Our Bodies

Hello, it's a lovely Saturday night and I'm currently spinning Coldplay's Kaleidoscope EP on the turntable and sipping earl grey tea mmhmm. My kind of Saturday definitely. Anyway I wanna talk about something today, it's about taking care of our bodies, this only place we have to live in.

One of my favourite quotes is by Jim Rohn, which says take care of your body, it's the only place you have to live. I think this quote really makes us think about our bodies and health in general. Cause it's true, this is the only body that we are given in this life. This is the body that lets us do many things. Chase our dreams, and do the things that we want to do before time runs out.

As someone who spends a lot of time with people who are older than me (like in their 30s-50s), I realised many people are kind of ignorant of their own health? I know people who are in their 30s and they have high cholesterol/triglyceride levels, high blood pressure and so on. Most of this are caused by their diet (nasi padang ftw!) and of course lack of exercise. But the funny thing is, they just brush it off easily. Or they would just say there's medicines I can take!

Or the most classic reason is "I'm still young and I think I still have time to enjoy my food"

Well a few weeks ago I came with the thought, do we need like 50 years to finally learn how to take care and love our bodies? Okay I'm not a perfect young man either. I haven't been exercising, and sometimes I eat a lot of junk food (like chocolates and sweet drinks). Thankfully being a vegetarian doesn't leave me with a lot of junk food options hahaha. But yeah I am becoming more conscious of my health and my body. This is one of the reasons why I decided to become a vegetarian.

Although like I said above, I'm far from being a "perfect" vegetarian.

My idea is that do we have to wait till we're old to start taking care of our bodies and health? Like okay we need to start eating healthily when we hit 40 or so. I think we should start young hmm. Well recently I realised I've been gaining weight as well haha. Okay don't blame my diet, blame it on my lack of exercise and eating too much rice heh. Which I've been limiting now.

So far my blood test levels are doing very fine. I haven't done any test this year though but I'm thinking of doing it every year to see how I progress. The last time I checked I even asked to have my iron levels checked and it's doing okay too. I want to try to live healthily from now till I grow old. Hoping that my health won't be so miserable when I'm old heh.

And not only about health-wise, but injury wise too! Small things like being aware of our surroundings, and to be aware of our actions so that we don't hurt ourselves. Similar thing to the above point, a lot of people only started to be "more careful" when they are old. Okay this is true because as we grow older, it takes harder for us to recover and heal.

So perhaps we should all start becoming more alert and aware of the things that we are doing to ourselves as well, so that we can avoid getting injuries when we grow old. I once watched a documentary about this man who does this - he trains himself to become more agile and alert by doing exercises every day, and he even made an "obstacle course" that trains his cognitive alertness and skills. In the documentary he was 60 years old. And he's very fit and agile!

Well to be honest, my parents are such people heh. My mum for example, she gets stomachache whenever she eats spicy food. So I always told her not to eat chili and other spicy food but well, beyond my control, she always eats them (and get stomachache later). My dad likes brave himself to go to places that are dangerous to go to, even though he's 60. And when things go wrong, he'll regret it. But a few weeks later he'll do it again. Ah well, like I once said, 

Your parents will one day be your children. 

I can't understand why people always constantly do things that damages their health. And I always land on the question, do we need 50 years to finally learn how to take care of our own health, and to love our bodies? Even though our bodies have been showing signs of things that they like and do not like. Do we constantly do things that our bodies don't like? Until one day our bodies say "enough" and things start to go really wrong. When, will we learn to love this place we live in?

Alright that's all for this really random post. Just a random thought that came to my mind. November is coming to an end really soon. I hope it has been treating you well! Let's end 2017 beautifully.

Sunshine

It all takes one day of sunshine to make people sick here. Well we believe that if the weather changes really quickly, say it rains today and it becomes hot tomorrow, and it rains again the day after tomorrow, it's a perfect recipe to fall sick. So it was pretty sunny on Monday after a month of rain. And on Tuesday it was just cloudy (and not raining) and today it was drizzling. My dad and I were feeling kinda feverish just now. Perhaps this is the reason why, or maybe we just have an infection.

I spent three years of my life studying biomedical science and one of the "goals" I had before entering this course was to break the beliefs we have here that involve sickness. Like the term "masuk angin", which literally translates to enter wind, or wind entering the stomach, which is a condition when you feel bloated, nauseatic and have headaches etc, usually after you spent some time outside in the wind. I want to know what causes all of these, and I haven't! Should have made it my FYP.

And I'll name it "The Investigation of "Masuk Angin" Syndrome"

I successfully did a study though, to how garlic can cure pimples and boils. Cause here that's what we do, use garlic on pimples and boils to cure it. And we (Kai Xuan, Candy and I) did prove it back in year one in our microbiology group project! So cool. This is a reason why I love science heh.

There are a lot of taboos and beliefs we have here which I'm always interested to investigate. Like how we shouldn't take a shower after exercising (which is what I always do when I was in Singapore), or how we should avoid aircon and winds when we are sweating (another thing I always do). And one of the most unfathomable one is that eating too much eggs will give you boils. I actually did a research on this and came with nothing. I even found a site where it suggests applying egg yolk on boils as remedy.

I often realise how a lot of things are much of a contradiction here and when I was in Singapore.The weird thing is that when I do all of these "taboos" in Singapore, I don't necessarily feel that they are taboos just because I'm not back at home. But when I am back here, I always take these precautions seriously. Because somehow being back at home seems to increase the chance of these situations to really happen by 200%. Perhaps it's the home-cebo effect, I would call it.

Ah well, there are lots of mysteries we have in life.