About

Vanity started my obsession with food.  

Conventional wisdom exhorts me to control calories through dieting and burn them through exercise.  Well, I am thin and should never have to worry about my weight, right?  WRONG!!!  I used to count calories for each meal and fret over exceeding my caloric budget.  If I thought I overate for one day, nearly one quarter of the next would be spent on creating a deficit through strenuous exercise.  The problem was I never really felt satisfied with food, and so I almost always overate every other day.  Which means, heavy exercise nearly every day.

I used to have a clear complexion except for the occasional minor outbreaks on the forehead which disappeared almost as quickly as they came.  As I grew older, those annoying pimples spread and freckled both my cheeks.  Worse, their lifespan seemed to have lengthened as well.  Maybe it was stress, I thought.  But being Singaporean, I have always been stressed from the time I started primary school!

I was obsessed with having toned abs.  (And I still care about them.)  But no matter how strong my core is from abdominal work, it can never be defined as long as I am bloated from inside out.  I am fine with small gains in water weight sitting in my tummy when my period approaches.  They call it premenstrual syndrome (PMS).  Fine.  But then, I started having progressively worsening PMS over the months and years.  There were at least a few times when I gained as much as 2.5 kilograms worth of water that made me look pregnant.  I also had to fight sugar cravings that only served to exacerbate my ongoing caloric battle.

And yes, I had and still have constipation though I am seeing some light from the end of the tunnel right now, like finally.  Sorry, guys.  Anything that is less than one bowel movement per day is constipation.  And bowel movement that requires me to sit on the toilet bowl and wait for at least five minutes is not normal.  Feeling incomplete even after the movement is also abnormal.  And I have all these problems.  And they appeared to progressively worsen over time.  Guess what?  At the height of these problems, I had my worst episodes of acne and premenstrual water retention, making me feel fat and ugly.  The feeling of being constipated also resulted in a perennial state of bloatedness that invariably affected my appetite.  I also tended to develop gas rapidly in response to certain types of food, and such a problem never existed at all.  Even when I wasn't having PMS, I felt like I was a hot-air balloon.

Enough is enough.  Something is definitely wrong, but what?

People have always thought of me as a picture of health based on my careful eating habits and fanatic exercise regimen.  But I didn't feel healthy at all.  To cut an otherwise long story short, I have reached a conclusion that cooking and eating well is the key to health.  (And health is the key to being beautiful.)  I want to enjoy food.  I want to enjoy beauty.  Of course, my perspectives have changed much since I started on my sojourn into semi-raw veganism.  Like how health matters much more than appearance, even though both are closely related to each other.  Becoming more environmentally conscious was another change.  You realise that you are taking so much more from nature than it can give.  Because you are part of nature, taking so much from nature means taking that much from yourself too.

This isn't some spiritual mumbo-jumbo here.  I am not going to end my story about becoming Buddha overnight.  Om!  They always say that the journey is more important than the outcome itself.  And I think it is so true.  In many ways more than one, my blog represents a continuous self-discovery through the food I am inspired to cook for myself and people I love.  Thank you for reading and...namaste!