To check out the rest of this blog series, click here.
When I came to Taiwan, I was fresh out of working job that involved manual labor, sometimes longer than eight hours a day and six days a week. In a word, I was exhausted. I spent the two weeks I gave myself off from the job laying around, catching up on all the things I didn’t have time to do when I was under the blazing sun. And like in years past, I seemed to gain back all that I had lost during the ten weeks I worked, and then some. And then couldn’t shake it off me.
With all the advertisements and infomercials and other things plastered all over the news and the media in front of our faces, we think we know how to do it. We think we know how lose weight. We use crash diets, we go on severe workout binges until we burnout and have to start all over again. The thing is we think we know how to lose weight. But truthfully, I didn’t learn how to properly do it until 2018, this past year.
I joined a gym right before Chinese New Year with the goal of going up to five times a week, being the crazy person that I am. Needless to say, five times a week didn’t happen. At least not without crashing a couple of times. At the time, I was still eating the SAD (Standard American Diet) and hadn’t been vegan since coming to Taiwan, when I couldn’t read the menu and had to assimilate or make my life harder. I wish I had pushed through then and been pickier with what I ate, but I didn’t want my transition to life in Taiwan to be difficult.
At first, going to the gym was tough, as it always is in the beginning. I did stuff at home prior to that, but it wasn’t the same. And my diet wasn’t working. So I started to track and began doing keto at my mother’s recommendation, but I kept crashing. It wasn’t doing it for me like it had for her. So, in April, I returned to veganism. And that, honestly, was the start of it all. That’s when I started to drop weight, more so than in years past.
I was thrilled seeing myself lose a pound or two a week for a while, because as I did so, I was regaining energy. It was like the more in shape and slimmer I got, the more energy I found within myself. It was amazing. I fell in love with working out and still love it (honestly, ask any of my friends, they will confirm that my love for the gym is intense). After I started to love the gym, I was more mindful of what I put in my body. At first, my cheat meals were sloppy, and now they are clean. For instance, my cheat meals in Taipei one weekend were a fruit and granola bowl and a bagel, and then the next one was a mushroom pesto vegan pizza. Yeah, I’ve become that person you see on Instagram and other social media platforms.
After a while, I didn’t really mind if I was losing or not. It was enough for me to just see my clothes not fitting the same anymore, to see the looks on my friends and family’s faces when they saw me and said that I looked better and healthier. By the year’s end, I had lost forty pounds. Forty pounds. That’s a little under a pound a week. And it’s all because of three simple things that I was doing that I hadn’t done in the past:
- Being Outcome Driven
- Being Mindful of My Food Choices
- Finding a Workout Routine I Loved
Too many times in the past, I tried crash diets. I did the smoothies every morning, keto, and even attempted cardio binges. None of that worked. What finally did it for me was committing to four times a week in the gym: three weight sessions and a cardio session. Each time I went to the gym, I was in and out within forty-five minutes. I wasn’t overdoing it, and when it came to food, I made sure to nourish myself and not eat too much or too little of one macro-nutrient. At the end of the day, it was literally all about balance. Balance, as I learned in 2018, is the key to everything.
I hope that if any of you are looking for that magic pill to losing all the weight you want to, this is a sign for you. I hope you see that the hardest part about getting your dream body is the first step of committing to what you want, and not giving up every day after that. It’s important to commit, but not lose sight of every other aspect of your life. At the start, tracking my food and my gym sessions ruled my life because I was so determined to not give up this time. But somewhere along the way, I realized that I had made it a habit and didn’t need to be so obsessive, and ironically, that’s when I saw the most progress. If you follow your intuition and listen to your body, you’ll see the progress you want to see. It won’t happen overnight. It could take longer than a year, but if you really want it, no amount of waiting period is too long.
Best of luck to all of you who are looking to get healthier, stronger, leaner, or looking to even bulk up. Wherever you are on your health journey, don’t let magazines or social media dictate what your perfect body will look like. Your perfect body is one that allows you to do all that you aspire to do, one that fuels your every move, and one that you love and care for daily. Your perfect body just is.
Thanks for reading and stay rad!
