How I lost 20% of my body weight: naps, spices and Instagram

Hi guys, in my last post, I talked about the issue of fat shaming in our society but I thought I'd do a quick follow up to deal with one point I made in that post - I too had struggled with my weight in the past. In 2000, I weighed about 65 kgs but by 2004 I had ballooned to 90 kgs and now I am back to about 71.5 kgs. Needless to say, I was really fat for those few years and have managed to bring my weight back under control; the thing is that I'm highly educated, I understand the concept of nutrition, I know the importance of a healthy diet yet somehow, even I let myself become so fat. It was a simple story why I became fat: I got a stressful job, I was keen to prove myself in a competitive sales environment, so I worked long hours in an office whilst eating way too much. You only need to do a simple calculation of the number of calories I was consuming vs the number of calories I was burning in an office environment to know that it was a formula for obesity. You've heard about the caloric deficit - well I was in a huge caloric surplus and all those extra calories ended up being converted to fats. But since I was so focused on my work, I just ignored becoming fat until I quit that job, so instead in this post, I'll talk about how I managed to lose about 20% of my body weight after leaving that toxic work environment.

Looking at the root cause of your obesity

I wasn't happy when I put on a lot of weight - I was struggling in my career. I got a job offer before even having finished my final exams at university in 2000, but that work environment was so toxic I left within three months. Then in my second job, it was just as toxic but I was determined not to leave within a few months just in case it made me look like someone who couldn't hold down a job so I stayed there for nearly a year before I left - then by the time I had moved onto my third job since graduation, I was determined to make things work there no matter how toxic the environment was. I had basically resigned myself to the fact that dealing with toxic work environments was part and parcel of working life and I simply had to learn to swim with the sharks if I am to survive and thrive in the corporate world - the alternative would have been to resigned and become a gymnastics coach, which I didn't want to do given that the pay was so crap and I didn't want to be poor. Thus within that context, I hated the work environment and lunch became a big deal - there was this wonderful Malaysian cafe near where I worked run by this lady from Penang and I would get a huge lunch there, it was the highlight of my day as I sought comfort in food. But on top of that, I was snacking throughout the day as I was so bored at work - yeah, you can be busy and bored at the same time if you simply do not enjoy what you are doing. Was my situation unique? Hardly, there are many people out there who don't enjoy their jobs, they have nasty colleagues and they feel so miserable and trapped there but they wake up every morning and go to work regardless because they have families to support - so they have to find something during the day that brings them joy and they may turn to alcohol or tobacco, but many turn to food since you have to eat anyway, why not make your mealtimes the highlight of the day?

That was a problem I solved when I quit that job, I had become so miserable there by November 2004. There was one Sunday night when I was so depressed that I couldn't face the prospect of going into work the next day that I couldn't sleep and after staring at the ceiling for hours in the dark, I decided right there and then to go into the office and resign. I was very lucky that I had the luxury of doing that since I didn't have a family to support and I had enough money in the bank regardless, so I could just decide that I could put my mental health first and make that decision. Ironically, I was only thinking about mental health then, rather than my waistline but resigning from that job killed two birds with one stone. There are many people out there who are not happy - perhaps it is stress from work, maybe it is problem with their relationships or their families, it could have something to do with their housing conditions; these could be very complex problems with no easy solutions, so in the meantime they turn to food to find joy, as a distraction to the problems they were facing. Perhaps this sounds obvious but you must confront your problems and solve them, or at least try to remove yourself from the root cause of the problem - once you have distanced yourself from the problem, you will be a lot happier and you will no longer find the need to seek solace in food because you will have other things in your life to make you happy. So even if I went on a diet to try to lose weight whilst still being trapped in that unhappy, stressful situation, I probably would have turned to something else because I would still have been utterly miserable and it would have made any attempt to lose weight more than likely to fail; so be logical and always deal with the root cause of your misery first.

Stop hiding behind others to feel less fat

There was this guy at work from that period when I was so fat - let's call him Mr South since he is from South Africa and here's how fat he was. He was so huge that he broke two chairs and the office manager had to order a special chair that would actually take his weight. Even if the new chair wouldn't break under his weight, he left a substantial dent in the floor where he sat, because there was just so much pressure on the floor boards the moment he sat down - the landlord kicked up a big fuss about the damage to the floor boards! Mr South was very good at his job regardless of his weight. So when you are working next to someone like Mr South, you can easily compare yourself to him and think, "yeah I'm not skinny but at least I'm not like Mr South over there, just look at him - compared to him, I'm actually doing pretty alright." And of course, given that it was an office environment, there were several people who were all overweight as well since we were all sitting on our fat asses in the office all day and compared to some of the people there, I wasn't as fat as them. That principle can be applied to any aspect of our lives really: if you want to feel rich, just hang out with some friends who are struggling to make ends meet. If you want to feel tall, hang out with some friends who are at least three inches shorter than you. If you want to feel super intelligent, well then give me a call, I'll arrange for you to hang out with my parents. Oh and my dad does the same thing: in 2017, I met some of two of his friends when I went along with him to the bank to act as his translator and then we all went out for lunch together. Good grief, so if you think my dad's autistic and has bad social skills, wait till you meet these two friends. Therefore, I am sure even Mr South can find someone fatter than him to make him feel better about his weight - but that doesn't change the fact that he is still morbidly obese.

Exercise should be both fun and social 

A lot of people equate doing exercise with going to the gym - that's a product of effective marketing and advertising by these highly lucrative gym clubs that want to sell you a membership (see the video below). If you enjoy going to those gyms to work out, then fair enough - that's your thing but whenever I step into these places, I just see people zoning out, listening to their music and it is completely anti-social. Nobody is talking to anyone, there is no social interaction even if the gym is rather crowded. Another exercise which I simply don't get it jogging: it is once again a solo activity with little or no social interaction. It is hard to jog with someone else you may run at different speeds, even if you agree to pace each other, how can you talk when you're running? If you are trying to lose weight through exercise, then there should be a fun and social element to it. A zumba dance class is bound to be more fun than swimming. Hence any kind of team sports would add a whole new social element to your exercise routine because you're seeing your friends when you do sports and thus you're far more likely to doing it on a regular basis if you have team mates counting on you to turn up for the next practice session. Gymnastics is not a team sport per se in that I can turn up in the gym and still train alone, but my gymnastics club has a great adult gymnastics programme and it is very social - I really enjoy seeing my friends there and the social interaction does help me push through the harder parts of the training. Some sports involve a certain level of skill but with it comes a lot more fun - hence a game of table tennis or badminton is a lot more engaging and entertaining than say doing a hundred push ups and sit ups or just jogging around the block. The better you are at the game, the more fun you will have with it. Thus you should be having so much fun with the games you forget that you're exercising!

Getting enough sleep and naps

This is a controversial one but I am glad to see attitudes changing over the years. Most companies didn't like it if their employees took naps and even if they were okay about it you had to perfect the art of sleep in your chair. It is often considered unprofessional, disrespectful or even lazy to be sleeping in the office whilst the rest of your colleagues are hard at work - this goes right back to when we were students at school: imagine if you fell asleep in the middle of a boring lesson, only to be awoken my the teacher angrily tapping you on the shoulder. Oh yeah, I have certainly been there and done that. Bosses often insist that workers stay awake at work, if they are caught napping, they are told, "that's not what I pay you for!" I remember once when I was very sleepy at work and was trying to get a quick nap, a sympathetic colleague told me, "if you're that tired, then just go home now, come back tomorrow and finish that report." But my colleague didn't understand a few vital points: firstly, I was at the point when I needed sleep there and then, I was possibly even too tired to walk to the bus stop and make the journey home. Even if I did make it to the bus stop, I would have probably fallen asleep on the bus if I got a seat. Furthermore, I was not trying to sleep for a few hours - I only needed a 10 to 15 minute power nap and I would have effectively recharged my batteries to allow me to become a lot more alert and continue working. But given this massive taboo about napping at work, people seem to have about sleeping in the office, most people would simply drink coffee and eat sugary snacks, in order to stay awake. Thus it is that combination of the physical act of chewing plus the stimulus from the taste of the snacks that helps keep you awake.

Apart from using coffee, many people turn to energy drinks in order to stay awake despite feeling tired at work and this can be once again lead to weight gain. A can of Red Bull contains 220 calories - compare that to white rice with 136 calories, so drinking a can of Red Bull is like eating one and a half bowls of rice. Sure it works but then you start to become quite dependent on it and these energy drinks will certainly lead to obesity. Compare that to taking a short nap, you're achieving the same objective of feeling refreshed yet you've not consumed any calories at all. So even if you use caffeine to force yourself to stay awake during a meeting when you are exhausted, you're not going to be productive - at best, I can describe it as "the lights are on but no one's home". Sure I'm in the meeting, I'm awake, my eyes are open but my brain has checked out and I'm not able to contribute much, I'm barely listening to what the others are saying in the meeting and I can't wait for it to be over. That's like your phone battery running dangerously low - you can switch to low battery mode to shut down all but essential functions, but there's really no alternative but to charge your phone at that stage. Taking a short nap is thus the equivalent of charging your phone when you have simply worn your battery down and companies need to realize that they will get the best out of their employees if they are allowed to nap at work rather than force them to turn to Red Bull and coffee to stay awake throughout the working day. It is a win-win situation: the employees are far more alert when they need to be and they are also far more healthy if they are not consuming that much caffeine and extra calories during the day. Being self-employed now, I am at the liberty to nap every afternoon and it has become a vital part of my weight loss routine. Naps are a very efficient, zero-calorie way to recharge my batteries.

Quality, not quantity when it comes to spending on food

My parents have struggled with this all their lives and it is a common problem with the working class - sorry if that makes me sound like a snob, but having actually seen my parents do this, I can talk about it. My parents were extremely poor when they were young and had a tough childhood, so when we were better off and could walk into a supermarket and buy whatever we liked, they still behaved as if they were very poor and had to be very careful with money. I remember once looking at a new brand of ice cream and suggesting that it looked nice, but my father lashed out at me and point out that it was a waste of money as that ice cream was so much more expensive. I then had a look the price of the ice cream and sure it was more expensive, but it was unfair to compare it to the cheapest brands available in the supermarket because that premium brand had far more interesting flavours and you were paying more for a luxury product. So it wasn't that my father couldn't afford the more expensive ice cream, he just couldn't bring herself to spend the money on the more expensive product: the words in Chinese to describe this would be 舍不得 - that is not easy to translate into English, but it conveys that very sentiment going through my father's mind at that point. Yes he could afford the more expensive product but he was so reluctant to buy it that he found excuses to say no to it. Ironically, both my parents are overweight today because they overindulge in basic food items that they couldn't get enough of as children such as rice, biscuits and even white sugar. Having more disposable income has resulted in some very irrational diet choices for them.

The issue with white sugar has always been a bone of contention: my father has a history of diabetes in his family yet he puts so much sugar in his tea and coffee. I don't even dare to touch white sugar and I can't remember ever buying white sugar from the supermarket since I am only too aware that I too have inherited my father's family's history of diabetes. Yet because my father couldn't afford white sugar as a child, he is still trying to compensate for it now when he is elderly and obese by trying to dissolve an insane amount of white sugar in each cup of tea or coffee he drinks. Whilst there's a complete lack of self-control here, he is also the same kind of man who would refuse to buy a slightly more expensive brand of ice cream at the supermarket just to save 50 cents. I remember this incident from a while ago: my father had taken my mother to the hospital for a medical appointment, so whilst my mother was seeing the doctor,my father went to get buy some tissue paper. However, when my father realized that the supermarket had increased the price of the tissue paper he usually bought by 10 cents. It wasn't that he couldn't afford the price hike, but he simply was so reluctant to pay that extra 10 cents that he started walking around all of Ang Mo Kio to try to find the tissue paper at the price he was willing to pay. My mother had finished her medical appointment and was kept waiting for nearly two hours at the hospital (she was so furious about it) because my father had lost all track of time over just 10 cents - it is pretty ridiculous of course as my mother would have gladly given my father 10 cents to avoid waiting that long for him, but that's just his working class mentality kicking in - this irrational desire to save 10 cents despite the fact that we are not poor anymore.

It's not like 10 cents is a lot of money to my father - good grief, he lives in a nice house and drives a nice car, he has a generous state pension as a former civil servant. Yet because he grew up so poor, he remembers what it is like to be poor so he cannot break some old habits even when it seems totally irrational. I wouldn't spend two hours hunting around for a cheaper product the way he did because I know how much I earn an hour when I work, thus I am rational enough to put a value to my time - paying 10 cents more for a product at a shop doesn't matter as much to me as it would allow me to then spend my precious time on something else more important. So whilst my father isn't poor but he is highly irrational I'm afraid because he can't understand that he is no longer poor. Now this problem manifests itself in diabetes when people like my father end up consuming a lot more high-calorie, low cost food when they suddenly realize that they have more money to spend on food. So when my father had more money, he would buy more of what he liked rather than a finer, more expensive version of the same product. So for something like coffee for example, my father would buy more cheap coffee and then drink more coffee, rather than explore the possibility of buying a more expensive brand of coffee for a better experience. If I may be blunt, this is because of a total lack of sophistication - working class people are ignorant when it comes to spending money. So if you had say £200 to spend on a night out, a working class person might spend that on beer and £200 can buy you a lot of beer to get you (and your mates) totally drunk, but a middle class person would probably spend that on a fine bottle of wine so they wouldn't have consumed enough alcohol to get drunk but they would have drunk an absolutely exquisite bottle of wine. It is that basic difference between quality and quantity.

Changing the way we enjoy food

So even if you have the situation where someone who is working class but has money to spend on food (as in the case of my father), they're going to go for quantity over quality because of a lack of sophistication when it comes to their taste and preferences. My father wasn't that educated, so he certainly would be baffled for example by different kinds of cheeses that you would encounter in a typical supermarket. Thus he tends to limit himself to the food that he is already familiar with, that he is very fond of and that tends not to be particularly expensive foods but these are flavours that he grew up with when he was very poor. Compare that to a rich person who grew up being introduced to everything from fine wine to caviar to that quince jelly you find on a cheese plate, my father simply didn't have any knowledge about what kind of relationship rich people had with food. Hence if I decide that I deserve a treat, then I would spend more money on my food, perhaps getting some special ingredients that are more expensive or unusual in order to create a recipe that I have come across on the internet - or I may decide to go to a restaurant to try some new dishes that I don't otherwise know how to make myself. In fact, when I was in Bariloche, Argentina recently, I visited a restaurant called Cassis which offered a fine dining tasting menu with seven courses. It came highly recommended - the portions were tiny but the quality of the ingredients was outstanding - the meal cost about £90 per head and it was quality over quantity. I don't usually spend that much on a meal but if I was going to push the boat out and do it, I'd rather do it in a place like Argentina to make my trip even more memorable since I was already in one of the most beautiful places in the Andes.

Obesity occurs because people it too much - I get it: I too gain a lot of pleasure from eating the foods I enjoy. However, in order to avoid eating too much and still gain as much pleasure, the trick is to replicate that fine dining experience where the joy you get from the food is from experiencing new flavours or a much finer version of something you already know. I grew up eating beef, but I would never forget the first time I taste genuine Wagyu beef in a fine Japanese restaurant, the buttery flavour and the super tender texture: it was the kind of experience that you just wanted to freeze in time and capture forever because it was so insanely good. That's why the Japanese are so good at this: an example of one such craze that spread from Japanese cuisine was the raindrop cake. It was a desert made for Instagram - it looks so delicate and perfect that you don't feel like piercing it with your spoon, opinion is divided on the taste with some people finding it bland and boring, whilst others liking it for its refreshingly light flavours. But when was the last time a desert when viral on Instagram like that? This was a brilliant example of how a food item almost looks too pretty too eat, it has a sense of wonder and playfulness to it and that's how we can gain more pleasure from having fun with our food with such creativity. Thus it is important to understand how we can gain so much joy and pleasure from food without feeling guilty about eating, as long as we are always choosing quality over quantity - we can have all the fun and joy we want from food without becoming fat. That seems to be something that rich people have figured out much faster than the working class.

Aspiration, social media and changing attitudes

Thankfully, things are moving in the right direction because all it takes is aspiration for working class people to desire nicer things in life - back in the 1980s, I was brought up in a very working class family in Singapore and my parents weren't that educated. Our social influences were very local - so if it wasn't something that we would stumble across in Ang Mo Kio, then my parents wouldn't be aware of it. However, you only need to log onto Instagram or Youtube these days and social media will give you access to a wealth of information on the latest trends when it comes to fine dining and cute deserts from all over the world. This will have a massive impact on the way younger people relate to food and most importantly, change the way they find joy in enjoying food. Perhaps this is our biggest tool in our fight against obesity given that childhood obesity is becoming a major problem in the world today - it isn't just older adults who have become fatter, children are becoming just as fat as well at an alarming rate. Oh I remember when I was a child, asking me parents if we could try a new product at the supermarket and the reply was always, "when you are earning your own money and can pay for your own food, then you get to choose what we buy at the supermarket." So I didn't have any influence at all over my parents, I do wonder how much influence children today have on their parents' diet and consumption patterns but of course, it takes more than having an Instagram account to have that different attitude: there must be an element of social aspiration, to learn about how rich people eat, how they spend their money and understand why one food item costs much more than the other in order come across as more sophisticated and fit into high society.

Creating delicious food with fewer calories

There's a simple reason why people indulge in high calorie foods like fried chicken, cheesy fries and cheesecakes - they taste good and goodness me, I have traveled through a lot of countries where the food is just bloody awful. Good grief. From Georgia to Norway to Ireland to Argentina to Poland to Finland - there are so many countries where the local cuisine is just so bad. There are a few ways to make something bland taste better - let's take the potato, a staple food in the West. You can bake it, roast it, boil it, mash it, make it a part of another dish like a casserole or a stew or you can deep fat fry it and we all know which one tastes the best. Food in the West tends to taste very bland because the spices which give foods the flavours we enjoy tend to come from the tropics - so for centuries, these countries usually resort to using fat (such as through deep fat frying or using fatty ingredients like cheese) or adding a lot of sugar to make their foods more appealing. Luckily, I was brought up in a tropical country where I have developed a liking for very spicy food and so I know how to use spices to jazz up quite ordinary dishes to make them appealing. So for example, many people find salads quite bland and boring, comparing it to rabbit food. But I like to make a Thai style salad which resembles the popular green papaya salad but as I can't always get hold of unripe papayas, I tend to substitute it with other vegetables but the dressing is always has that spicy, tangy mix of extra hot chillis, lime juice and fish sauce - making my taste buds fire on all cylinders. Thanks to my spices, I can make healthy food taste amazing whilst not containing too many calories.

Now the problem facing a lot of people in the West is that they simply have no grown up with much spice in their diet - having been brought up without much or any exposure to foreign foods. I have heard of this story where a bunch of British guys in a London company had a Norwegian intern who had never ever tasted curry before, so they brought him to an Indian restaurant and told the chef to make him an exceptionally mild curry - the Norwegian guy tasted it and turned red in the face, then drank about five glasses of water whilst looking as if he was being pepper sprayed in the face. I wasn't there but my white British friend who tasted that 'exceptionally mild' curry told me that it was virtually tasteless, yet the Norwegian guy couldn't take it. Somehow this story doesn't surprise me as I struggled to find anything with spices in it when I was traveling through South America and even when I encountered a Chinese restaurant in Santiago, I was offered an insanely, revoltingly sweet tamarind sauce (I can't stress just how fucking disgusting it was given my intense hatred for white sugar) instead of chili sauce because the locals simply wouldn't touch anything spicy and preferred to pour that crazy sweet sauce all over their Chinese food. That sickeningly sweet sauce must have contained a zillion calories given how it was mostly white sugar, whilst fresh red chilies are actually very healthy for you: they are rich in vitamins, are packed with so much flavour to please your taste buds and like all fresh vegetables, contain very few calories. Besides chilies, there are so many other spices that can make your food taste much better without adding many more calories: ginger, garlic, pepper, turmeric, cloves, paprika, nutmeg, cardamoms, cumin, coriander just to name a few.

Being in control of your meals

As I was walking around the supermarket earlier, I realized that it was surprising how savoury items like soups, burgers and lasagna contained a lot of sugar. Hence the only way you can eliminate sugar from your food is to prepare it yourself - something that I do regularly, I really enjoy cooking. I pride myself in using herbs and spices to give my food loads of flavour without ever using any sugar - perhaps it is because of the way that my parents love white sugar that has made me treat it like poison. I was looking for cake at my local supermarket recently and really struggled to find anything with low or no sugar - this is because manufacturers are more concerned about selling more of the product and thus have focused on taste rather than nutrition. A sweeter cake tastes nicer and will sell more, so that results in practically all cakes you will find in a supermarket being loaded with an insane amount of sugar. Likewise, if you go to a nice cafe with your friends and order a slice of cake, their priority is to make sure you have a nice experience eating that cake - they're not there to help you watch your calories. You can of course look up low/no sugar recipes for cakes, breads, muffins, brownies and pastries but there isn't a big enough market for these to be readily available in your regular supermarket. Sometimes you may find a section with products for those with diabetes or on a diet but even then, the selection there is very limited. The answer seems to be for us to simply take matter into our own hands quite literally, roll up our sleeves and get to work in our kitchen creating our own healthy meals then you will have complete control over the ingredients. That depends on two key factors: firstly, having the skills to create great meals and secondly, having the time to do so.

I thought that having the skill to create great meals isn't a problem thanks to Youtube - all you have to do is watch the video and follow the instructions step by step and you will get the same result. But we still face the same problem on Youtube: a Youtuber's recipe has got to taste good or else they won't get subscribers and the easiest way to make a recipe like a cake taste good is to add loads of sugar because we're all so used to tasting sweet cakes when we buy them from the bakery or the supermarket. So you cannot blindly follow a recipe you see on Youtube if it tells you for example to put 350 grams of sugar into a cake - now that's an awful lot of sugar. And of course, if you're coming home after a long day at work, you may not have the time or the inclination to start making a meal from scratch - that's why people may opt for a a ready meal, a take-away or dining out instead but that's when you're allowing someone else to decide how much sugar and other fattening ingredients they put into your meal. Thus the more often you cook your own meals, the more control you have over your diet and nutrition. But how far can you take this? Can you bake your own bread or make your own ice cream for example? Will you make your own pasta and soy milk? Realistically, there are some things that you simply have to buy because you would not have enough time to make and so the sensible compromise is to avoid certain items particularly ready meals whilst being careful with portion sizes. So even if we're talking about an item like cake which contains a lot of sugar, what matters is how much you do consume and how often.

A little vanity goes a long way

My regular readers will know that I have an Instagram account - I post a few times a week and if you haven't already seen it, you need to click on the link here. I enjoy posting videos and photos there but the one time I got self-conscious was when I was posting my diving videos and photos from this summer - I was obviously just wearing a pair of swimming trunks and good grief, I was so worried that I looked fat in the video, with my big fat Buddha belly on display for all to see. Yeah, I don't have a six-pack, I have what they would call a "dad bod". It's not like I'm totally shameless, I do care about what people may think or say when they see my body, but on balance, I decided to post those pictures as I liked the idea of putting myself out there - here I am in my swimming trunks, I'm not thin, I have a dad bod but I am still diving because I am working towards a better body through sports. Remember my former colleague Mr South, the one who broke two chairs with his weight? It's not like he isn't aware that he is fat - he is way past the point of caring given how long he has been obese and that's not good. He knows he is extremely fat and he doesn't care what anyone else thinks - in that department, he has effectively given up on himself. We should care about our weight, even if you're not too fussed about your physical appearances, at the very least you should consider the implications it has on your health. But regardless, even if your motivation is indeed vanity, then using that motivation in a positive way to lead a healthier lifestyle to achieve that better body is a good thing. I care about what people think when they see me and that's my motivation to want to be healthier, thinner and fitter. Oh you would have to be totally autistic to really not care about what others think about you!

So that's it from me on this issue - what do you think? Have you also had weight issues in the past? How did you lose the weight eventually? How do we tackle this obesity epidemic plaguing our society today? Do you have any other useful tips to share when it comes to dieting, losing weight and keeping fit? Leave a comment below and many thanks for reading.