured me that as long as I continued to ‘work out’ and ‘strengthen the thigh muscles, the knee problem would go away’. I ignored all the signs of my body breaking down. From everyone I asked, the answer was always to keep at what I was doing because exercise is good! And hey, check out that 3 consecutive push ups I could now do! I thrived on my personal trainer’s praise of me and felt really really awful when I let him down. There were days I just felt SO sore after and couldn’t bring myself to go for another PT session so I’d cancel last minute. At the next session, my trainer would tell me very gently and concernedly that ‘not being consistent’ wouldn’t allow me to see ‘results’. Suddenly this health game became nothing about me but about meeting other people’s expectations. I didn’t even know what results I was working for anymore!

At monthly weigh ins when the needle moved east, I thought I was doing well because hey, that gotta be some muscles growing! I couldn’t fit into my pants anymore but with all the squats I was doing, my butt must be nicely filling out (or so I thought) Deep down though,  I knew something was wrong.  My stomach was SO BLOATED. I knew it had to be the late night binge eating and the STRESS/ cortisol (from over analysing, exercise etc) causing me to pack on belly fat.

Things came to a hilt when I was at the gym but I just couldn’t bring myself to go for another session. I caught sight of myself in the mirror and didn’t even recognise myself at all. I honestly just looked really worn and dare I say this.. bloated and fat.

In order to motivate myself, I decided to take another Body Composition Scan and here were the results:

After all that I did to myself, I had only put on 0.7g of muscle mass and 4.2kg of fat.

Was I surprised? Not really. I knew the signs. I just blatantly ignored them. 

**NOTE: I am not saying that exercise and healthy eating is bad or doesn’t work. IT DOES. But the type of exercise and eating must be suited to you and your lifestyle! Weight gain is not bad either but weight should be gained from muscles (if you need them) and fat (if you need them). In my case, it wasn’t the exercise that made me unhealthy. It was the way I was doing it, and the unsustainable, stressful way that caused me to return to unhealthy binging habits that did me in.

That day I decided that HIIT wasn’t for me and I wanted to lose the 4.2kg of fat quickly so despite knowing everything about health and nutrition and having a blog on health and nutrition, I decided to try out being vegan, vegetarian, pure protein, the dukan, whatever. I even tried being a fruitarian. BUT IT WAS ALL SO AWFUL. I knew in essence what I was doing was just punishing myself. I had fallen into the same dark pit I tried to warn so many other girls not to do.

Then I just decided to stop abusing myself.

If you follow me on instagram, you would likely have seen this picture I posted about 2.5 months back:

The first thing I did was go right back to how I used to eat. I no longer ‘packed in the protein’ or cut the carbs. Neither did I go low carb. I ate everything in balance and moderation. I ate first for my nutritional needs, then for whatever else I wanted. I learnt to really really listen to my body. If it was hungry at night, I knew I must have missed out on some nutritional component that day. I wanted something sustainable and suited to my lifestyle. I thought about how I’d like to be when I grew up and I knew that I wanted to have healthy bones,  be as free from aches and joint pain as possible with a healthy heart. That meant a couple of hours a week of light cardiovascular exercise (mall walking = shopping!), lots of stretching for a supple spine and joints and light toning like body weight exercises. I can see myself doing walks, light stretches and toning exercises now at the age of 26 and I can see myself doing it as well at 89. I can see myself eating bread, rice, meat, fruit and other yummy things now and at 99 too without having to obsess over it and spend time away from truly living life. That, to me, is true consistency and sustainability.

I haven’t been back at the gym for 2 months now but my body has recently been calling for some activity. So I went for a long brisk walk and it was good and my body enjoyed it. Now I know how exercise should really make you feel. It should be invigorating, mood lifting. After a quick brisk walk enjoying the morning breeze and scenery, I returned home refreshed and ready to work. Pre enlightenment, I would return home thoroughly exhausted and go through the day like a zombie ( I would feel really good after a workout but quickly become fatigued and sleepy) using whatever willpower I had to prevent myself from inhaling the nearest box of chocolate.

I now understand that even with NO exercise at all, the body needs to be fueled with proper substantial, healthy meals. And with any form of stress like exercise, the body needs MORE nourishment, MORE rest. The moment I allowed myself to rest, the better I felt about myself and the unhealthy habits stopped. Your diet and fitness routine should at never, at any point, make you feel upset or a failure. Honestly, if you ask me now if you should go to the gym after a long day of work for a quick HIIT workout or go for an hour long massage + eat a light dinner after, I would totally recommend the massage. Haha.

Sometimes I feel a little stupid thinking back about the kind of money I’ve spent and how it led me further away from health but I realise now that it hasn’t. Without that experience, I wouldn’t have understood and known of all these and most importantly, I wouldn’t have learnt how to listen to my body and give it what it really needs- plenty of rest, nutrition and lots of love.

These days all I aim for is to have slept well, ate well and had some sort of activity i.e. some form of stretching to recuperate my super stiff and abused body. I’ve learnt that all activity is a kind of exercise and following a meal or exercise plan to the T is just outsourcing my own health and ignoring the opportunity to understand my body better.

So today I really want to encourage you to listen to what your body is trying to tell you. Does your neck ache after work? Do you get frequent migraines? Are you constantly hungry at night? Can you not sleep? Does your hair fall out? Do you huff and puff up the stairs? Do you see stars when you stand up abruptly? Do you have acne, bumps on the back of your arms, feel cold easily, poor digestion, bloatedness, constipation, feel lethargic all the time? Do you ignore them, suppress them with drugs, food or alcohol? Do you use exercise to compensate for ‘naughty’ days? Are you so strict (or lax) on yourself that you do whatever without heed to the signals your body is trying to tell you? Have you ever ignored the signals your body tried to give you? How would you treat your body like your best friend?

Have a good day everyone and remember! Listen to your body! Give it what it needs!

Let’s talk: The Perfect Diet

A question I get very frequently is- what then is the perfect diet? How should I eat such that I can meet all my nutritional needs and hopefully, look awesome and be lean and strong?

In order to tackle that question, let’s look at what I feel are the different levels of healthy eating.

For level 1, you are a total newbie to nutritional eating. You don’t care about what you eat and you feel 5 KFC meals a day wouldn’t kill you. YOLO, you know. You also hate drinking water and feel like soda is the best choice. Very likely you are also skinny because if you are bigger sized, everyone around you would be on your case condemning you and judging you into change. But because you don’t look like the societal definition of ‘unhealthy’ outside, nobody really says much. You may not be big sized but you have some sort of skin problem- probably acne or bumps on the back of your arms. If you are male, most parts of you may be slim but your tummy is round and pudgy. On the other side of the spectrum is your body which has so successfully created so many fat cells to prevent the toxins from reaching your internal organs that you struggle daily with obesity and fundamental things like moving around or even breathing.

For level 2, you have some sort of awareness but you don’t do much about it. Either that or you are trying to be healthier (more likely you just want to lose weight) so you decide to go on a detox, or a cleanse or experiment with one diet after another. If you are at 2A you probably know lots about nutrition and you are swinging between being vegan and being paleo or some sort of ‘healthy’ diet out there. You categorise food into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ and feel bad when you overstep the ‘boundaries’ you drew up for yourself.

Most of the time, people are in between levels.

And now we come to what I think is the perfect diet.

The perfect diet is one that is sustainable and tailored specifically for you, at that moment, for that day. It is one that has NO LABELS. Which means that you wouldn’t follow a diet plan written in a book or call yourself vegan, paleo, vegetarian etc because a book said so. No, you would not eat meat because you care about the animals that are dying, not because you want to be skinny or because it’s what vegans do. You might not eat grains and refined carbs because you have experimented and feel that you are better off without them but you wouldn’t label yourself as ‘paleo’ just because it’s yet another diet to try.  

When you follow a diet and label yourself as such, you are giving up ownership of your own diet and life. Choose to not eat grains because you want to, because you feel you function best without it, not because a book on paleo told you to do so. Take all the advice that all the diet books in the world give and customise it to yourself. Take ownership of your own health. When you give up ownership of your own nutritional needs, you hop from diet to diet thinking that it’s the diet’s fault when you don’t get the results you want.  You are always searching for the answer, out there when in fact, all the help you need is within you. You have the power to be lean, to be strong, to be healthy and it’s in taking ownership of your health. It is not healthy at all if you started a diet to be ‘healthier’ and then hate yourself for having crossed some sort of boundary. Maybe you consider yourself a high carb vegan and you accidentally ingested a piece of cheese and spent the whole day hating yourself.

The moment you feel your ‘diet’ is ruined is the moment you need to come clean with yourself- you aren’t on a lifestyle change. You are still riding high on the diet mentality. There are no good and bad foods. Just eat for what you need.

I don’t know what diet you may be on right now but I want you to think about yourself for the moment. Maybe you aren’t vegan or vegetarian or whatever. Maybe you are just seeking health. You want to be in a better condition because you know what you are currently doing to yourself isn’t the best.

Okay, breathhhheee. Now think about who you are and what you do. You are definitely human so you need vitamin and minerals and these are found in abundance in different coloured veggies and fruits so that’s it. Step 1- your diet will consist predominantly of fruits and veggies. Are you a marathoner? A triathelete? Or do you work at an office? If you engage a lot in sports, you need carbohydrate sources for quick energy (I’m not going into how the body can supply energy even in ketosis. That’s just too much work). But how much do you need? Do you want to get them from fruits and veggies or do you want to add them in the form of grain based carbs? Are you just jogging or doing HIIT? You also need protein. Are you going to get them from beans and plant sources or animals in accordance with your beliefs? You also need good fats. Where will you get them from? YOU ALSO NEED PLAIN WATER, not more sugar- drink your water guys 🙂

Different people will have different dietary needs. Perhaps you are a recovering anoretic so load up on the nourishment you’ve deprived your body off. Perhaps you are diabetic. Perhaps you are pregnant. Or breastfeeding or weight training. Everybody is different and every day is different. For myself, there are days where I don’t do much activity (just sit in front of the computer) so I load up on fruits and veggies and smaller amounts of grains because I still need vitamins and minerals. I feel ungrounded and hungry without grains so even though there a ton of research out there that says grains irritate your guy lining, I’ll eat them and be happy anyway. Likewise, I love peanut butter and most research says peanut butter is a great source of protein but peanut butter  (and cashews :() cause me to binge so I try to stay off them even though I LOVE THEM SO MUCH. T.T I’m pretty sure one day research will say fruits and veggies ARE BAD! Don’t eat them. Then what are you going to do? Would you be horrified and just jump ship or would you be so assured and confident in what is best for your body that you would know all those years of choosing to eat all that you have eaten was made with a mindful choice?

I guess what I’m trying to say is that don’t outsource your health. The perfect diet is not found in some book or supplement or machine out there. It’s in the deep awareness of yourself and your needs and most importantly, it is sustainable. Eating is supposed to be intuitive but we’ve complicated it in all sort of ways, turned a beautiful act of social bonding into an arena to be judged. Nobody can or should judge you for whatever you are eating (nor should you judge others) whether you are vegan or paleo or having McDonald chicken nuggets one day or a salad the next. You only need to be true to yourself about your choices. Eat first for what you need then for what you want and over time, you’ll realize that your body will crave things that are naturally good for you. There will never be the sense of restriction, ever.

At the end of the day, I just want to remind you that eating is such a small small part of life. It’s an energy giver FOR life. Which means that you just ingest the food and it fills you with energy to go out and do other things. Eating shouldn’t BE life. It shouldn’t be something you agonise over, worry about, judge yourself and other people for. Your next diet plan, next juice cleanse shouldn’t be the first thing on your mind every morning when you wake up. Neither should you miss out on life just because you’ve restricted yourself in some way. Healthy eating does not equate healthy living.  Healthy eating is a subset of healthy living. Because let’s be frank here. The person at level 1 who eats junk like it doesn’t matter is probably living a healthier life than you if all you do everyday is obsess over eating the ‘right’ foods and the best ‘superfoods’.

You know how they say the perfect job is one you don’t need to take a vacation from? Well, a perfect diet is one you never need to cleanse from. Everything in moderation and balance. Fill up on real food that meet your nutritional needs and have some (sweet potato) chips on the side if you want to.

Just eat for what you need, then what you want and go out there AND LIVE. There is a whole life waiting for you.

xx

My Story/ New Beginnings

Today I want to share with you what’s on my heart and a little of my journey to health.

For ease of understanding, I’ve made a really crude bar chart. There will be no fancy pictures tonight, no hyperboles, extravagant recipes. Just a very honest, heavy heart and words from a very flawed person.

From ages 0-16 I lived as normal a life as could be. I always thought I was average in everything. Average in height, average in weight, average, average, average. It didn’t matter much to me though. I liked being average. It meant like baby bear’s porridge, I was neither too hot nor too cold and I was just right. Besides, I had more important things to do in life like playing shadows with my brothers, protecting my oreos from them and collecting fanciful stationery pads from the school bookshop that I hid at the bottom of my drawer in hopes that my mother would never find out (didn’t work). Save for a couple of comments at Chinese New Year or other family gatherings where the proverbial aunt with her ample bossom would always pinch my cheek and exclaim “AIYO! What happened to you! Why you put on so much weight!” I never really gave much thought to my size or any physical part of me. I had hands and I had legs and every part of me worked perfectly fine except for my traitorous lungs that always gave out on me on my dreaded NAPFA tests. But wheezing and panting and swearing that I was going to die helped me to eek out a pass anyway so even though I knew I wasn’t very fit, I felt that I was okay because, well, I passed right? And I wouldn’t ever have to run for another year so meh, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. I was doing well in school and had even gotten attached to my primary school sweetheart (haha, how young and foolish we all were last time) and life was going pretty well.

Life changed drastically when I was 17 though. I left the protective arms of my secondary school and was thrust into a whole new environment in JC. Perhaps it was the ‘communist’ nature of my secondary school but for the first time in my life, I realised what it meant to be in a ‘dog eat dog world’. Don’t get me wrong, none of the people I met in JC were bad just that we were so different and it didn’t helped that we were all vying to succeed in a pressure cooker environment. I remember being totally gobsmacked when in the first week of school I’d printed notes for everyone in class-because well, if you are printing 1 copy, you might as well print 25 right?- and a senior stopped me and said “huh. why did you do that. xiao. you are just wasting your time. Nobody will ever do that for you also. ” I didn’t know if that was more painful or the fact that in the 2 years of my time in JC, that would turn out to be true.

For the first time ever as well, everyone suddenly seemed almost perfect to the point of being painful. (Although of course, on hindsight now I knew everybody also felt almost the same and it was my insecurity talking to me and nothing was really true). They were all so effortlessly good looking, so smart, so athletic, so cool I felt like I didn’t belong anywhere. How did they even know to tailor their skirts like that? Where did they get such short socks from and oh lord, their hair- so gorgeous it made my flowing locks look like a haystack. It probably also didn’t help that my skirt was knee length and my hair neatly pulled back from my chubby face like what my secondary school DM would approve of. It was easy to strike up a conversation but terribly difficult to sustain it because I didn’t have any common topics to discuss with anyone. Till that first day in school, I’d never even stepped foot into Holland Village- how was I to answer if I had ‘heard of the new ice cream place that just opened’? I was ranked as one of the top 20 speakers in the nationwide debating championships in secondary school but for my entire time in JC I ironically had no ability to speak. There was just nothing to say. Everyone else was smarter, more exposed to the world, prettier, better, more outgoing. Everyday in JC was just the suckiest time ever and while everyone seemed to be having the time of their lives I often hid in the toilet to cry after failing yet another exam paper (seriously, I don’t think I passed a single one), hating myself and believing that I was an absolute failure.

Then the bingeing came.

I wouldn’t go into details but one particular incident stands out the most. Stress levels were at an all time high and it had been yet another sucky day at school. The moment the dismissal bell rang, I stuffed (yet another failed) exam paper into my bag and dashed out of the school gates almost trembling with need like a drug addict. I went to the nearby macdonalds and bought a large McSpicy meal, with 20 nuggets and alacarte mcwings, to KFC for another set meal, to the hawker centre of meepok (don’t ask) and to 7-11 for bags of chips then I took a cab home, praying no one would be in and inhaled everything. For that few moments when I was stuffing and stuffing and my stomach expanding to the point of hurting, the hurt, the pain the anguish, all diminished with each mouthful I shovelled into my system. It was only when everything was gone, when the last morsel had made it’s way into my tummy that I finally recovered my senses and the sense of guilt would start creeping in.

From that moment life became a rollercoaster of comfort eating and guilt. Every time something happened and I had no words for it I would eat my feelings. Bad grades?  3 fast food set meals would cure it. No friends? Hey, nuggets would never let you down. I ate my way through the next few years of my life ballooning to 15kg over my ‘happy weight’.

All these happened while everything was crumbling around me- my grades in university, my love life, my relationships with the people around me yet I think on the outside I was still quite happy, bubbly and functional? Inside though, I felt like I was drowning and desperately trying to keep my head afloat in water. I swung from binging, to restricting and back again and was in general just always filled with despair.

At 22, everything came to a hilt. To cut the long story short, my boyfriend of 8 years found some other girl more attractive than I was and left (in the most heartrendingly horrible way ever). My professor threatened to fail me if I skipped anymore classes and I was slapped with a $30,000+ debt (Inclusive of my undergrad fees but I was also young and frivolous and stupid about money).

I wish I could say more (and maybe someday I would) but if you look at the bar, 23-24 was really a period of discovery for me. For the first time in 8 years I decided to stop being a door mat and LOVE MYSELF. I stopped defining myself by societal standards, stopped depending on others to validate my self worth, stop spending money frivolously, restricting/ bingeing/purging whatever.

I was desperate to learn about health and not some bikini body diet so I scoured the internet and the library for cancer prevention books, food nutrition books and the like. I figured that if I really wanted to be healthy FOR LIFE and love myself, not just to look good then I would need to learn from people whose diets truly meant the difference between life and death. 23-24 was truly, truly a learning experience for me. I got out of all my crappy relationships, built new, true real ones, rediscovered God (seriously, He is my everything now), lost 15kg, learnt to live healthy on a shoestring budget, drank green smoothies everyday, counted nutrients in my food instead of calories, threw my weighing scale away, completed my Honours year, wrote my thesis on societal standards and the female body (Ii am hellbent on this topic haha), made so many mistakes and learnt from them and really learnt the true meaning of living a happy healthy life.

Age 25 I coloured in green because this was the year I can frankly say I was the healthiest and happiest. This was the age I could truly look you in the eye and tell you that I feel beautiful not because I was perfect but because I’d achieved balance in life. The day I knew I truly loved myself was when I was looking over at my boyfriend (yes, I got attached again after agonising for months to make sure I wasn’t rebounding and questioning if I could really ‘trust’ again) and thinking to myself ‘wow, I love myself so much now that even if I had to get married tmr I wouldn’t even have to despair over losing weight because being married is about LOVE and HAPPINESS not how I look or what I weigh!’

That year, I gained a few kg and learnt that I had a range of weight that I considered my ‘happy size/ place’ where I felt confident and happy about myself. It meant no restriction yet no excessive binges either. Even if I ate out of line a few days in a row, my weight would stabilise and it would cause me no worry. I learnt that TRUE HEALTH is in THE MIND and characterised by the fact that I didn’t have to think about food (too much or the lack thereof) all the time. I indulged in a wide variety of Real Food and everything was so yummy and so satisfying! For the first time in my life as well, my constipation was cured and I was going EVERYDAY and I finally could understand when people say it is possible to go in just under 5 min! (TMI, but big deal to me. I used to spend HOURS in the toilet). I was literally glowing and I just felt so healthy, so happy, so empowered. I chose to eschew the typical 9-5 career path and it really helped opened me to new experiences in life, to learn to empathize with people, to be less judgmental and to just be more loving and gracious because the world is beautiful and there is so much to celebrate about it. I learnt the we truly are the culmination of all our experiences and I cherish each moment of crying in the school toilet, each ounce of self hate and self doubt and even (or especially) my failed broken relationship that consumed so much of my youth because every of those moments fueled my journey into becoming the person I truly am happy being. I felt so good about food and life that I started this blog because I wanted to let others the amazing healing properties of food as well as all the beauty the world had to offer.

Unfortunately, that time has some how slipped away and I have to admit that I’ve tumbled off the bandwagon. The stress of life has gotten to me again and while life is certainly not as bad as before, I’ve had recurring episodes of bingeing and comfort eating. At first they started out inncuosuly enough. Just a slightly larger meal than usual, than more and more till I was mindlessly shoveiling porportions of yesteryears. If you noticed, I haven’t even bothered making lunchboxes the whole of the past month because I was just so busy and unbalanced. I possibly ate more junk this few months than the past 3 months put together. I grew heavier and heavier but I guess I love myself so much now that I am all LOLLOLOLOLOLOLOL what is a little weight gain etc :/ I’ve read so much about different diets that I experimented with paleo, dukan, veganism, vegetarianism, even fruitarianism etc and all of that has taken a toll on my poor body ( I hope I haven’t damaged it beyond repair).  All these little bits and pieces culminated into a massive meltdown and I have to be honest with myself now that I’ve once again reached the pit and I need to rebalance my life. I am almost 8kg away from my happy place (too much for my frame) and I’m almost slipping into the diet mentality game once again and thinking about my body in terms of numbers. (NO. I NEVER EVER WANT TO GO BACK THERE AGAIN). I want to go back to the green zone once again when I didn’t worry whether dairy was leeching calcium out from my bones or if rice was still inherently processed (since in came in a package -.-. FYI- Being obsessive about health is also an eating disorder called orthorexia) Following and experimenting with ‘healthy’ diets has really taken such a toll on my body and mental state that I am also desperate to go back to just normal, varied eating.

Also, I hope that for those of you struggling to follow a diet or wondering which diet is best for you (Vegan-ism is so healthy and compassionate! The dairy industry is LYING to us. Meat has hormones and bacteria! Fish has metals! Bread is processed! Carbs make you fat!) and you just end up undereating and avoiding food options because ‘it’s not part of your diet plan’ (only to end up BINGEING from hunger and hating yourself after) then may I please welcome you back to balanced eating. 😀

So bear with me my dear readers, as I make the tedious climb back to my
happy place and a more balanced life. I took a long time to decide
whether or not to share this information with you all because I felt
like such a hypocrite- but for what it’s worth, I really want to stress
that a journey to health is not in the least bit simple or linear. It
has to be worked for (some harder than others. sigh) and there will be
times when we slip or even come full circle (sigh x2) but more important
is the hope that there will always be a better tomorrow 🙂

For the time being though, I will unlikely be updating my facebook page that much but will be updating more frequently over on this space/ instagram just like how I did when I first started out. It’s back to the basics for me once again, and I’ve always wanted this space to be a small, intimate place where we can talk without fear of judgement or persecution. I will also be updating this space on my journey back to more balanced living and my Real Food meal plans and ideas geared towards weight loss (portion controlled vs. abundant unrestricted eating until I recalibrate my tastebuds and reset my hunger signals) which I think might be helpful for some of you as well. I don’t recommend calorie counting but my meal plans for weight loss are not ‘detoxes’ or starvation diets. Instead, they incporporate a wide range of food designed to bring balance back to the body and are perfect for long term sustainable eating. There will be no veganism, vegetarianism, cutting out carbs, cutting out foodgroups or whatnot here, I’m afraid. I find it makes me too finnicky and unbalanced and it has (evidently!) caused me to undereat and binge and harm my body even more. I’m going back to the basics- wholegrain carbs, small amounts of dairy, lean meats and an abundance of fruits and vegetables. Since I’m a quest to love myself right once again, that includes lots of massages and happy, positive moments as well 😀 I wouldn’t be weighing myself to chart my progress but I will know when I reach my happy place because I’ve been there before and wow, I look forward to once again leaping out of bed refreshed and happy with myself and raring to take on life!

I understand that there are many here as well who are recovering from anorexia and are looking to gain weight. I’m not sure if what I’m doing is triggering but I really hope that it isn’t and if you do feel like it’s triggering I really want to encourage you to view both you and I as on the journey to reaching our happy place where we can live our most balanced, confident lives where food is just food and a tool to fuel our body and mind. I doubt a weight where you constantly worry about your health or food is a happy weight so if you need to gain, please continue and keep at it! If you need to lose, tone up or reach your happy weight, I hope this helps you as well.

I have no greater wish than to see all of you be happy, healthy and confident at your most happy place where you fear no food and you live balanced, inspiring, lives.

Let’s be like baby bear’s porridge- not too hot, not too cold, just right.

See you at our happy weight my beautifuls 🙂

With all my love and determination,
xxx

TNP interview- Sugar Not So Sweet

Hi guys, just thought I’d share what my full answers to the interview questions were. And thanks so much to Judith Tan from TNP for taking the time to interview me on them! I know the article was about cutting out processed sugar entirely but I do still have it on the rare occasion. If it happens to be in something I’m eating I’m not going to be too fussed about it!- Life is all about reveling in abundance and not worrying about restriction!


1. Why did you decide to cut processed sugar?

I
decided to cut out processed sugar because I was trying to get
healthier and find a way to curb my tendencies to mindlessly binge. At a
point of time in my life, I couldn’t understand why I was always so
hungry even after eating a full meal. Through a lot of research, I found
that processed sugar had more detrimental effects on the body than
dietary fat and read that an excessive intake of processed sugar caused
an imbalance in the blood sugar levels causing people to crave more
(sugary) food. I was also horrified to find out that high levels of
processed sugar is in everything. Nevermind that it’s in obvious choices
like soda, pastries and cookies but it’s even in ‘healthier’ options
like low fat yoghurt, milk and pasta sauce. Since processed sugar is
nothing but a nutrient-less quick energy source and I am not a marathon
runner, I decided that I didn’t need much of it in my life and began to
limit my intake of it.


2. When did this happen?

About a year ago.

3. Did it work to help make you a healthier person? In what way?

It
definitely did! For one, I had to learn how to read nutritional labels
and that opened the doors to general all round healthy eating. I learnt
that almost all packaged food contained some sort of harmful additive or
was just imbalanced in some way. They were either too high in salt,
sugar or fat and were engineered to keep consumers addicted to them.
Since processed sugar is in virtually everything, I started to add more
vegetables, fruit and lean meats to my diet to make up for all the
things I could no longer eat. I soon began to delight in a diet made up
of natural, nutritious whole foods. My skin started to glow and I
stopped binge eating.


4. At any point did you backslide?
Of
course! It wasn’t till I tried to get off processed sugar that I
realised just what a drug sugar is. In the beginning I would restrict
all products with sugar then cave and inhale 3 chocolate fudge cupcakes
in one go. Like all girls on a diet, I initially beat myself up on the
fact that I was not ‘sticking to it’ properly. Then I realised that if I
really wanted to do this for health I needed to make it a lifestyle
change and embrace freedom from processed sugar rather than miserably
restrict myself from it. Instead of feeling upset I ate something
sugary, I would now just eat more natural whole food like fruits and
vegetables to make up for it. Over time, I gradually lost my tastebuds
for unnaturally sweet and salty food. Now, more than a few mouthfuls of
chocolate fudge cake feels like an assault on the tastebuds so my body
naturally forces me to stop and I feel satisfied and happy with a few
bites rather than miserably craving more.

5. How then did you overcome the temptation since
everywhere we turn there seems to be a cake or cupcake or ice cream shop
popping up?
Eating healthier has
really change my tastebuds so I no longer crave sugar products. Drinking
carbonated sugary water now is literally a painful experience I do not
enjoy. I delight in water! I do still have the occasional sweet tooth
and will usually share a sweet treat with a friend or make my own sweet
treat with whole foods. Walking pass confectioneries is not a problem.
It’s often birthday parties and other social functions that are more
difficult to handle. It’s unbelievable how much we center a celebration
around sugar! At first I just kept silent and tried to go with the flow
and eat whatever everyone was eating. Then I realised that this was
helping neither myself nor my loved ones around me so i started to try
and encourage everyone else to eat better as well. At social functions I
bring non sugary tea and desserts with no processed sugar added. A
chocolate mousse made out of banana, avocado and coacoa powder is a
crowd favourite! I’ve discovered that people actually do want to be
healthier and are curious about how to do. Putting myself out there and
letting people see that I am reaping the benefits of such a lifestyle
encourages others to try it too (even though there was a lot of ribbing
and joking in the beginning! Isn’t it strange how there seems to be some
sort of glamourization of unhealthy eating?). Nowadays social functions
are not a problem as the people around me are very obliging and do try
to provide healthier options to cater to me. It makes me very happy to
see other people eating healthily as well!

6. How would you advice someone who wants to do the same?

First
off, understand that it’s not a short term diet nor is processed sugar
the no. 1 enemy. Food should never be separated into forbidden and non
forbidden categories. Fearing food and categorizing them can lead to a
disordered relationship with food. Instead of miserably restricting
yourself from it, embrace the fact that there is an abundance of
gorgeously beautiful and tasty food that nature provides! Start to add
more fruits, vegetables and meat into your diet instead and experience
the natural sweetness from a juicy ripe mango. Start to cut down first
on sodas, drink teas (sweetened with honey if you must) or water
flavoured with real fruits. Then educate yourself on which products have
high amounts of hidden sugar. Read nutritional labels. Cut down on
packaged food and learn to cook simple meals. Bring your lunch to work. .
Stay processed sugar free 80% of the time and enjoy the remaining 20%
of the time sharing a sugary treat with a friend if the feeling strikes.
Give yourself time, drink a lot of water and gradually, your taste buds
will soon be reset. Indulgence to you will be a juicy watermelon
instead of a tastebud assaulting coke! Good luck!

Getting Started 2:

Congratulations!

So you’ve made the decision to love
yourself and fuel your body right. You’ve got a plan and you’re all
fired up (don’t you love new beginnings 🙂 )  but… where do you start?

Here’s 10 things I recommend:


1. Clear out all the nutritionally empty food from your kitchen cabinets/ fridge.
Be
heartless. take a large trash bag and get rid of everything in your
cabinets and fridge that wouldn’t provide your body with the nutrition
it needs. This can be your large stash of potato chips, chocolate bars,
sweets. Keep the wholegrains, the clean proteins like eggs and meat and
fish, the vegetables and fruits. If it isn’t there, it’s much easier to
eat healthy.

2. Learn to read labels. 
There
are a million websites on the internet dedicated to teaching you to eat
well. The number one thing i really advise you to steer clear of is
sugar. When you are ready, you can read articles on the web about high
blood glucose levels and their contribution to obesity, heart disease,
diabetes etc. Understand that it’s not just white sugar alone but white
products such as white flour, bread, rice that all raise your blood
sugar levels without any sort of nutritional boost at all. Learn to read
labels to steer clear of any kind of High Fructose Corn Syrup or
chemical additives that end with ‘-ose’ like dextrose and maltose. Also,
if you can’t pronounce it on the ingredient list, it’s probably not
good for you. The best would be to eat food that don’t even come with a
label. Zucchinis, apples and oranges are eat as it is. No packaging, no
labels, just fresh wholesome food just as nature intended.

3. Make wise choices
Want
to eat Bak Kut Teh? sure! Laksa? Sure! Just eat a smaller portion or
make healthy swaps such as brown rice for your Bak Kut Teh instead of
the white rice. Swap sugary drinks for green tea and plain water or
naturally flavoured water just a lemon water etc. Always try to choose
wholegrains, fruits, vegetables, lean meats. You should ever feel deprived or starve yourself. This is not a diet. It is a healthy lifestyle for the rest of your life.

4. Learn to cook
The
only way you would be able to control what you eat is if you know what
is going into your food and only you can control that. No need for fancy
dishes. Learn to make omelettes, hardboiled eggs. learn to use the rice
cooker to make brown rice, learn to fry up vegetables. It’s as simple
as heating up a pan and watching the veggies get smaller and smaller in a
few seconds. No culinary degree required. Search the internet for
healthy recipes and healthy swaps and make healthier versions of your
favourite food.

5. Bring a lunchbox with you
In
line with learning how to cook, bringing a lunch box out with you helps
you to regulate what you eat. The food in Singapore, while
yummilicious, is really high in (bad) fats, salt and sugar. A meal at a
hawker centre can weigh in at almost 700 calories, of which is made up mostly of empty carbohydrates. (think meepok)

6. Learn to assess your meal in terms of nutritional content and composition
A
typical meal in Singapore is way too carb heavy. Take for instance my
favourite meepok. It is 50% simple carbohydrates (noodles), 40% un-useful fat
from the bakchor and 10% protein. (percentages are my own eyeballed estimates). This is great if you are going to do a
highly aerobic intense exercise after but if you are just a desk bound
student/ office worker, it’s just going to raise your blood sugar levels
and make you feel sleepy and drowsy post meal when your insulin crashes
after. If i eat meepok, i normally half the amount of noodles I eat,
add more meat etc to rebalance the composition of the meal. I try to
make every meal 40% complex carbs (vegetables, wholegrains etc), 40%
protein (eggs, meat, seafood, legumes) and 20% fat (olive oil, avocados,
coconut oil) It is important not to cut out any of the food groups and
terribly important to eat fat. if you want to lose fat, you HAVE to eat
GOOD FATS. i cannot stress this enough. Coconut is my favorite source of
fat though I love avocados as well. Steer clear away from the fat/
sodium in instant noodles or fried food and load up more on the good
kinds of fat from salmon, coconut, nuts and oils.

7. Drink water
Drink
lots of it. It’s really good for you and keeps you from eating
mindlessly when you are not really hungry. Your body sends you hunger
signals when you are really thirsty. So drink water first. and lots of
it, through the day.

8. Stay strong and believe in yourself. 
Only
you alone know what is good for your body. No diet book or plan or blog
can tell you what’s best for your body. There will be an overwhelming
amount of information out there in regard to what’s good for you. There
is the paleo lifestyles that advocates butter and bacon and cutting out
all carbs and legumes, there is the only carbs diet, the no fruits diet,
the lots of fruits diet, there are a million things out there and it
can get very scary but only you know what’s good for you. Experiment a
little. see howyour body performs. For myself, i cannot live without
carbs and while lots of people say the fructose in fruits is terrible, I
eat lots of fruits and wholegrains and lean protein. Do what works for
you, trust yourself. Also when you start eating healthily, everybody is
going to have something to say. They might give you well meaning advice,
like cut out ALL CARBS. Or they might pressure you to eat a bit of
chocolate and not be a spoilsport. Going to grandma’s house might be
tough because grandma is going to be heartbroken you no longer wolf down her
shrimp tempura like you once did. I have been asked on numerous
occassions “wah! why so healthy?!” when i pile my plate high with
fruits, yoghurt, wholegrains and eggs at a buffet table. Does nobody
else think it’s a bit funny that I shock people when I eat healthy but
nobody gets any comments when they don’t eat healthy? Shouldn’t it be
the other way round?! So stay strong, believe in yourself and understand
that sometimes a piece of chocolate is what your soul needs (or maybe not).


9.  Understand that it’s not “failure” when you eat a “forbidden” food.
There
is no such thing as a “forbidden food”. Stop categorizing food and
cutting out specific foods. Eat them if you want to, don’t eat them
because you don’t want to. And you don’t want to because there is so
much gorgeously unprocessed food out there for you though if you do want
to.. why not? Just make a mindful choice and enjoy whatever you choose
in a moderate portion

10. Reward yourself
Don’t’
reward yourself with food. you are not a pet. Indulge yourself with
some shopping, a massage, a movie, time with friends. Have fun with your
meals, Enjoy life.

Detox food? Nah- just what I eat on a daily basis :)

A lot of people have been asking me what I ate over the 4 days so I thought I’d do up a little post to share. I don’t have many pictures because I never thought that I’d be blogging about it but I’m a very happy asian instagrammer so I got pictures off my iphone and instagram etc to put together this post! Hope it helps! I wouldn’t call it a detox diet and I really hate the idea of a short term detox or diet because I feel that it doesn’t lead to a healthy sustainable lifestlye. Also, I can never fathom how anyone can feel happy regarding food as ‘safe’ or ‘unsafe’, ‘clean’ or ‘unclean’, ‘permissible’ or ‘impermissible’ just because some author said so. It’s just so disordered and restrictive 🙁 I want to view food and choose to eat something because I GENUINELY love it more for it’s nourishing qualities not because I’m trying to suppress my desire for something else. My advice is just choose real food- an abundance of colourful fruits and veg, food that grows from the ground, walks on earth, swims in the sea and drink lots of water, take some walks with loved ones and you will be good to go!

Healthy living is the everyday not just a 2 week fast and then binge eating junk again. But I know it works for some people who need a tastebud reset and stuff like that, so- whatever floats your boat! :). However, I really rather you stop telling yourself you will eat better and cleaner ‘tomorrow’ or ‘monday’ or sometime in the future. Life is NOW. Make the commitment to health now. You can eat one less cookie NOW. You don’t need to binge now and start on a Monday. Life does not always begin on a clean slate. (Advice I wished I listened to when I was 18 :/)

Anyway!

This is roughly what I ate from Sunday to Thursday after the horrendous bloating. Please note that eating like that everyday will yield you great results but if you have true belly fat to lose, it’s definitely not going to take just 4 days! Weight that is lost slowly wouldn’t be put on so fast as well. So eat right and lose weight slowly and healthily! Don’t rush perfection! (Hehhheh)

I don’t have a lot of pictures but here’s roughly how it went:

I always start the day off with warm lemon water when I have lemons in the house or I remember to buy them. I feel it’s just so cleansing and really resets your tastebuds so you don’t crave sweet things. Water is hard to drink in the morning for some people as they don’t like the feeling of their stomach expanding. But I drink a lot of water everyday so it’s fine for me 🙂

Due to the renovations, I had no kitchen equipment. I had no sieve or anything with which to wash my quinoa so I laboriously washed it in this rubbishy thing I found in some cupboard that hadn’t be taped up and boxed away. It was so small and could wash so little but I was so grateful for it. *Seriously, the renovation taught me to appreciate a lot!) I also still had an oven so I baked the mushrooms and cheese.

The picture you see in the bottom right hand corner is my breakfast and take away lunch. –
One green smoothie- a blend of frozen banana, spinach, oatbran, almond milk, chia seeds for a power packed quick and easy yummy breakfast on the go (seriously, blending has changed my life- and my boyfriend’s! haha)
A lunch box consisting of- salmon spiced with chili flakes, baby portobello and cheese, broccoli and quinoa. I cooked the quinoa in low sodium chicken broth and the cheese on the mushroom is salty as well. Other than that, everything was cooked without oil or salt and so was a great balance of flavours.

If you are interested- this is how you can cook quinoa and how it looks like. I used a 3 mix quinoa.

It wasn’t easy eating my lunch while everyone else had Indian food though! I happen to really love Indian food haha 🙂 But I wanted even more this time to nourish my body with fibre and nutrients I knew it had been missing out for a week.

Posted this on instagram that day! Haha! #storyofmylife indeed. Most people often ask me how I deal with being anti social if I bring my own food. WHY MUST BE ANTI SOCIAL?? You can still eat your food with them! The conversation around that table wasn’t any less or I didn’t feel bad or anything. Don’t worry, nobody is really judging you except yourself 🙂 At most, you’ll get some good natured jibes and curious looks as you open your lunch box. haha Lots of people also ask how I can eat my ‘plain’ food while they eat such good rich food and I must admit, I used to love such rich food but honestly, I don’t find them indulgent these days anymore. My tastebuds have changed so much that eating a lot of such food is honestly quite torturous so I really don’t feel left out eating my own food. This is from a girl who used to eat 3 fast food meals a day! Everyone has hope! 🙂

As for the rest of the week, I’m sorry I really don’t have many other pictures but I would eat meals from cedele, and my family had a meal out at a czechar place. I would just go along and eat but just a smaller portion of rice and veg and beancurd and the pork ribs I took only 1. I’m used to a lot of food though because most of the food I eat take up a lot of space in my tummy but are not calorie dense so when I eat too little, I cannot sleep! To curb it, I drank my green smoothie blend to up the fibre for the day when I felt like I was not getting enough nutrients. I also continued to bring out a lunch box for lunch and/or dinner. OH OH! and if you go to the hawker centre with friends and you don’t want to feel left out when getting a drink- oolong tea is my drink of choice other than water because it has zero sugar in it. Zero calories! Tea by itself has no calories and a whole host of benefits so when you drink canned tea like the pokka green tea, you’re basically just drinking a lot of sugar!

Some homecooked wholemeal pasta, green juice, (I try to stay away from the very sweet pure fruit variety) and no sugar soya bean are a couple of my favourite drinks aside from water (my ultimate favourite)

Fortune Centre at Bugis is a great place to find low salt, low oil food in Singapore 🙂 Slightly higher than hawker prices but not very wallet busting as well 🙂 I was lucky to be around that area that day.

If you noticed, these food are not low in calories but they are big on nutrition. I can eat 1500- 2000 calories of good nutrition vs 800 calories of poor nutrition (chips, fried rice etc) and feel better than the low caloried diet. Seriously, if you are on a restricted low caloried diet, come off it now- it will only destroy your metabolism.

I can’t just do a small salad a day to detox because they are honestly too little for me and I will crave and binge (especially at night :/). However, only veg and fruits can give you a reasonable amt of nutrients so I always make sure to blend up a nutritious and filling veg smoothie drink in the morning (unpictured because it’s such a habit) It was all I could do as my kitchen was still unavailable and I only had a blender to work with. As my taste buds resettled and my appetite got smaller (gosh, hawker food makes you crave so badly), my stomach shrank back to normal and my facial glow came back as well.I also drank lots of water and ended the night with a happy calming blend of hot goodness 🙂

The only place that I felt marketed itself as ‘healthy’ but I felt was not healthy at all was surprisingly, Soup Spoon. This is of course, my own humble opinion. But would you please look at the sad sad state of that wrap? And what’s with the paltry salad leaves? 🙁 The pumpkin soup was also surprisingly salty (?!) I am sorry to say but while I feel that the concept of the place is really good and while I love that the chef creates it herself and offers Singaporeans fresh healthy options, this is one place I would not be going back soon again. Food cannot just be ‘healthy’. It has to be nourishing for both the body and the soul. Real food should make you feel alive and happy and ready to take on the world. A couple of wet leaves and a dried out falafel in an obviously reheated- by- microwave- wrap does not qualify on my list as ‘nourishing’ no matter how ‘healthy’ it might be.

Alright, so this is what I ate for the 4 days and actually, what I usually eat. Basically thick oatbran vegetable smoothies in the morning for a nutrient punch, then a homemade lunchbox for lunch, snacks will be fruit or leftover from my lunchbox and dinner was probably cedele or some other healthy eating place. It was such a relief for my tastebuds honestly. I instagram what I eat on a daily basis but I’ll try to collate it during the weekend for people who don’t have instagram. Really hope this shows you that healthy eating is not about restriction and eating as little as possible. Real food, eating a wide variety, lots of produce, some meat, reasonable portions, less salt, less oil and time spent doing worthy things in life, getting enough rest, drinking enough water, – it’s a whole sustainable package!

Keep healthy and loving!

Grace 🙂

10 Healthy Living Resolutions for 2014

Hi everyone!!!

It’s New Year’s Eve! How brilliant is that?? I’m so excited for 2014 and I hope that you are too!

As the year wraps to a close, I thought I’d share a couple of new year resolutions! So here are 10 healthy Living resolutions for 2014 you might want to consider!

1. Redefine Health. 

Health to most people now seems to be just centered around healthy eating and regular exercise but health, as I’ve come to know, is really so much more that that. Health is first and foremost, in the mind. A life characterized by the fear of food, or constantly counting calories or protein percentages and whatnot, of lying in bed desperately coveting a model’s body, of planning and scheduling every single morsel that passes through your lips and feeling like a failure each time you fail to keep to that self imposed perfection- is not health. You may be eating really healthily, you may look like a million bucks, you may not be fat, you may be at the gym at the stroke of 6 every morning, people may think you are healthy, look up to you in awe and admiration but that’s not health. Health is not debilitating obsessive behaviors. True health is mental freedom from all of these fears and worry that you don’t look like an airbrushed model or that you aren’t fueling yourself on 100% nutrition from every bit of food that you eat. Health is not in bulging muscles or a modelesque body or a life lived in fear and restriction. Health is a personal awareness that the food you eat is nourishment for a body that will help you to live life to the fullest in gratitude and to love those around you.

2. Personalise Health

Health means different things to every one. Maybe you feel that the best for you is a vegan diet. Perhaps you feel that paleo is the way to go. Whatever it is, take it, experiment with it and don’t be afraid to modify it. Your body is unique and entirely yours. Only you know everything about it and how certain food makes you feel. How would the best selling author of some diet book know what works best for your body? The basics of healthy living is easy- more real food, more water, more movement.

3. Stop living in restriction

Perhaps you always tell yourself ‘no’. I can’t do this, I can’t eat that, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t. If you are trying to break a sugar habit, why not remove the adam’s apple of temptation and tell yourself what you CAN. You CAN eat a beautifully buttered brioche bread (or dark rye!) with smoked salmon and scrambled eggs instead of the pack of chips because mhmmm, they taste so much better. You CAN eat a warm comforting bowl of oatmeal stirred with sweet bananas topped with silvered almonds instead of plain nutella and bread for breakfast. It’s not that you can’t eat the chips or you can’t eat carbs or you can’t eat a million and one things you always tell yourself you can’t- you can, if you wanted to (and yes, you can!) But life is beautiful and filled with so much good stuff. The chips will always be in the supermarket beckoning you in glossy packaging from the shelves. Why not nourish yourself with an indulgent grilled fish and salad for lunch instead?


4. Invest in the eternal not the external. 
What are things that will still be around when you pass away? Your family maybe- through your children? What would you like to be remembered post posthumously for when all is said and done and you are no longer around? I don’t know what you might want to leave behind when you pass on but I’ll tell you what you can’t leave behind- your body. All the time you spend worrying about your imperfect jaw line, your nose bridge that isn’t high enough, the tummy flab that wouldn’t go away after 2 kids, the money used to rectify all of these- what would come out of investing your entire life on your body? All the time and effort that you invested into creating an adonis body of art would be for nothing. Suffering through starving yourself to fit a social ideal- nothing. Worrying day and night about what to eat, what to wear, how someone thinks about your body- nothing. One day, your body will be gone, buried six feet deep for decomposers to work on or cremated into little unrecognizable shards of bone but what you CAN live behind- WOW! You could leave behind children who are a reflection of what you once were- responsible, respectful, a heart for social change perhaps. You could teach your children (daughters) to believe in themselves, live healthy, live large, break the cycles of fat talking about physical stereotypes that have hurt and discriminated for generations. You could leave behind social institutions built to feed the poor or empower the downtrodden in society for generations to come. You could leave behind the budding seeds of new inventions for future generations to work on and make life easier for all. Teach, empower, invest your time and energies into things that would last beyond you and your years. At the very least, you could leave behind the memory that you were more than just a pretty body. This doesn’t mean you don’t bother about your health and work yourself to do the bone or eat drink and be merry excessively. Nourish your body for the NOW. Take care of it wisely, not obsessively so that it is strong enough to enable you to invest in the eternal.


5. Stop the Fat Talking.

6. Be brave, empower others

It is all too easy to be swept up in the current of popular opinion. To stand out there and bring your lunch to work perhaps, to refuse another slice of cake, to not take part in fat talking as a social bonding tool, to bring up the topic of healthier eating- it all takes a lot of bravery especially when you don’t look like a fitness model (screw society and its singular definition of good health). You WILL be open to jibes. People will mock you. When you eat healthily, they will taunt you. When you don’t, they will jeer you (“I thought you very health conscious one?”). But secretly, deep down inside, everyone wants to be nourished even if they declare with much swag that they would rather DIE than eat a salad for dinner. I’ve lived past all the jeering and the taunts (mostly lighthearted and goodnatured) and discovered that if you just keep being true to yourself, one day it’ll all be okay. People will start asking you for advice to eat healthier, or to live better. When you don’t cave in to social pressure and choose instead to eat the healthier option (seriously, what is with this glamorization of unhealthy eating. Is it some YOLO thing I’m missing out?), you are empowering someone else out there to muster up the courage to do likewise as well next time. When you make healthy eating a natural conversation topic, you empower others to speak up with their doubts, fears and insecurities as well. When you are brave enough to eat out of a lunchbox at the office, you empower others to do the same as well. Don’t bother criticizing what you hate in life. Just be brave and empower others such that the good you believe in becomes the norm instead.


7. Cut out the diet mentality
When you are on a diet, you fail to see food/fruits as it is- whole,
real, natural and bursting with nourishing vitamins and minerals.
Instead, everything is judged by the ‘allowed’ and ‘disallowed’ list that somebody wrote up.
It doesn’t matter anymore whether the food infront of you is a banana
or a potato chip. You eat it and your mind races the same way, your
heart palpitates and you are overcome by an overwhelming guilt for
having done something you shouldn’t. What happens then after the week is up or the month? Who’s going to write up your next diet plan? Healthy living is a lifestyle change, not a 2 week thing.

8. Stop judging other based on appearance. 
If you stop fat talking about judging your appearance, it’ll help you stop judging others as well. To cut it short- you don’t know A THING about other people. You cannot tell EVERYTHING about a person’s health based on how he or she looks. You cannot tell if the person is struggling with an eating disorder, or a thyroid condition. You don’t know if he/spent the day writing up yet another diet plan and the nights crying to sleep locked up in a mental prison of despair and fear. BODY SIZE TELLS YOU NOTHING. You can never know everything about the person but you do know yourself. Just take care of yourself and leave others to take care of them as well. Offer advice if needed but never from a moral high horse. Everybody is a work in progress at different stages in life with different circumstances to battle with. I really want to build up a society where the body means nothing but if you really must look I want you to look at the person and think of not of the lack of perfection so far from the standard of an airbrushed model but to just look at the twinkle in a person’s eye, the funny way the person throws back her head to laugh, the soft roundedness of tummy indicating the joy of several good meals shared in the company of loved ones. The tiny muscles a physical manifestation of a determination to be better than the day before.

9. Stop measuring your self worth by numbers
The scale- throw it away. Now. ’nuff said. You are defined by how much you can love those around you, how the strength of your mind inspires others, your determination, your resolve, everything else but those damn numbers on a machine you stand on every morning.

10. Live simply, passionately and joyfully/ It’s okay to be a cogwheel in a great and purposeful plan.
Never mind about the car or the condo or the whatever. Life is not in building up an empire for yourself now but it’s in what you would leave behind for the future. Live simply, live happy. DO you really want to spend another evening catching up with old friends talking yet once again about how much your investments have made? Or what’s the best bonds to buy? Does catching up with old friends seem like a prideful discussion on who has made the most money or come the furthest in life? How about sharing about your passion instead? Or your hobbies? (see: Be brave and empower others) My generation especially, the terribly privileged one has been brought up to believe that we can achieved (somewhere a long the lines, it’s turned into we MUST achieve) we are the university grads, the white collar workers but somehow we’ve forgotten that it’s okay to be part of a team to build a life for future generations to come. We are so obsessed with the fact that we must succeed, make a name for ourselves that we no longer believe in working as a team in causes worth working for. It is OKAY to not get to the top of the working world. It is OKAY to never have your name written down in history books. As long as you go to work and do your best, with the all the passion you have, with much sincere joy, your contribution will go a long way as well. Live simply, acknowledge that you are planting seeds for trees you would never get to enjoy the shade of and take care of the earth you are in now. Your children will inherit whatever you are careful with now.

Okay! That’s my 10 for this year! I didn’t write any about the usual drink water, sleep more etc etc etc because I’m sure everybody knows that already. Those are all just steps to truly live a healthy and fulfilling life! What’s more important is a positive mindset so here’s wishing you a healthy and happy 2014! May it be a year of love for you! 🙂

Ending off with 2 pictures I really like 🙂

Go Live life!

Lots of love and all of God’s blessings,
Grace 🙂

Effects of Eating Out in SIngapore Hawker Centres

If you have been following me on instagram, you would have read how I whinged and whined the whole way through several weeks back about my house undergoing renovations and how I had no kitchen to cook in or do anything whatsoever.

Ending 2013 with my house renovated and undergoing the renovation has got to be, singlehandedly, the most gratitude inducing activity of the year for me. I never realised how privileged I was to have a place to call home that was neat and clean and liveable.

My beautiful home was suddenly transformed into a jungle of plastic wrapping and newspapers strewn everywhere. The workers came to hack away an entire roomful of built in shelving (my precious books!) whilst I stayed hidden in the only room that wasn’t scheduled to be renovated.

But the renovation isn’t the point of this post- the point of this post is to share what happened during the long weeks that the common areas of the house were under renovation. Because I had no access to the kitchen, I had no choice but to sustain myself on non- homecooked food. And to be honest, I was REALLY GLEEFUL- No need to cook! No need to wash up! I love Singaporean food! Hokkien Mee, Char Kway Teow, come to momma! 😀

So for a week, I ate out. It started innocently enough.. I think for my first meal I had kaya toast and milo (standard kopitiam breakfast food, aye?), lunch.. yong tau foo and dinner perhaps a soup or caifan. And so it went on the next day, and the next and the next for a week.

At the end of the week I was feeling the worst I had felt in a long long time. I was constantly thirsty and lethargic. My skin was dry and unsupple and the usual glow and redness (My boyfriend likes to call me the hale and hearty farmer’s wife -.-) I had in my cheeks had faded. My stomach felt funny and I was constantly craving for something sweet or salty or stronger tasting food. By the end of the week, the yong tau foo no longer satisfied me and I had turned to choosing dishes that were heavily seasoned or fried to satisfy my tastebuds.

** I really have to emphasize how addictive salt and sugar and processed foods are. I’m generally a very clean eater with not much of a sweet tooth- save for an occasional bite here and there- and I pack most of my food or cook meals at home using a variety of spices rather than salt and sugar so my tastebuds tend to favour blander tastes. But one day into eating hawker food and I was constantly craving for heavier tastes. I think I started the day eating my usual yong tau foo (mostly veg and beancurd) but by nightfall, I was sloshing my veg in a ton of chilli sauce and eyeing the duck rice for lunch the next day.

But what really shocked me on my one week hawker centre diet was the way my stomach looked and felt. Please note that I never thought I would ever be the kind of person to show a picture of my tummy flab to the whole wide world but the sight shocked me so much that I felt that I just had to share it.

THIS- the flab bulging over my waistline, was the result of a paltry 7 days of eating hawker centre food for every meal. And I didn’t even eat chicken rice or anything like that in the 7 days. In fact, I probably ate yong tau foo quite a number of times! I don’t think it is really a sudden explosion of fat cells in my belly but it certainly is A LOT OF stomach bloating and water retention and whatnot from all the salt and oil found in hawker centre food. I was horrified because I didn’t think that eating outside food would be so detrimental for me (or you). Truth be told, I don’t actually eat out very often as eversince embarking on a healthier eating regime, I mostly pack my own lunchbox to work but I never imagined that just one week on such food would have such damaging effects both psychologically and physiologically. A large expanding waistline indicates a higher propensity for heart disease and other preventable illnesses and I certainly had a rapidly expanding waistline after just one week of hawker centre food!

How is everyone surviving?! I am sure that there are hundreds and thousands of people who eat out everyday in Singapore and who possibly eat out all 3 meals as well. AM I the lone Singaporean who hasn’t adapted to the highly salted and oily food in Singapore?!

You know how as men and women age their limbs are still quite slim but their tummy rounds out? The ahpeh at the hawker centre might rub his belly meaningfully and say rather endearingly that that is his fortune ball with a wide grin on his face but there is nothing prosperous about that. I am almost certain that more than half of the Singaporean population are carrying around with them little salt babies.

Are you one of them?

Do you eat at a hawker centre for lunch and feel really sleepy and lethargic after? Do you need a sweet ‘pick me up’ and coffee in the morning or in the late afternoon? Are you generally quite slim with an acceptable BMI but you have a flabby belly that no amount of exercise seems to shift?

It’s not the exercise you should be worried about, it’s the stuff you are eating for lunch at the hawker centre.

I am telling you, point blank, that there is NOTHING HEALTHY to be found in a Singapore Hawker Centre. It is virtually impossible to eat clean in there. EVERYTHING is super high in salt and/or oil and seriously, other than the yong tau foo stall and the caifan stall, where are the vegetables (that are not dripping in oil?!)? I guess it’s okay if you eat at the hawker centre once a day but if you are eating almost all your meals out, I really implore you to start modifying your hawker food choices or bringing your own lunch to work.

The people I’m most concerned about aren’t the people who will be reading this. I am most concerned about my (and your!) parents first of all, and all their peers. Especially with their kids growing up and no one returning home for dinner, many middle aged parents would rather save the time and effort and eat at the hawker centre for dinner instead. Take my dad for example, he has lunch, teabreak and dinner all outside. Naturally, he wouldn’t be eating at KFC or Macdonalds or anything like that but that wouldn’t matter because somehow, I am guessing that some food at the hawker centre can rival fast food offerings in terms of salt and calorie count. We think that hypertension and high cholesterol are part and parcel of growing up but it isn’t! It’s even worse now that many parents have no time to cook for their young children and more young children are being diagnosed with high blood pressure and high cholesterol!

If you need more convincing, here is an infograph on hawker food in general:

Check out the salt and fat content in ‘healthier’ hawker food!

It was only during this week that I realised the best way to eat Yong Tau Foo and to make it TRULY the healthiest thing you can eat at a hawker centre is to pick the veg options and the egg and mushrooms and everything as unprocessed as possible, and ask the store owner to cook your food in plain boiling water. Ask for your yong tau foo dry with NO SOUP and eat your yong tau foo as a ‘salad’. You would find that even by doing so, the salt used to marinate the yong tau foo items would leech out by the end of the meal and still make whatever plain water you had in your bowl super salty.

(However, eating like this everyday is super sad. So I highly recommend just bringing your own super nutritious, dangerous- visceral- fat- busting lunch to work instead)

I was so down with the blahs after all the hawker food that I resolved to get right back on track. I just went back to eating like I usually do- no diets or detoxes! Healthy for LIFE, not for 1 week! You simply can’t live life to the fullest without a healthy body. Kitchen or no kitchen, I was determined to make (most of) my meals at home even if I had to wash my quinoa with water sprouting out of a spout in the wall because I had no tap. Good news though! The body is highly adaptable and 4 days is enough to have you feeling much better again!

Just cutting out sugar, reducing the hawker meals to special outings with family and friends and MAKING YOUR OWN FOOD will help you get rid of the lethargy and have your skin glowing like it should once again!

Here is me just 4 days off 100% hawker food. I still had chocolate and hawker meals with my family but I also packed most of my lunches or when I couldn’t, I invested in my health and chose to pay more to eat at cedele or any other healthier eating place I could find. It really is expensive though so I really encourage you to cook at home instead.

/EDIT: I’ve had some comments asking me if it’s true that this photo was taken just 4 days after the first one. Yes it was! But I have to emphasize that I looked roughly the same as the ‘after’ photo BEFORE the one week on hawker food. The bloated photo above was to show just how much bloating can occur FOR ME due to the high salt and oil diet I’m totally not used to. If youa re used to such levels in your diet, you probably would not be so affected. And if you have not really paid much attention to what you’ve been eating generally, then 4 days certainly would not be enough time for you to get rid of true BELLY FAT. However, 4 days certainly is enough time to get rid of any water retention or bloating caused by high sodium intake! 🙂 I am also not asking you to restrict yourself from hawker food ever again but to champion homecooking instead. Eat out if you must of course, but there is much to benefit from simple homecooking! 🙂 Hope this clears up any doubts! Comment or email me if anything else occurs to you! 🙂

*(I’m sorry I totally sold myself out and put a before and after picture here to get your attention. While I do want you to know how great a real food, low salt, low oil diet can be for you, I want you to choose healthier options for health’s sake and not to just obsessively focus on trimming the body. I do promise however, that this will be the last before and after photo you’ll ever find on this website because I want this to be a place you can focus on what’s really important rather than only on what can be seen)

I think this one week has really cemented what I want to do for 2014. I
really really want to encourage the people around me to start bringing
their own lunch to work or choosing healthier options. If it’s possible,
I would really like to campaign for hawker centres to cut down on all
the salt and oil that they use as well but everything would be for
naught of course, if the general population isn’t keen on healthier
living. If I can’t, then at least I can encourage those around me to be a little more mindful about their health! I also want to build up this place as a resource for quick and easy lunchbox ideas. There are other things I would like to do as well but I guess I’ll think about them and share them with you guys at the end of the year maybe? 🙂 What would you guys like to do or see here in the coming new year? 🙂

Anyhow, since 2014 is just 2 days away, why don’t you make the decision to better nourish and cherish the body you have? Join the giveaway I’m hosting ($50 world of sports vouchers to motivate you to lead a healthier lifestyle!) or just resolve to make 2014 a year you love yourself and those around you a little more! 🙂

With much love,
grace 🙂