The food, the nutrients and the values

Everyone knows that the key to a healthy life is having a healthy diet. In today’s society media shows you one food advertisement after the other. One product claiming to be even tastier or healthier than the other. When you go into the supermarket products are labeled with seals claiming that said product is a healthy choice. Packaging advertises things such as “0% fat” or “no added sugar”. These things can be decent guidelines, but in my experience you shouldn’t take them to heart. Don’t forget these are still companies trying to make a profit. I’ve found that teaching yourself to read the nutrient value’s on the packaging together with the basic knowledge of what kind of effect nutrients have on your body, will make resisting poor food choices and picking healthier food a lot easier.

Based on the knowledge I gathered during my research on nutrients I decided for myself what things I would be looking out for when I’d pick my food. In my experience deciding for myself what things I could have and not have made sticking to my diet a lot easier. I’d like to share with you what decisions I made, but please keep in mind that it doesn’t hurt to read up on things yourself and not just follow every advice on the internet blindly.

The most important thing I started keeping account of in my diet is sugar. This isn’t just about sugar in sweets and cakes but also those in drinks and other products. Especially drinks seem to have a lot of sugar hidden in them. For example fruit juices and even those products that say they’re healthy with their 0 fat, you could say that for all the fat they’ve taken out they replaced it with sugar. Or how about those lemonades you mix with water, surely that can’t be that bad. Truth is all these things still have far too much sugar in them. This has led me to only drinking water and green tea, and I’m perfectly happy with that and don’t miss the sugary drinks one bit. I always pay attention to how many carbs something has in it as well, this isn’t as important to me as sugar but I specifically try to avoid refined carbs like the ones in bread, cereal grains and pasta. I also avoid potatoes as these have a high glycemic index. The reason I avoid these things in specific is because they give you a high insulin spike. A high insulin spike causes you to have more insulin in your bloodstream, a higher blood sugar and thus causes higher stress on your body because of this you get into a state where you’re less likely to burn fat and more likely to store fat. If you’d wish to learn more about why sugar is so bad I would advise you to watch this video called “Sugar the bitter truth” this video has been a real motivation for me as to why I should lower my sugar intake.

The other things I look out for are: preservatives mainly found in things as ready meals and processed packaged food, polyunsaturated fat (vegetable oil is a perfect example of this and is used in a lot of products like crisps and cakes), and last but not least high fructose corn syrup mainly found in cheaper junk food. High fructose corn syrup is just as bad as sugar if not even worse it has addictive qualities and thus actually messes with your brain.

What else is important in deciding on your food is knowing what kind of nutrients and foods are good for you. For example I have a teaspoon of honey in my yoghurt every day. Honey does contain sugar but has a low glycemic index, a lot of good nutrients and great natural antioxidants and these are only a few things that make honey so healthy. Knowing things like these about certain types of food made it not only easier for me and more enjoyable to stick with my healthy lifestyle. It feels great to enjoy some yoghurt with honey knowing there’s nothing bad about it. Some basic things I like to have in my good foods are monounsaturated fats like olive oil and all different kind of nuts. Protein is also important to me as this is a nutrient that makes sure you feel full for a longer period of time and you don’t get that hungry feeling that makes you snack.

Finally to give you a general idea of what kind of food I have on a day, I’ll break my fast with either Greek yoghurt with honey or oats with honey and for tea it usually contains either rice or quinoa, vegetables like broccoli, beans, bell peppers, mushrooms, spinach etc. and lastly some kind of meat or fish. In future blog post I’ll be going more in depth about different lifestyle changes that contributed to my healthier lifestyle like intermittent fasting and only eating 2 meals a day.

The right mentality

In my experience mental strength is essential and maybe even the most important thing to be able to live a healthier lifestyle and possibly shed some weight. It is the thing that gets you started with your journey, keeps you strong and helps prevent you going back to old habits. I would like to share with you how I was able to, and still am, maintain a healthy mind throughout the whole process. Losing weight doesn’t come easy and I love chocolate and sweets just as much as anyone.

First I’d like to start with actually getting yourself to even start losing weight and becoming healthy. I am sure many people get these moments where they think “I’m going to lose weight and be healthy”. It is an ambitious thing and often a new year’s resolution as well. Here is the thing; though it is something many people tend to do, including myself many times, we tell ourselves we start tomorrow or next week or maybe next month. Before you know it’s a year later and you haven’t gotten anywhere. So what is it that actually keeps us from starting? A question that only the person themselves can give an answer to. For me a big part was my self-confidence, which kept me from going on. Years of mean comments had left their marks and I couldn’t bring myself to love even the tiniest bit of me. I’d feel bad whenever I’d look in the mirror and think “why would I even try, I’ll look horrible anyway and I’ll be stuck to my blood pressure medicine no matter what”. I would often try and convince myself that I was happy with the way I was and there was no point in trying to be different. Truth be told I wasn’t happy. A part of me wanted to embrace my feminine side, stop wearing male clothes and just wanted to look pretty. However I had reached the point where I told myself that I wasn’t worthy of being feminine. I’d always wear plain clothes and hope people wouldn’t look at me. After my attempt at losing weight 2 years earlier in which I lost 20 kilo’s and gained it all back, plus some more, I simply thought there was no way I could ever be healthy or wear anything else but XL male shirts. It wasn’t until I had a really in-depth talk with my beloved that I became fully aware of these things. Being honest with myself that I wasn’t happy at all caused me to be able to find the motivation to start the progress. I wanted to be happy, healthy and pretty, and I was determined to do so.

“Your determination to be healthy has to be stronger than your desire to cling to bad habits. Otherwise you’re bound to fail.” – Kal

I’ve always felt like the hardest part of losing weight and being healthy is keeping your motivation up throughout the process no matter what happens. A part I admittedly failed at multiple times. This time it was different. I learned what, for me personally, was the best method for me to keep at it. We all know what kind of food is bad for us and what kind of food is good for us. But do we actually know exactly why? I didn’t. Kal taught me about the different nutrients in food and eventually I started to educate myself more as well. I learned about insulin spikes, why stuff was good or bad and what kind of effects certain nutrients have on the body. To me knowing these things made a massive difference, the cravings I’d get were answered with “No, I don’t want to have that for this and this reason” instead of “No, I can’t have that”. This made me able to resist cravings and not give in. eventually cravings became nearly non-existent. On the opposite side knowing the good things about the food I ate made me enjoy it so much more. However my love for chocolate and custard hasn’t gone, but instead of answering to cravings I’m answering to a mind that tells me I deserve a treat once in a while for doing so well. Custard and cake never tasted better.

“I still don’t like broccoli though” – Sera

The last stage of the process, which is reaching and maintaining your goal weight, is one I’m not yet at myself. However, I feel like I am very close to my goal. The hardest part of the journey is behind me and I do not have much further to go. My lifestyle is totally different than a year back and it doesn’t feel like I’m just doing it to lose weight. It feels like just a regular lifestyle. I can’t imagine myself ever going back to my old one. I think this satisfied feeling about my lifestyle is of importance to prevent me getting back to old habits. So I’d advise you in your process of getting healthy and losing weight to find a lifestyle that you’re comfortable with and can maintain.

I plan on going into more detail about the lifestyle changes I made in a different post.

I wonder….

Sera

How someone in Guild Wars 2 led me to a healthier life.

Over the course of the last year I went from a morbidly obese young woman of 22 years to a healthy one. I lost 40 kilo’s (about 6 stone), stopped taking blood pressure medicine and was able to cease my course of treatment. During this process I learned a lot of things. This blog isn’t going to be about the best way to lose weight however, I just want to share my experience and the things I have learned about health, the things I’ve done and what has been important to me on the mental side of things.

Before taken in August 2014 – after taken in June 2015 Unfortunately this is the best comparison I can provide as pictures of me are not a common thing. I still intend to lose more weight (10 kilo or so) however loads of progress has been made.

Now before I’ll move into more in depth posts about what I’ve done and experienced to get to this point I first want to share with you a bit about my worst days before I lost the weight and what has been my turning point. I’ve been obese since I was a kid. All my life people have been trying to get me to lose weight without much success. I simply didn’t have the mentality to hang on and go through with it at the time. Like many kids I was bullied about my weight throughout my life all the way to the first year of college. It didn’t help me if anything it made things worse. I would just start eating more out of depression. At the start of 2012 I went to see my doctor. I don’t even remember what it was about but she took my blood pressure and it was extremely high. I don’t remember the exact numbers all I know is that my doctor was shocked. She urged me to lose weight so I might have had a chance to avoid having to take medicine. So I found my motivation and went to see a dietitian and acquired a diet plan. I kept to that for a while and tried to do a half hour of exercise each day and not much later started following boxing classes. Slowly but surely I lost weight. I managed to lose 20 kilo’s back then, far from a healthy weight, but still I was improving. When it was finally time to get back to the doctor to get my blood pressure checked, to my horror it wasn’t lower than before… it was higher. To this day I still don’t know exactly why this was but I’m assuming it was because of stress. Safe to say I wasn’t in the best of mental states. I left the appointment depressed with all my hard work feeling like it had been for nothing. Now I had to go through hospital visits to check my health and most likely start taking medicine which I wanted to avoid. I stopped caring about my weight at this point and gained everything back plus a little more, junk food had become the thing that would make me feel better. Sometimes my mom would urge me to start losing weight again but I stopped caring. I kept telling myself I was fine the way I was and that there was no point to trying to change it.

I didn’t start losing weight seriously till last year November, but the thing that would eventually lead me up to this point already occurred in August 2012. Gaming has always been one my favourite activities and in 2012 Guild Wars 2 released, I absolutely loved this game and played it for a long time. On an evening in November 2013 while doing stuff in game I met a person. A person who eventually would mean the world to me and saved me from an early death and many health problems to come with being obese. His name is Kal and I’m proud to say that this amazing person is now my beloved. It didn’t take long before we grew close and would talk about things that made us happy but also things that bothered us. In June 2014 I had another attempt at losing the weight, went to the dietitian yet again for help and signed up at the gym. Around this time I moved back in with my parents due to circumstances. This didn’t make the whole thing a lot easier and my motivation faded again bit by bit. Living with my parents was a stressful time, my dad had gotten a heart attack and 5 strokes which left permanent brain damage in October 2013, thing have never been the same since. However, moving back with my parents allowed for me to be closer to Kal than I’d ever been. He has always been there for me and supporting me, making sure I wouldn’t go into a massive depression. At the end of October I was able to move out again. The whole diet plan had failed and I couldn’t bring myself to go the gym anymore. Kal always had extensive knowledge about nutrients, the human body and vitamins and minerals. I asked him for help, we started off sorting out a diet plan that I would be happy with. It was pretty much your standard kind of diet except I’d stop eating bread and for lunch I took a lunchbox of cold rice, chicken and broccoli with me to school. Next to that I started taking supplements next to my food to make sure I’d gotten enough vitamins. Kal took the time to educate me about nutrition – why things were bad and how the body dealt with the nutrients you’d get from food.

Eventually the food schedule became a pain as it was hard to keep making food for lunch the day before and I like to sleep in so most of the time I wouldn’t even bother with breakfast. When I told Kal that I was having a hard time keeping it up, he told me about intermittent fasting. Yes the first week was tough but after that things have never been easier. I didn’t have to worry about having breakfast or having lunch. I’d eat when I’d get home from school, it made things a lot easier and more enjoyable. I didn’t really restrict calories I just made sure I ate healthy foods.

Kal has always been a great support to me ever since I met him he has helped me through a lot of things and I’m forever grateful.   In all honesty I wouldn’t have achieved anything without him. Some might think of it as weird, developing a relationship on a videogame and long distance at that. But we see each other a lot and he makes me very happy. To me he’s worth more than anything and our relationship is the most beautiful thing in the world.

This was a brief summary of my life for the past few years, obviously I didn’t go into much detail at this point. However expect some blogposts about different things like food, intermittent fasting, nutrients, supplements, mental aspects and possibly some personal opinions on the food industry.

Our characters in Guild Wars 2

Sera