Today’s post will be from an awesome bro – Andrik Sim: “Lifestyle eating and exercising“. Enjoy.
This is about living your life, eating what you want, and exercise. This is not about creating a 3-month weight losing program and reverting back to your original eating habits at the end. It is about adjusting your eating habits and exercise into your lifestyle so that everything flows in harmony.
A lot of “eating healthy” today draws up a painful, agonizing image for people where they run on strictly vegetables, plain yoghurt, cottage cheese, etc-a total horror show. Most people trying to lose weight today find it difficult, painful and all in all cutting off what they like-food. They think they have to starve. But to me, that’s not living your life, and with a life like that, i wouldn’t be able to enjoy the benefits gained from the exercises. I might even stop after awhile. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
Eating healthy doesn’t mean starving, not at all. And it doesn’t mean cutting your meals into a hamster diet. I don’t strive to be perfect in my eating habits, and i don’t expect you to, besides, there’s no point. I love to cook and bake, and baking deals with butter, and butter = fats. But that’s okay for me, because when i exercise, i do it twice harder, and i enjoy that. I like to go out and eat like crazy, i have a sweet tooth, especially for the molten chocolate lava cake at Chilli’s. But in my usual meals, i keep it simple and go for vegetables, chicken/fish/egg with my breakfast made up of grapes and apples. And i’ve lost significant weight over the year. There’s something bigger than eating healthy just because it makes you lose weight. And if you’ve paid attention to your body, you’d know what i mean. What i eat isn’t so much about losing weight, it’s how i felt after i ate. When i ate healthy, i felt light, fast, clear, focused and lots of energy. And naturally you would be in good health, though some of you would hate not getting MCs…but thats the price to pay.
Your present diet may be giving you plenty of ‘energy’, but it may also be affecting your mood levels and lower your level of awareness. Some of you prefer eating junk food because “plain” food tastes blend. But thats because most of our tongues are messed up by the extra-sharp-flavour-msg added into today’s food, and its been killing our sensitivity to taste. But once you start eating healthy food for awhile, your tongue starts to adapt back and starts to really tastes the “blend” flavors again-which actually tastes really good and refreshing. Time to give your tongue a break.
Find out the difference between how you feel when you have a bowl of assorted fruits like honeydew, grapes, apples, pears, sliced mangoes and papayas, as compared to how you feel after eating Macdonald fries. And make your choice.
Eating healthy is not so much being anal about every meal, but is a very concious choice of eradicating most food like chips, fries(even though i don’t consider Seaweed fries from macdonalds to be fries..BECAUSE ITS SO GOOD), fast foods, pizzas because deep down they don’t make you feel as good. Since this is for lifestyle eating, be flexible, if all your buddies want to hit up modestos for the huge ass pizza, go for it.Give it a try, eat healthy for a month, pay attention to how you feel, and then switch to eating unhealthy food frequently for another month, and notice how you feel.
For the some of you who resist exercise, that’s because you haven’t found what you like to do, and your main reason for exercising isn’t strong enough. I love running, and at first i did it because my main reason was to lose weight, and it was undoubtedly agonizing. It didn’t change until i started running at night, late in the night like 12am, and i started developing feelings for running, especially for forest trails. I liked the way the air smelled, of earth and trees…and monkeys. And i started to love the motion of simply running. My initial reason for running faded away, and i developed a new one: I ran because i loved to run. It sounds crazy, but most runners will agree. This love for running became a joyful experience, and losing weight became a byproduct, and an easy one at that. Martial arts and gym gives me the same feeling. So, find your reason, find what makes you feel good, and nothing can stop you.
You may not lose weight as fast as compared to someone with a strict diet, or you may, but whats important is that you are on track and enjoying yourself wholly. Just remember, always be honest, don’t make excuses for yourself. Eating is not the problem, the habit is the problem. It’s just like smoking. If you decide to have pizza for dinner, be fully concious and responsible for the aftereffects.
There’s no such thing as a bad or good habit, everything has its price and pleasure. Recognizing both sides, you become realistic and responsible for your actions. Responsibility means recognizing both price and pleasure, action and consequence, then making a choice.
Find out what works for you, try both sides of the coin.
Eat, love and laugh,
Andrik.
