Appetite for Destruction: Eat to Live or Live to Eat?

I’m not much of an eating person. I eat only to fill up my duty as a human person who is required to furnish himself with grub three times a day at a routinely time throughout. of course there are the in-between snacks and titbits but that’s minor in my daily eating habits.

I have been living my life in a country with mixed cultures and practises, and as the topic of discussion suggests, these different cultures each pose eating habits which I find rather alarming. Alarming in the sense that when it comes to eating, the rule of thumb is, it’s gotta be good, prepared rather sumptuously and to be eaten with absolute glee and without a care of what tomorrow may bring to your health. Be it Malay, Indian, Chinese, Iban, Kadazan, etc. etc. whatever ethnic group it comes from, the order of the day for food paraphernalia is never short of killing the digestive system and incessantly making attempts to paralyse the liver.

I guess other cultures in other parts of the world are the same.  The Greeks for example, enjoy meals upon meals upon meals for every meal of the day they have.  And I know of this from experience as I have a good old Greek-American friend who loves every meal he has. I have nothing against eating lavishly and sharing the good food on the table with friends, families and loved ones as a sign of happiness, prosperity and all that jazz. I do however have something against making the dining part of an event the most important part of that event, e.g. in a charity dinner, you’d sometimes forget why you’re there because the bloody highlight of the evening would be the dinner instead of the whole charity thing.  Then again, I have issues on charity dinners because I think it’s most of the time organised by hypocrites.  But that’s another story.

Food is for nourishment, and to me food should be taken moderately at the time it’s supposed to be taken.  When taken moderately and with the right amount of balanced type or class of food that one is supposed to take, then you’d be as healthy as a horse for as long as you can live. And that is how I personally perceive the matter of food. I do not like food in large amounts simply because it more often than not gets wasted, i.e. it’s not consumed completely.  I hate people who have a tendency to waste food. Talking about the different cultures in this country, the food prepared generally uses large quantities of saturated oil and fatty stuff, because as you know Asian food tends to be fried most of the time.  Western food tends to be healthier since boiling, grilling and baking are options that are actually considered and used also in Western cooking, Unlike Asian cooking of course.  There are Asian food that has less frying or the use of heat to prepare it, such as Japanese sashimis and sushis. Good to a certain extent but can be bad too if the rawness gets to your blood.

Moderation, that’s the word I was told to use when it comes to selecting food to eat. Or anything that goes into your mouth.

I found a recent quote in one of the emails forwarded to me.  It said this: “Health = Knowledge + Discipline”.  Self-explanatory I guess.

Dealing with the tides in one’s life

This past week has seen me working my butt off on one of my projects with my current employer.  I had to prepare for a very important report presentation and days before the actual day itself, I was having anxious thoughts and on-the-edge sort of sensation running through my veins. It’s not that I’ve never done any of these presentations before, so I’m still not very sure why I was feeling the way I did.  I’m a bloody professional after all, am I not? I mean, 11 years in the business does count for something right?

In any case, the outcome of the event was much better than I thought it would be.  For my part of the presentation, I think I managed to nail it through as clear as daybreak.  I’m not the best presenter there is in the company, but hey, I am one of the most experienced and probably one of the best.  I consider the positive outcome of the presentation as one of my little successes in life.  And yes, I feel really good about it, really good.  It makes all your effort seem worthwhile when you know that the receiving party whom the material was prepared for accepted the work you delivered and acknowledged your worth.

I’ve had plenty other little successes too, outside of my career.  I don’t really ever  remember having one huge success, all of mine has been small ones which I’ve manage to accumulate in the 34 years of my existence on this planet.  But of course, along the path of success I have also had my fair share of incessant failures which seemed to be unavoidable.  My financials for example, is still very much below par for a person my age.  And that is one aspect of my life that I really need to urgently sort out, fast and efficiently.

The path leading to achieving your dreams of getting what you want is never short of tidal successes and failures which needs to be documented carefully in order for you to understand and appreciate life as you live it.  From my own experience, nothing ever goes as planned.  No matter how good a planner you are, life just seems to fit in the things you need not according to your desired timing, rather it fills up the racks at its own phase and as it sees fit.

I am continuously trying to elevate and improve my life every single day, trying to go beyond what my mind actually tells me I can do, and instead following the stronger desires in my heart.

I’ll start to do one change in my life today, and that is to exercise at least 3 times a week for at least one hour each time.  Health is very important, and if I am to see everything through, then I need my health at its peak condition.

Who I can be

Since my last post, I’ve been having quite a rough time trying to find a balance between work, spending time with the family and having some quiet time for myself. Time, something that none of us can ever get enough of or have more of, ever. And for the last 30+18=48 days, I’ve been racking my brains, trying to figure out what are my priorities in life at this very moment. I wrote a list about 3 weeks ago on the most important things that I should be looking into and thinking of ways to deal with it. And of course the list comprises issues related to the 4 main conundrums in my life that I’m constantly battling to empower and cultivate healthily – relationships, money, career, health. Out of the four, the first one is the most difficult one to deal with, as it inevitably involves raw human emotion. The last one is to me the easiest of the lot to handle, simply because I only have to deal strictly with myself and to have a certain degree of self-discipline, which I do have. The two in between share almost an equal amount of effort and willpower to wrestle with, and strangely, it’s these two that I am actually able to put much of my time and effort into and, at this very moment, are beginning to show some very promising signs. These four issues have been the cornerstone of my very existence ever since I moved out of my parent’s house and started living with my wife and son.

The last 48 days have seen me rage war against my very own fundamental belief of how things were supposed to be done before I decided to change the way that I’ve been dealing with things, more importantly how I have been perceiving or thinking about them. In the battlefield of my mind, I see myself constantly having this inner turmoil of wanting every single aspect of my life to be absolutely perfect, down to the very toothpick that I use everyday to eradicate that sniggering piece of food left-over in between my dilapidated teeth. Although I’ve known for a very long time that there is no such thing as a perfect life, I still wanted to pursue the notion that I could perhaps actually achieve it in a short span of time with a sketchly plan for life and what goes beyond. Very wrong ideology that, now I’ve come to realise.

So now I have changed the way I see myself. Now, I put myself before anything or anybody else. I see myself as the person who has the ability to be more than what he used to think he was, or is. I am now the person that I am going to be whether that person in me exists or not. Because I know that if you want to aim for every bit of perfection in life that youve always wanted, then the only way that you can hope to get anywhere near that perfection rung of the ladder is by realising it first in your mind, and visualising yourself as that person who is the epitome of a man with the perfect life. It all starts in your mind.

I have changed my mind. I now live my life not according to the rules quoted by the religious teachings that I have acquired as a child in school, but by those handed down to me by my subconscious mind, who knows and understands my life and myself, as well as the Creator, better than anyone else I know. I have now freed myself from the perception that I used to have of myself, and that is I can only do as much as my eyes can see in front of me. Which is, when I think about it, a foolish and totally unproductive way of looking at one’s life.

I spend more time everyday, when I am alone, trying to see and understand why things happen the way they do, why He does things the way it is, and why we as humans always fail to see things more clearly. I wouldn’t actually say that I have uncovered the secret of life, but I would say that I have now achieved a new level of living in this world, living in this life. I have discovered that, in order to understand and see why things happen the way they do, you must first and foremostly have a lot of faith in the powers that be. Secondly, you must have a lot of patience. Thirdly, you must have a lot of strength in your mind and soul. And lastly, you must have a lot of courage.

I am going on a short holiday tomorrow with my wife and kid. There are things in my life now which are clearer compared to 48 days ago, but some things are still in a mess. I am hopeful, because I know the person that I can be to be able to clear this mess, and I have faith, patience, strength and courage to help me go through these days of constant battles with the elements of human emotions, whether my own or others.

May God grant me the will to be who I can be.

Food for Thought: Nocturnal Nibblings

I’m one for “no food after 10.00 pm” because I firmly believe that your stomach needs a good night’s rest to prepare for yet another full day of digestion and apprehension after indigestion. I used to snack a lot after 10 previously (a lot here is every night, sometimes a few times each night) but now I’ve reduced this detrimental habit quite tremendously. In the old days, I’d keep stocks of instant noodles, an assortment of nuts, potato chips of all kinds of flavours, more instant noodles, etc. Having read some health articles a couple of months back (Reader’s Digest “Foods That Harm, Foods That Heal: An A-Z Guide to Safe and Healthy Eating, 1996) on the effects of eating after a specific time of the day prior to bedtime and the ill-consequences it has on various vital internal organs of your body (liver most of all), I decided to end my snacking fiasco once and for all. Didn’t actually stop altogether though at first, because I still had massive stocks of ready-to-eat grubberies in my grub storage place. So I decided I’ll stop completely AFTER I’ve exhausted my existing supply.

Which worked. Well, sort of. I still do snack on occasions, but now it’s strictly limited to weekends when I’m at home. My 4-year old son loves to snack so I’ve got a legit excuse to help myself to the old habit once in a while, shall I say it’s father and son quality time sort of thing.

Notwithstanding the above, in my post “Top Ten List of The Best Way to Rid your Cravings for Midnight Snacks“, I’m suggesting some ways which could help alleviate your nocturnal nibblings, and keep it at bay. Digest the suggestions and good luck!