I'm Such A Loser

One of the most important driving force for personal development is actually your willpower, your mind. Conversely, your greatest pitfall is the same too - your mind.

If you keep thinking you're fat (even if you really aren't), you are going to do destructive things to your body, like missing meals, eating very little, or to induce purging after eating. This usually happens in women.

As mentioned before in this blog, as well as in other health and fitness blogs, missing meals is really a BAD thing to do. Even if you're losing weight, you should not skip any meals. Your body has built-in mechanisms to trigger you to do something. You become thirsty when your body needs water. You get hungry when the body needs food. Depriving yourself of these when your body tells you it needs those, just makes the body go into survival mode.

While in survival mode the body does burn fat, but once you get to the weight you want, and start eating again, the food you eat goes right back into your fat stores - you are back to square one.

You have to have the right frame of mind, not just for this, but for everything else. Fearing to see your weight doesn't help you lose weight. It just gives you a false sense of relief, for want of a better word, that you aren't "fat" yet. Without having a baseline, you have nothing to work towards. Without regular weigh-ins, you'll never know if you're on the right track on losing weight.

Having a driving force, your motivation, helps you succeed. You will surely have come across numerous stories when reading about people who have been successful at losing weight the right way - they had motivation. Their mindset was right. They had a goal. They worked towards the goal, and if they ever strayed from the goal, they took corrective actions.

By not wanting to look at the numbers on the weighing scales, you are just fooling yourself.

Having a defeatist attitude, like "What's the use? It'll never happen" is the most destructive thought you can ever have. It doesn't necessarily have to do with losing weight, but doing anything. Business, weight loss, it's all the same. Your mindset is very important.

The moment you tell yourself, "I can do it", you're already halfway there. The other half, is of course, the action you need to take to achieve the results. Start eating healthy (not "go on a diet"). Start working out - run, swim, do weights.

And ladies, working out with weights won't "bulk you up". Don't keep having the misconception of having "unsightly muscles" when you touch weights. In fact I'll tell you something interesting, something you probably never thought of.

When you carry your infant child, you're already "carrying weights". The baby will weigh something like 2kg or so at birth, and steadily grow heavier as the year goes on. In this couple of years that you've been carrying him/her (before he/she can walk), you've been carrying "weights". Do you see "muscles" on you?

Similarly, when you do train with weights, train with light ones. They are there to tone your body when you do lose the fats. By toning, I mean to give your underlying muscles (ie those that were covered by fats) definition. You work them so they are defined and not flabby-looking.

Also, by eating healthy, you don't even need to "eat less" to lose weight. More often than not, you can eat your normal portions of HEALTHY food and still lose weight (instead of junk food like potato chips, tortillas etc). "Going on a diet" for ladies usually means "eat less, skip meals", which I have explained before, is actually BAD for you.

Labels: dieting, mindset, weight loss

Image by galant via FlickrOnce again, I come here and say the same thing - don't "go on a diet", especially not a "eat less" one. I've already covered why not, so just search for my previous entries for "eat less" and you should get a couple of posts on it.

I came across this website here, called Diet Recipes. I thought it's great because on every recipe that it presents to you, it tells you the calorie value of the recipe. Hence, if you're on a "eat less" diet, this site with its mouth-watering pictures and calorie-calculated recipes, should be great for you.


Personally I'm on a "eat more" diet myself, and I wish I found a website where it tells me that. No, pigging out at MacDonalds and so on doesn't really qualify, ok?

Labels: diet, dieting, healthy diet

We Asians, especially Chinese, are at a disadvantage when it comes to health and healthy diet. We eat mainly RICE, which is basically Carbohydrates. The meat and veggies are mainly "side dishes" to go with the rice. So that means, lotta carbs, very little "other stuff".

In the grand scheme of things, that's not good. For losing weight, you need to cut down on carbs, because unused carbs get turned into fats (if I remember what I learnt back in 1998 is still correct). For gaining muscle, you need protein (meat, egg whites etc), not carbs.

So, when we cut down on carbs, we need "fillers"... and that either means more meat or more eggs. Somehow I don't think we'll feel "full" if we ate only eggs.

The past couple of days I have been really cutting way down on rice/noodles. And, since I have been working to muscle failure, I eat alot of eggs and meat. For some strange reason, I don't feel "hungry" per se. It's probably because I ate enough so that the body doesn't trigger any "craving" mechanisms to tell me that I lack something.

To eat like the ang mos, which I think is actually more ideal if building muscles, is gonna be expensive. Then I'd be eating western food most of the time. Yeah well, at least, eat like the ang mos at home. If you eat Western outside, you get all the unhealthy mayonnaise, salad dressings etc. If I cook at home, at least I can cook the meat plain (no oil needed), and the veggies are simply boiled. No extra useless calories.

In any case, my body is aching today, so I didn't even do the circuit training workouts. Guess my original plan has a couple of flaws :p I forgot to take into account bodyaches after the weekend intensive training...

Labels: diet, dieting, eating, workout

Is cooking without using oil even possible?

Yup, it is. I know many people would disagree, saying that using oil enhances flavour etc.

We go back to my analogy of ancient man. When we first discovered fire, we cooked our food by roasting them over an open fire. When you go camping even today, do you cook your fish that you caught in the river in oil?

Righto, you don't (you don't, right?). Well if you actually bring cooking oil out camping, I have nothing to say except "dot dot dot dot" (local Singaporean slang for "speechless").

Nowadays, cooking pans, woks and so on come with non-stick coating. If you don't scrimp and buy only cheap ones, the non-stick pan you buy today can last you for YEARS. Spend a little more, it'll last long and you'll "earn" back the cost by not having to buy a new "non-stick" pan every couple of years.

Ok why do I say cooking without cooking oil is possible? Well that's because the purpose of cooking oil is to help spread the heat from the fire out quicker and more evenly, so that all parts of the food item is cooked. Also, it helps by not letting the food item stick to the pan during cooking, and therefore you avoid charring the food. Along the way, manufacturers decided to "value-add" to the basic oil, and make food that is cooked with certain brands "tastier".

Pans nowadays are scientifically researched and engineered (if you buy the good brands), and they already do the job of whatever the oil used to do.

I cook without oil, and it's healthier. Although you need oil in your diet, and fats too, those from cooking oil could be the "excess" ones you're trying to get rid of.

Cutting cooking oil out of the equation is yet another simple and small change you can make to your current lifestyle without upsetting it too much to make you hate "dieting" :)

Labels: diet, dieting, healthy diet

Yep, most people I know dread the word "diet".

I remember what I read somewhere, a long time ago - "Whatever tastes good, is bad for you!". To some extent, it's true.

Let me clarify. First, we harken back to the ancient days of early prehistoric Man. Back then we had no processed food, no sweets, no manufactured food items. Everything Man ate was only available in nature. In some cases, Man's food fought back. Try eating a live chicken, or a pig :) You can bet the fella will struggle like hell...

So in this scenario, "whatever tastes good is bad for you" is usually not true. Fruits that aren't ripe taste awful. Man was gifted with colour vision for the purpose of telling which fruits were ripe, and which weren't. Poisonous plants generally don't taste good. The taste tells early Man to stop eating it, and eat something else that tastes good.

Plants propogate themselves by producing seeds. In order to sow the seeds further away than a few feet, plants produce fruits which have the seeds inside them. That will entice animals to eat the fruit and then perhaps, discard the seed(s) some distance away.

So, back in prehistoric times, Man only had frutis, plants, and hunted animals for meat. They had no seasonings, no mustard, no mayonaise, etc. They don't even cook their meat with cooking oil - just roast 'em over an open fire.

Fast forward 3 million years later. Here we are today. We have sweets, candies, cakes etc etc ... things that "taste good". When we dine, we have to have a generous helping of condiments, like salt, pepper, mustard and so on. All these are MANUFACTURED. When humans manufacture things, the intent is to SELL the products. To sell food products, they must TASTE GOOD. In this day and age, tasting good involves adding chemicals (which generally aren't good for the body) into the product, to make it taste good. If it tastes good, it sells. Companies don't really care about the health of the consumers in general.

So, whatever tastes good, generally is bad for you. That is true for the situation we have today in the modern society.

My point?

My point being, we need to start eating food without all the processed junk again. Stop using chilli, pepper and so on. If you need to use salt, use it sparingly. Cook your meat without using oil. Roast it over an open flame like our ancestors did. Or, what I do is to dump the meat into the toaster/microwave and cook it... yes, just like that, no oil, no marinating.

How does it taste? Same as always. The thing about me is, I normally don't use condiments with my meals. I'm strange I know. I get teased about being "scared of chilli" cos I normally don't put chilli on anything I eat, unlike all my typical Singaporean friends who apply gobs of it on their food. Even when I eat burgers, and they ask me "Chilli or ketchup?", my reply is always "nothing, thanks". Yup, I eat french fries WITHOUT chilli or ketchup! You need to try it yourself.

So when I "roast the meat over an open flame", the meat tasted almost the same as when it's cooked in oil, except minus all the unhealthy oil.

To many people, "dieting" means eating less, and the food tastes bland. The reason is - you're all too dependent on condiments. Give 'em up. It's the first step you can take to a healthy diet.

Disclaimer - I am not a nutritionist. I am not a doctor. Whatever I'm writing here is knowledge I learnt from various sources. Use of information presented here is at your own risk.

Labels: dieting, food, healthy diet