Another popular mantra that health experts love chanting is that it’s not so [...]]]> I once read somewhere that at least two months needed to pass before you are able to see tangible changes to your body after starting an exercise routine. This is assuming you are consistently working out at least 2-4 hours a week.

Another popular mantra that health experts love chanting is that it’s not so much the numbers on the scale that matter, but rather that you are getting leaner with the build up of muscles from fat loss. You can tell this once your clothes start hanging off you and you find that you could easily fit into smaller ones. Honestly, I didn’t really realize mine were draping loosely on me until I received exasperated comments from people (usually women) around me, demanding me to go shopping for new attire that actually fit me! Surely a girl can’t say no to that?

Although I couldn’t physically see myself change much in the beginning, internally I could feel all kinds of good things happening: for a start, my stamina was getting better and I felt happier after each work out (thanks endorphin production!). I also eagerly looked for ways to increase my NEAT factor (non-exercise activity thermogenesis) like taking the stairs instead of the elevator and doing more house chores. Anything that I could do to bump up my metabolism rate, it had my name on it.

Speaking of NEAT, I was so obsessed about the technicalities of stair climbing that I calculated and estimated the amount of energy I’d exert if I just took the 6 flights of stairs to reach my office floor from the basement parking for every working day over a year: enough to burn off 0.8kg of body fat! How’s that for motivation?

Me playing at a company match (Bangi is hot, man!)

I was happy to find myself keeping up with my sweat sessions at least 3-4 times a week, whether I did it indoors with my Wii gaming console or outdoors via (real) tennis practice which I had also begun to start playing again with colleagues at the club near the office. It was good to reacquaint with a sport that I liked and learned in high school. If there was ever an activity you loved back in school, it’s a great idea to pick it up again, especially if you have like-minded friends willing to evade going home on time to their screaming kids to join you. Sure, I played tennis with two left feet, but I didn’t care, I was having fun and sweating buckets doing it. An hour of tennis burns 490 calories Ok! I usually play 2 hours a week.

While I was anxious to see my physical changes immediately, I decided to just focus on the workouts and food intake control and not mind so much about the weight. However I continued to regularly record readings with my Wii Balance Board to keep motivating myself. Sure enough after about 2 months, I noticed a little bit of a downward trend ever so slight in the graphic chart on the Wii Fit. It was a tiny dip but it was certainly the best looking dip I had ever seen.

After about 4 months of consistently keeping up with my exercises and diet, my good friend Hani from Jakarta who lived in KL at the time noticed my renewed active lifestyle and asked me if I would be interested to join her in some free aerobic sessions at a park 10 minutes from where I live. I was very impressed that someone not originally from around these parts actually knew more about what was happening (but that’s always the case with outsiders), so I agreed to join her on a bright Sunday morning that mid-May of 2010.

[Sidetrack: Did you know an hour of aerobics burns up to 455 calories? Not quite enough to burn off an entire Big Mac (which contains 704 kcal), but good enough to rev up any stalled up metabolism if you're doing it every week!]

I learned that these aerobic sessions are held every Sunday morning at 8, led by Aliez, a petite and sweet Malay instructor in her late 30s. She is always accompanied by 2 female sidekicks who demonstrate the moves in basic and advance forms, and a loud sound system setup to boot. She also has a trademark yell, “Are you OK!?” every time she sees us panting trying to keep up with her. So the story is Aliez has a contract with the city council to conduct these sessions as a community health service for park visitors. The woman is so popular that her fitness loyalists come from as far as 30km away to join her sessions.

In the beginning I was a bit shy to start dancing amongst so many people but after seeing how shameless and confident Hani was (the Indonesians say pe-de, or percaya diri or better yet, ga tau malu - know no shame), I decided to push away all inhibitions and started to go with the flow. After all, it’s like playing Just Dance on the Wii, minus the remote and plus the instructor. I get to flaunt it all in the great outdoors, right? Bring it on!

Hence my Sundays no longer became a day for sleep-ins and being lazy in the morning. By 7am I’d be up to get ready to go to the park. I’d arrive only to be greeted a sea of fellow active seekers who were up to run, walk, bike or like me, engage in dance accompanied by lively loud music blaring from the huge speakers setup by Aliez’s sound guy whom I assume is her husband. Most mornings are cool and the park is a welcoming lush green area, playground to cheeky monkeys complete with a medium-sized lake that tortoises and fishes call home.

Aerobics at the park on a Sunday morning - photo taken by Dad

I learned a few new dance routines from Aliez which ranged from salsa (hard!), zumba (interesting), hip hop (yo!) and even African (help!). One dance was particularly memorable. It was the season of the FIFA World Cup and Aliez had put together a series of steps inspired by Shakira’s soundtrack video clip for the ocassion, Waka Waka (This Time for Africa). Wow, that was an energetic number to learn and a fat incinerator for sure! She even had the session recorded on video but alas, I have never seen the clip (it’s probably out there lost in the deep recesses of Facebook). Probably a good thing – I may scare myself into not wanting to do it again.

Hani has since left Malaysia to return back to Indonesia for good and I miss my days of going to the aerobics sessions with her. I still go to the park on a weekly basis after more than a year later since the introduction. I’m super glad I took up her offer to join her for aerobics outdoors; it would later on expose me to another activity which was never quite my favorite since childhood but have recently learned to enjoy doing.

Can you guess what?

I’m always amazed at how nearly everyone who noticed my weight loss made the same statement the first time they saw me since I started dropping the pounds and losing the chubby cheeks. It was mostly uttered by colleagues who had not seen [...]]]> “How did you lose weight!? Let me guess, you stopped eating rice?”

I’m always amazed at how nearly everyone who noticed my weight loss made the same statement the first time they saw me since I started dropping the pounds and losing the chubby cheeks. It was mostly uttered by colleagues who had not seen me in many months (since they were in different departments), but as soon as they did, they gushed over how fit and good I looked and wondered if my reclaimed slimness had anything to do with the non-taking of the white grains. They begged me for my trade secrets and when I shared with them my experience, I am often met with looks of dismay and hopelessness. Their reactions did not strike me as surprising; most people who are looking to lose weight want an easy way to do it, and including exercise is the less preferred method. Understandably so – exercise actually requires commitment and effort.

But back to the topic of rice. Poor white rice. Always getting blamed for weight gain, always earning a bad reputation amongst people who were trying to lose weight by swearing it off, claiming that they’re overweight because they ate it. Diet books do no better either by condemning white rice to being less nutritious as they were simple carbohydrates that contained less fiber than say brown rice, supported by the high Glycemic Index value it contains (are you still with me?). Why are simple carbs so bad? Because they make you feel hungrier faster. Which triggers you to eat more within a shorter span of time. Or so the experts say.

I am not one to insult the food of my ancestors, so rather than caution curious people not to eat white rice, anything made from white flour or the like, I instead tell them how I managed the intake of food that I consumed during the course of my weight loss journey.

To be quite honest, I kept it all pretty simple. First, I made some common sense and painless decisions that anybody who works a daily hectic schedule can surely appreciate: 
I decided to eliminate unnecessary sugar wherever I could. For example I used to like ordering iced lime tea with my lunches but then I went cold turkey and instead took just water. In fact I drank a lot of water everyday and made sure my bottle at work is always filled with water. Water is actually one secret weapon to weight loss as it helps to flush out waste and toxins from your body; also, letting your body become dehydrated actually dampens your fat-burning process. Enough cannot be said about the sufficient consumption of water, if you are lazy to do anything else, just minus all your sugary drinks and just take aqua, neat!

Next I always made sure breakfast was taken. Mine would typically be toasted wholemeal bread with peanut butter and some fruits, or cereal or oatmeal with milk, or whatever breakfast food I had handy around the kitchen. I’m a sucker for American cereals so every other week or so I’m always checking out the cereal aisle for the latest imports and I especially started taking an affinity towards Kellog’s Special K cereals because of its low caloric value per serving. Also if you’re on a health mission, Cheerios is another cereal brand that is worth looking into. Breakfast is especially important because it is the first meal of the day after a long night’s sleep and fasting, so you need the energy boost to get your day to start out right.

My next ninja move was to literally halve the portion of my meals, especially rice intake during lunch (see I didn’t eliminate it, I reduced it), and made sure I maintained a suitable ratio of protein (chicken, fish, etc) and vegetables. At night for dinner, I ate only home cooked meals. My first few months of controlled dinners came in the shape of homemade chicken soup in which I’d dump all kinds of colorful vegetables (capsicum, beans, carrots, cabbage), accompanied by rice or toasted buttered bread. I never got bored of it, in fact I lived for it. If soup nights got unbearable (very rarely, I must say), homemade pasta or salad with tuna or smoked salmon and feta cheese did the trick.

I also readily stocked my fridge with lots of fruits like apples, oranges, grapes, guava and any other ripe thing that was of my fancy for the week. So if I needed a healthy snack or need to satisfy a sweet craving, there would always be something natural to nibble on. At times I would cut a piece of fruit, say a pear or apples (at one point I went absolutely bananas for green apples and ate that almost every day, until one day I couldn’t even bear to whiff ‘em anymore because I ate it so consistently), pack it up in my tupperware and bring it to work for a late morning or late afternoon snack.

Another trick that helped me with sweet cravings is to always have sugar free gum on me, whether in my handbag or on my desk at work. Chewing gum not only freshens your breath and fights that craving to have something in your mouth, it also helps you burn calories, as much as 11 calories per hour! There used to be a Wrigley gum ad on Malaysian TV in the ’80s which I remembered watching as a kid. It showed a guy and a girl going out for a jog, who then ended it by coolly popping gum into their mouths, while the narrator declares, “Wrigley’s gum is exercise for your face!” (senaman muka in the Malay version, haha!). Guess what – they weren’t kidding!

The next enemy I tackled was the fast food fodder and processed food. No more junk like that! If you start to read how much preservative, fat and sodium that are used to make your beef patties for your favorite burger joint, it’s enough to make anyone drop their burger in despair. The only fast food I allowed myself to have regularly was Subway sandwiches, which I think it is a much healthier alternative to the other types of fast food. Plus, the cookies and any other processed food that was packaged or boxed (except for my cereals and milk) made less frequent appearances in my grocery shopping cart.

Around the time I started my weight loss journey, I had started to read a book called Controlling High Blood Pressure The Natural Way by David L. Carroll and Wahida Karmally. I didn’t have high blood pressure or anything, but I just happened to chance upon the book in my dad’s library and thought it would make good reading. And was it ever. I learned that one should really consider the foods they ate in order to control their blood pressure, and that’s where the whole topic of sodium intake and its effect on the human body came to light. I learned that the more one consumes high sodium-laden food, the more water the body retains hence increasing your weight and also your blood pressure (this is when your heart has to work harder to pump and transport blood across your body).

Weight reduction and control is also a topic covered extensively in the book, which is proven to alleviate high blood pressure. It also talked about different types of exercises and which ones were beneficial for the human body. It’s definitely a reading I’d highly recommend to anyone interested in improving their health and increasing general knowledge.

When you read up on losing weight, one of the first few things they tell you is to never starve yourself or skip a meal. Many people think they can lose weight easier if they missed out on breakfast, lunch, dinner or all of the above, which they probably could and would. But doing this would be counter productive. Going on a diet is like doing business: you need money to make money, right? Hence in the weight losing process, you need calories in order to burn calories. Skipping a meal is like telling your body that you’re starving, so it tends to slow down the metabolism and thinks you’re supposed to be in survival mode.

After I got my rough draft pretty much in place when it came to eating, I decided to refine my knowledge in the dietary department. An important equation became the mantra of my eating pattern. To lose weight I needed to burn more calories than have consumed. And to lose 1 pound (around 453g) a week, I needed to eat 500 calories less a day to see that much drop in my body weight.

But before I started shaving off calories from my diet, I needed to figure out how many calories would it take to maintain my current weight at the basal metabolic rate (a person’s resting metabolism rate). Let’s say for a sedentary or mildly active woman of my height and weight then, I needed 1700 calories in order to maintain the weight. So in order to lose 1 pound a week, I had to reduce 500 calories from the total amount of food taken daily, which is around 1200-1300 calories.

So when I finally figured out the number of calories I needed to eat in order to lose weight, I began consciously summing up roughly the calorie content of each meal. 1200 divided by 3 main meals is roughly around 400-450 calories, so I tried to eat well within the range per meal. This is what my typical meal plan would look like:

Breakfast

2 slices of toast with peanut butter + chocolate milk / Cereal
(est. 250-350 calories)

Lunch

Rice with chicken/fish/beef + vegetables
Fruit for dessert
(est. 350-500 calories)

Tea time
 (ocassionally)
A hot Milo and some crackers / Sliced fruits
(est. 100-250 calories)

Dinner
Chicken Soup with toast or rice / Home cooked pasta / Salad with tuna/smoked salmon + feta cheese
More fruits
(est. 400-500 calories)

For foods that are uniquely Malaysian, I used a Malaysian website called cekodok.com to help me figure out the calorie content. For everything else, I typically used Calorie Count. But I didn’t keep a diligent food log or anything (I was too lazy), I just basically took the task a day at a time and eyeballed each portion to be about the same small size everyday.

Well, OK perhaps on some days I didn’t precisely meet the calories which I had so carefully pre-calculated, but it seemed to make some difference. By combining my exercise routine and downsized and relatively cleaner diets, I finally found a successful mix that worked well for my weight loss goal. I was burning more calories than consuming, so the deficit was helping me reach my weight goal in a realistic and non-exaggerated time frame. Plus I was getting real conscious of the makeup of food and was particular in choosing what I ate and how much of it, something which I wasn’t doing in the past that led me to gain weight.

So essentially, food is good, but too much of it isn’t. I didn’t skimp it entirely just because I was trying to lose weight because slowing down my metabolism will not help. I found a good portion that I could live by that I won’t get too full on neither starve out on, and I was mindful of its calorie content. I focused on eating foods that were in their natural states (e.g. fruits) and made from scratch. Most importantly I limited, if not totally eliminated, my intake of processed foods. And I certainly didn’t fall for those expensive meal-replacement powder crap that they’re selling on the market, targeting gullible and hopeful weight watchers wanting to lose the pounds fast. Believe me – your body deserves much more than that, save your money and feed it real food!

When the day came, I could not contain [...]]]> January 2010 rolled around and I decided to make a birthday resolution – to buy a Nintendo Wii and to get more active by playing games which I liked. My birthday was only a short 4 weeks away, so timing was perfect for a little self splurging.

When the day came, I could not contain my excitement as we made our way to the video game store where my geek friend M is a regular customer. This was of course after I binged out at Tony Romas for a special dinner of delicious beef ribs and sinful desserts. What! A girl’s gotta enjoy her birthday first, right? I would offset it with multiple sessions of Wii, I promise!

At the game store I quickly pointed to what I wanted and there it was, beautifully boxed and ready to jump out! I whipped out my credit card, added the points to M’s membership card, and tada! I was now a new and proud owner of the Wii. I wanted to get the Just Dance game too at the time, however the store ran out, so I had to be contented with my sole purchase and walked home with the one game that came included in the box, the Wii Sport. Additional games could come later.

Got a Wii for my birthday resolution - exercise or die trying!

M helped me to setup the game console at home, as he always does (hey, the birthday girl gets to kick her heels off and get her geek friend to setup new tech toys for her) and pretty soon I was in business. Since I only had one game, I was to be satisfied to play only that for just another day. I made sure every sweat dropped over virtual tennis and bowling was worth the time and effort. I even bought indoor shoes so that my toes wouldn’t blister over my shiny tiled floors!

The following day I made another quick trip back to the game store. This time, after a little bit of research I purchased a new game called Wii Fit. It was a revolutionary game (at least for me it was) in that it came with something called a Balance Board which resembled a scale. The Balance Board is a platform you could step on, and underneath the hood were sensors that could detect your weight, body balance and movement. This intelligent peripheral worked beautifully with the series of games that were on the disc, ranging from yoga, strength, aerobics and some fun balance games.

The first thing that I had to do in order to play Wii is to setup an avatar which is essentially a graphical representation of myself which could then be used in the Wii Fit game. After keying in some personal information such as my sex, age, weight and height, I anxiously stepped onto the Balance Board which calculated my body to ascertain the status of my current weight: underweight, normal, or overweight (not sure if it had the ‘obese’ category, oh heaven forbid).

During that first weigh in on the Balance Board, I laughed out loud when I saw how the first-skinny avatar’s body filled up as the weight increased during measuring. However when the meter counting finally stopped, so did my laughing because I saw that my weight was dangerously edging the overweight area. Yikes. I was still barely in the normal range, yes, but that didn’t pacify me. I reminded myself that this was why I bought the Wii, and I knew I had to get working and try to bring my BMI down before it crossed the dreaded overweight line.

What also impressed me about the Wii Fit game was how it was able to tell you your physiological age based on some tests. Yes, I may have only been 30 years of age but after trying out some balancing acts and response games, I found out that physically I had the body of a 45 year old! That was a reality check – my first assessment and I’m already in midlife?! That was so uncool. That showed how way off balance and how out of tune my body was.

Remembering how I didn’t quite enjoy yoga moves based on my previous DVD purchase experience, I decided to try the ones that were on Wii Fit and I quickly discovered that these flexibility moves were to become my best friends. Not only were they easy to follow, but the Balance Board also showed me if I was correctly positioned in the stance shown on screen by use of a simple but clever graphical indicator. If my red dot was not located in the blue area, I knew I had to shift my body and hold it there in order to gain the maximum points. Prior to starting the move, a short blurb would appear on screen to tell me which body areas would reap the most benefit from the pose. Oh, that was lovely. Finally, a self-yoga routine that talked back to me, what more could a DIY girl ask for?

With the addition of yoga on the Wii, my blue yoga mat quickly outgrew its defunct function and began seeing the floor of my living room and the soles of my feet more often. Not to mention more than a few drops of sweat!

The other cute games on Wii Fit were a scream too, especially funny balance games like hula hoop. One looks really silly trying to whip around a virtual hula hoop (if it makes you feel better, you can actually try to use a real hoop along with it), but hey if I was going to trim the waist and burn off those abdominal fats, who cared if the neighbor saw me looking like a psychiatric patient off her medication?

Another feature I appreciated highly on the Wii Fit was a calendar log function that records down the days on and duration which I exercised. At this point I was still using the Wii Fit version 1 game (I upgraded later to Wii Fit Plus) so I didn’t know how many calories I burned for every game I played. But that didn’t matter, what was important is that I finally had a plan to exercise, and pretty soon I was firing up my Wii 3-5 times a week, about 30 minutes at a time. Waking up on the weekends to do yoga or walking the tight rope on the Wii proved to be very entertaining and rewarding, and time spent on exercising seemed to fly by.

While all of this was happening, I was finding Just Dance an impossible game to purchase locally. Very popular game, I thought, so I went online and just made an order on Amazon. While I was at it, I also bought a game called EA Sports Active which was a highly recommended game by many Wii gamers who were into exercise games, plus Bob Greene, the man behind the game, is Oprah Winfrey’s trainer. Not that that says much about the potential of the game (Oprah isn’t exactly permanently slim these days, but who knows, I could be watching old seasons of her show) but after seeing some video previews of it, EA Sports Active became even more intriguing. My newly ordered games were due to arrive in a few weeks and when they did, I ripped them out of their packaging like a hungry wilder beast clawing for meat.

Just Dance was like an old familiar friend, I popped in that CD and got reacquainted fast with the game play. I’d play that thing almost every night, committing myself to at least 5 songs. My family would find me randomly playing it as late as 10PM on some week days and are stunned that I’m causing a ruckus so near bedtime. Sure I looked ridiculous dancing in the living room in the middle of night all by myself, but when you’re on a roll, you’re on a roll, baby. Move over, Britney!

My weekly dosage of exercise Wii games: Wii Fit, Just Dance, EA Sports Active

EA Sports Active was a more serious approach to exercise, with a combination of strength, aerobic and toning. Everything had been tailor made to suit your difficulty level, from easy, intermediate to advanced. I did everything at easy pace at first, of course. The game box came with a few interesting accessories, including a red resistance band and a velcro holder which I would wear on my thigh and in which I could slip my secondary Wii nun chuck controller (this was to monitor and record moves that required leg movement such as lunges, squats and running). To make my life easier I followed the pre-set 30-day programme (which I never really completed in that time given because I had so many games to play), which basically asks that I do 30 minutes of their planned activities for 2 days, then get 1 day rest for recovery, then continue again with another 2 days, and so on.

This particular game was also an eye-opener for me as to how poor my aerobic condition was. I was just literally out of breath and flat during the running sessions, cursing and wishing the rounds were shorter and could end more quickly (they could if I could run in place faster!). Simple moves like the knee lunges and squats were killer on me too. I couldn’t understand how people could actually hold a squat for an entire minute (try it and see how it burns!), God that was painful! For me that was the true test of endurance, if you could hold a squat in midair for 60 seconds without feeling like you’re going to murder the game developers, ladies and gentlemen, you pretty much don’t need this game.

EA Sports Active also made use of the Wii Balance Board from Wii Fit, so I could use it for moves like the roller blade race. This one was challenging too for me, you basically had to squat in order to get the character onscreen to rollerblade faster, and when you came up to a ramp, you had to gently yet quickly straighten up your legs in time (but don’t jump on the board, the game will stop if you do) so that the character jumps off and lands successfully and continues on. I got to know my lactic acid buildup level a little bit too intimately during these times, but hey if these moves were going to kill off my thunder thighs, I’m sticking with ‘em!

Playing with the resistance band was a new thing to me. It essentially is a long rubber band with a soft handle on each end that I could slip my hands into whilst holding the Wii controllers so that the game tracks my arm movements. I would drop the middle section of the band on the floor and step on it to hold it in place, and with a corresponding game move, I pulled the ends of the band over my head, to my sides or in whatever position the game required me to do. The main aim of this simple yet effective tool was to tone the arm muscles. A few months after doing all that, I visited a couple of friends for dinner, and as I was sitting on their couch I laid back and extended one arm on the couch head area, to which one of them exclaimed I had toned biceps! Wow, I didn’t see that coming, though I was grinning sheepishly at the compliment. It’s funny how sometimes people notice changes in you before you do.

In short, I found that video game exercises worked for me because one, I loved video games, and two, I loved how simple and interactive they were, they really were like having your own personal trainers. Of course, the initial investment is quite high, but really, how different could it be than paying for a gym that you might not even go to. Having a video game console at home is something you’ll never get to run away from. Unless you’re planning to live in your car.

The games that I owned had many things in common, such as the point system and virtual trophies and awards that you could collect as you went along the programs, motivating you to do even more. Furthermore, the games recorded down all your activities and the time spent on them, so you didn’t have to write them down anywhere if you were lazy to do so. This is especially important to monitor your progress and to see how much time you were spending on exercise.

In this regard, the Wii Fit was my absolute favorite because it also chartered my weight status, so when I started losing pounds, I could graphically see the lovely dip trend on the game. A few months later, I discovered a radical feature on Wii Fit; the game eventually grants you a “Progress” button after about 10 sessions or more of working out. When I clicked on the button, I could see my avatar shrink in correspondence to the weight lost, right before my eyes, as though the extra mass was melting away in fast forward motion! Now while such an occurrence in real life is a scary indication that you might have tape worm in your intestines, it was gratifying to see such a powerful representation of all my hard work on the Wii, converted into just a few seconds.

In conclusion, exercising with video games would later on pave way for my involvement in other physical activities and other bold attempts at sporting events. But that’s material for another chapter.

All the years of thoughtless eating and sedentary lifestyle had finally added up and rudely pushed my Body Mass Index into the overweight and moderate health risk category, according to the Asian BMI standard.

However according to the Western BMI measuring, I was just borderline overweight, meaning I had about a [...]]]> It finally caught up.

All the years of thoughtless eating and sedentary lifestyle had finally added up and rudely pushed my Body Mass Index into the overweight and moderate health risk category, according to the Asian BMI standard.

However according to the Western BMI measuring, I was just borderline overweight, meaning I had about a 0.5 marginal luxury of being ‘normal’, just barely enough to keep my nose out of the water. Or should I say, suffocating blobs of fat!

But what did it matter, Asian or Caucasian BMI, I was in my eyes – I hate to say it, fat! Although ‘fat’ is a politically incorrect term when referring to overweight people (would you prefer metabolically challenged?), I felt just that – chubbier than a baby whale (no offense to the whales). And if you say it’s all a matter of perception and declare that I’m overreacting, I would have retorted and hollered that my BMI number was enough to quash any inkling of self denial. Facts are facts, baby.

But really – sometimes in these situations, everybody else’s opinions didn’t matter, only yours did. After all, who knew you better than yourself?

Although the doctor at the hospital where I underwent my medical checkup informed me that my weight was normal, I felt anything but. I was bloated, my cheeks were so puffed out and my dress size well on its way to becoming a permanent double digit. What’s a girl to do? And how the hell did I get here?

I will admit it, when I was in my twenties, much of my health and fitness were taken for granted. I would mindlessly scarf my way through countless meals and desserts, whether they were home cooked, picked up from the side of a warung on the street, or prepared at my favorite sports bar diner. I possibly picked up the “freshman 15” too when I started college in Ohio back in ’97, which is the number of pounds (about 6.8kg) that many fresh-out-of-high-school students put on in their first year at university. To top it off, I had a hearty appetite so I really enjoyed my food and had a habit of cleaning out my plates. You know the old Malay adage, food “cries” if you don’t finish it. As a child, the imagination of cartoon grains of rice sobbing themselves into a gluey pulp was enough to guilt this obedient girl into always leaving the Corelles spotless.

After I graduated from university, my eating habits changed little and life became even more sedentary upon starting full time work as I was in the computer line and did nothing but face a monitor all day (I’ll have you know I enjoyed this very much). After all, who had time to go exercise when all I wanted to do was either go home and sleep or chat online with cyber pals or update my website, or hang out with real life friends to go out and eat some more (such is the bane of having disposable income). Plus I was extremely lazy about exercise, which to me now is a shameful understatement of epic proportions.

Isn’t it amazing how reckless and invincible you think you are when you’re in your 20s? Stupid and ignorant is more like it.

What I didn’t realize was that as I grew older, my resting metabolic rate, the efficiency at which humans digest food for energy use when they’re not doing anything, had started declining at an average of 2-3% every year after I turned 20. Prior to that, a person’s metabolism dips a hefty 25% between ages 6 and 18 (source: Women’s Running magazine, January-February 2011 U.S. edition). With a steadily declining metabolism, if you continued eating like you did when you were younger but don’t offset the calories consumed through some sort of frequent physical activity, the extra pounds are destined to be stored as  undesirable fat (or, if you prefer, “extra unused energy”) in your body. It’s not like when I was a kid, the appetite and metabolism were equally ferocious, and I was so nimble and active anyways (climbing trees, swimming, cycling), that there was no fat chance (haha) for me to gain any extra weight back then.

If I was told of these metabolism facts 12 years ago, I would’ve been very indifferent towards it (and sadly, I was). Me? Gain weight? Nonsense. I was unbeatable, nothing could make me fat, after all I had been eating with a force of fury all this while and I don’t seem to be carrying around extra weight? Plus I was in total control of my body, yeah!

Well OK in my defense, college years weren’t all that lifeless for me. I remember participating in a couple of tennis, badminton, rock climbing, hiking and rowing sessions at the gym and even out boat paddling on the lake. But the amount of time spent was certainly not enough to make  me fit, and if I remember correctly they served more as social outlets to meet up and mingle with other people rather than as a means to maintain my health.

It wasn’t until I went for a full medical checkup in January ’09 that I realized the numbers I saw on the body scale at the hospital were, elegantly put, unflattering and frankly, alarming. If I kept up the pace I was trudging through my life, being inactive and all, I knew I was destined for disaster and to reverse the effects would probably take a bit longer than if I was younger. I was beginning to get a taste of what midlife crisis might feel like (it’s a bit like blood, a little bit irony). It was a sensation that left me craving to be younger and weighing less!

As I looked back at the full length mirror while changing back into my street clothes on that sobering day at the chilly and sterile hospital in Bangsar, I finally noticed the double chin which I had been ignoring over the last 3 years. Heck, it was beginning to look double its current size and my already round cheeks resembled the puffiness of the Marshmallow Man from Ghostbusters. Crap. And man, is that rear end big enough for a Cessna to land on? What have I done to myself! And my tummy and waist? Geez, did that mirror just crack?! The nerve.

That was my wake up call. If there was ever a moment of human enlightenment, by golly – that was mine. A little bit later on when I mustered the courage to look back at photos of myself, I noticed that my face and body were getting fuller from age 25 onwards. Yikes.

So a week later as the doctor sits me down and yaps away about the results of my health test report (which according to him is normal, though something needed to be done about my LDL – bad cholesterol levels), I sort of tuned him out for a bit and my mind was racing madly about what I could do to improve my weight standing.

“Doc, you sure my weight is OK, ah?” I asked him anxiously with a look of utter concern.

“Your weight?” (Doctor licks his thumb and flips to the page where it was recorded – euw!). “Oh ya ya, it looks fine lah, not to worry (I stared at him in disbelief, did this man need new glasses?) He continued without so much as glancing at me, “But do something about that LDL OK, do more exercise and less seafood!”

How proverbial and enlightening, gee thanks Doc. Next time I’ll consider self prognosis.

But I knew he was right. I did have to get my act together and start working out. The fact that I was about to turn the big 3-0 in about two weeks fueled my determination to get rid of my excess weight even more so, once and for all. Losing weight without exercise gets a little bit harder as you grow older due to the inevitable declining metabolism rate, and simply because mother nature wants you to get off your rear end while you still have more agility than you know what to do with. The vivid thought of me overweight in my midlife years was enough to scare me into desperately wanting to cut the fat out, right there and then.

But I had been inactive for so long. The last sports discipline that I followed diligently was the Korean martial arts of Taekwondo between ages 10 and 15. I stopped doing that when I earned my brown belt and had to move to the States with my family in ’94. What could I possibly pick up now that would hold my attention and interest me long enough to burn more than just a handful of calories? That there was my million dollar question. The quest to find the perfect exercise activity was on!

Before I decided on any kind of fitness regime, I believed in being honest and true to myself, so I started ruling out things that I knew I wasn’t going to do. For example, I wasn’t willing to fork out dough just to join the gym, a trend that seemed to take a life of its own as the Gen Y-ers started entering the workforce. I had a close friend who did bind herself to a fitness center but only ended up hemorrhaging money because of the 1-year contractual obligation and non-attendance due to interest that eventually tapered off and died. I was also reluctant to join any group activity as I wanted to lose this weight on my own time and effort, and I certainly wasn’t going to publicly flaunt the fat to anyone.

So in a rather lukewarm but well-meaning attempt, I purchased some yoga DVDs and a nice blue plushier-than-average yoga mat from Tesco (an investment which I would later appreciate down the road) to start my own exercise center right at home. I chose yoga because I thought I could ease my body slowly into a routine that wasn’t so vigorous, after all these body parts were rusty and creakin’. For about a session or two,  I seemed to enjoy doing yoga. But it was written in the stars that I wasn’t going to continue this route for long. I got bored of it and felt that it wasn’t quite the workout that I liked doing. Sure, some of the poses were difficult to maintain (hey, when you’re overweight, the first thing that flies out the window is your sense of balance). But the half moon poses or the downward facing dogs (at least in those portrayed in the DVDs) didn’t quite cut it for me. Maybe the lulling background music just turned me off, I could hardly stay awake doing the moves!

I abandoned the yoga way long before I knew it. And for the next 10 months I was again back to square one – sedentary and pathetically unmotivated to exert myself physically. Yearning for a better body but yet lazy to execute, oh the dilemma was excruciatingly conflicting on my mind and body.

During this year also, I signed up for an account with a website called Calorie Count. I developed a deeper interest in food science and the art of counting calories from stuff that we consume. There’s an abundance of resources on this wonderful health site, my favorite being the many inspirational stories of people (mostly Americans) losing scary amounts of weight in a healthy manner and above all, a useful food caloric calculator and grading system that taught you how to evaluate which foods were good for you and vice versa. In addition to soaking up all this information, it was also during these web surfing sessions that I started using CC’s weight log utility to record my latest known weight. That figure was to collect dust and remain unchanged for almost a year.

Apart from that, nothing much was going on in my so-called getting fit department. That was until that fateful month of December, when I finally discovered an exciting work out that would not only spark a desire and cultivate motivation in me so strong that I managed to lose close to 10kg in 7 months, but also lead me to pursue the one physical activity which I personally loathed whilst growing up: running. Strangely but pleasantly enough, running is currently a routine that I undertake weekly.

On Christmas ’09, the cogwheel of my successful weight loss would finally be set in motion.