Wednesday, May 27, 2015

About Weight Loss - How I Started My Journey

What do we understand about losing weight? Some people might take it the wrong way, for example, to eat lesser than we are supposed to, or to starve ourselves, etc. No, it's all wrong! Yes we eat lesser, but we don't eat lesser than the calories we are supposed to take in a day. We need a balance of exercise and food to keep our body fit and in other words, working.

Often that people mistake that, if we want to lose weight, we need to starve ourselves, we can't eat this, we can't eat that. But technically, we can eat anything, of course 'anything' doesn't include fast food, oily food, etc. What i meant that we could eat anything is, food with high carbs, low fat or high protein, low carbs (if you want to build huge muscles); rice (high carbs, low fats), lean meat (high protein), eggs (high protein) for instance. We still eat normal food, just in smaller portion and more meals. Eat more fruits, drink more water; it helps to flush all the toxins in our body.

I've once heard from my friend that it's 20% exercise and 80% food. It's all about the food you consume/ feed your body. I've came from someone with 86kg to 66kg in 1 year time. Yes, it's a lot of weight there. I've tried many ways to lose weight; from cutting down food intake to joining weight loss programs, it all didn't work.

What I think i did wrong was, keeping track of my weight every single day. But maybe it's just me, it's not the same for everyone. I realised that when i keep track of my weight every single day, and it didn't go down, it made me depressed, and that made me eat even more.

Therefore, I started putting away my weighing machine, and just continue working out; eating less but more meals in a day. It went on for almost 6-7months before i start weighing myself again and really seeing some results. I went from 86kg to 73kg; then continued with what I'm doing, exercising often, keeping myself fit. It wasn't easy for sure. At the beginning, my friend invited me to go hike with her every Saturdays and Sundays. We kept this on for a few months. After she gave up, I told myself, 'I've gotten this far, I need to keep going on'; I went hiking myself after that, but the place where I used to hike was a little far for me and since I'm alone, i decided to just jog around my neighborhood. Of course, I did some abs exercise at home as well.

I'm working, so I don't have much time to workout, but there's no excuses for this. So, I searched on youtube for some workout that I could do with minimal time, 10-15mins. I found Blogilates and POPSUGAR Fitness.

Oh, I love Cassey, she is a cheerful and positive person. I'd love to have a friend like this around me, always motivated. At the beginning, she was the only following her on youtube, doing almost all of her exercises; I thought Pilates are going to be easy, but it is HARD. Still very impressed that she could still speak while doing the workouts.

P/S: My friend also once told me that, to burn off the excess fats in our body, we need to build more muscles and unless we are taking steroids, we are not going to turn into Hulk even if we lift weights.


Toodles!

Suzanne

Saturday, May 23, 2015

Relaxing Trip

It has been a long time since I had a relaxing trip. We all need a trip once in a while, after working for a while now; we are living in a world where competition is everywhere, we force ourselves to work harder, we stress ourselves to be better. Finally, a nice and relaxed trip for myself and a friend of mine.

Day 1
We drove from Petaling Jaya to Penang at around 1pm in the afternoon, arrived at around 3.30pm. Had a walk around the Penang Streets, there are some new streets arts around. People always ask, why do you keep visiting the same places? No, it's not the place that matters, it's the company.

Some of the photos we took during our trip.




This is where we had our Nutmeg Juice. It's refreshing and very delicious.
You can adjust the sweetness just simply by adding some water. 
This is how it looks like when it's split into half
In the evening, met up some friends in Penang for dinner and a late tea session.



That's about it for day 1. Quite tired at the end of the night, but it was a nice catch up session with my friends, we haven't met each other for almost 2 years if I'm not mistaken.

Day 2
Since we were quite drained out at the end of the first day, with all the travelling and late night catch up session, we didn't really set a time to wake up. But still, we woke up at around 8.30am, just in time for our breakfast in the hotel. It was just a simple breakfast with toasted bread and cereal with coffee.

Then we continued with our trip in Penang. We visited the 3D Art Gallery, I've heard about this place, but just hadn't got the time to visit. Following are some of the photos we took during the visit.









We had a lot of fun in there. It was creative what they had in there. Worth to be visiting at least once.
After that, we moved on to Sekinchan, our next destination.

We reached around 5pm in the evening, went and checked in to the hotel (it looks more like a homestay, clean and cozy). We rest a while, and then we headed out for dinner. The food we had was cheap and delicious. It's called 喜记, photos of food will make you drool.

Have to admit that it's not really the best signboard, not easy to spot
Fried Hokkien Bee Hoon Mee
Tasted very fresh, not too oily and not too salty
This is what they call, 炒虾姑, very delicious.
We ordered small size for all these dishes, but it turned out that their portion is quite huge. Anyways, we finished all of them. This meal only costed RM47, quite cheap with these much food, easily cost more than that in Damansara.

We went for a second round for the 拉拉煎.

It was nice, but nothing special
We had a walk on the Redang Beach after our meal. It was nice to feel the wind by the beach. How often do we enjoy the nature, since we work and stay in the town. We went back and have our rest after that. That's the end of our 2nd day.

Day 3
We went back to Redang beach early in the morning, so that we could have a better view of the beach and the scenes around.






Had our breakfast after that at the local hawker stall. They were simple yet delicious. :) This was at 益大家茶餐室.



And a must visit place in Sekinchan, the paddy fields. Have walk down the paddy fields, it's relaxing, smell the greens. The weather was superb, so we enjoyed the walk with the wind blowing, it really felt like paradise.






Went on for our lunch before we head back to Damansara. Couldn't recall what is the shop's name. Food there was just average, there were a lot of people queuing up though.




Well, that's the end of our short trip to Penang and Sekinchan. Till the next time.

Toodles.

Suzanne