Jul 15
LouieLife BMI, diet, thin, wight
(and a few unorthodox tips on how not to get fat from an undernourished individual)
I was born thin; Twenty years later, I’m still skinny. Yeah, I was never a fat kid. I wasn’t teased for being fat back in grade school. The last time I checked my body mass index (BMI) — a simple statistical measure that determines if your weight is proportional to your height — I was under the category “emaciated” (which is worse than “underweight”) and I think I’m still under that category.
I’m not blaming anyone — my parents for that matter — except for myself for being a very thin person who has to use a belt every time I wear pants. My Dad and Mom did everything that they could just to make me gain weight. I guess, they’ve bought all of the brands of multi-vitamins out there in the market and forced me to drink them when I was still a kid. But nothing much happened. There were a few instances when I received comments like “Oh, it looks like you’re gaining weight.” But seriously, no matter how many times I check my weight, the scale just points to the same number.
Where is the problem? Maybe it’s my metabolism, maybe it’s my diet, maybe it’s just the scale. But I’m more inclined to believe the second one. I think I have a faulty diet…
I eat only when I like what’s on the dining table. I don’t eat strange-looking foods, I don’t even touch them. Generally, I hate fish, especially if it’s fried and it has a scary looking face (e.g. tilapia, lapu-lapu). Also, I don’t like eating anything that still has shells which would need me to manipulate my food. My Mom would tell me that they’re delicious. Well, everything to her is delicious. To me, they’re bland. I don’t like under seasoned foods. My taste buds are hard to please. Lately, the foods that are being served to me aren’t something that make me salivate excessively (okay, that sounds disgusting). In Filipino — and in the most simple term, I’m pihikan.
Tip 1: Tell your Mom, your maid or whoever prepares food at your home to cook foods that you do not like. Kill your appetite. But please remember that losing a big amount of weight in just a few days is not good for your health. Eat a small amount of what was prepared for you, also so as not to hurt the feelings of your cook.
But I definitely want to have a normal BMI. That’s what I want to achieve while I’m being a bum. It may sound easy for you, but for me, it’s really hard. A lot of people I know says that fast food makes gaining weight just as easy as walking. To me, it’s not applicable. During my review sessions that lasted for three months for my licensure examination (which was definitely hard) I was eating lunch either at Jollibee or McDonald’s almost everyday (including Saturadays and Sundays), and as far as what I think and look like, I hardly believe that I gained any weight. But then again, the stress that I was in during that time could have been a contributing factor on why my weight stayed the same. Oh, well, I guess, I’ll just eat more servings of whatever is on the table.
Tip 2 (which could be used in conjunction with my first tip): When cooking, prepare a large amount — something that would last for a few days. Then, refrigerate. Finally, reheat. Repeat steps two and three as many as you can. No matter how sumptuous and yummy your food is, its taste would get destroyed. At the end, your appetite would be gone.
PS: I hope they’ll make a counterpart of the reality show “The Biggest Loser” and give it a title of “The Biggest Gainer.” I’ll definitely audition for that show. LOL.
Mar 18
LouieSchool article, Chimes, choices, decisions, essay, graduation, Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken
NOTE: I originally wrote this for the Chimes, the official publication of my school back in high school. This article is already four years old. But since it’s graduation season once again (and I’m going to graduate next Friday), I think it’s just fitting that I should repost it.
“Two roads diverge in a yellow wood
And sorry I could not travel both”
These are the first two lines from the poem “The Road Not Taken” written by the famous American poet, Robert Frost.
Yes, it is hard to decide which road to be taken even there are only two choices. But what if on your way, you met an intersection that has three, four, five or more ways to choose from? For sure, things will be more complicated since there are too many choices to consider; you can’t just take a road without thinking. It might be the road that will change your life forever that’ll make you regret in the end.
We make decisions anytime, anywhere. Actually, we make decisions everyday. Sometimes we choose the wrong path… I know, some of us tend to go back and start allover again but sad to say, many of us forget that we can still go back and start again from the beginning to mend the things that we had messed. Even though we meet dead ends here and there we should not lose our hope.
If there are decisions that we cans still change, there are also roads that are difficult to escape from, as if you entered a labyrinth and can’t find the exit no matter what you do or you’re on a one way road that’ll not let you go back. These are the things that you can’t change forever. This occurs especially if you took shortcuts and dark alleys while taking the right path. As what they say, “Laging nasa huli ang pagsisisi.” We will only regret it once we’re running out of gas, once we are already lost.
I hope there are stop signs or slow down signs in the wrong roads so we can think twice and that they are not one way so if we choose to change our decision we can take a u-turn easily.
There are also times that while we are taking the right path we have to take detours and such. These detours are contrast to shortcuts — these will make our lives harder… a longcut if I may say. No matter how rocky or steep the road you took maybe and if you know that you’re on the right track, do not back out! Why choose one of those shortcuts if they will make your future disastrous?
Graduation is very near, I hope each and everyone of us will choose the right path. For now we should part ways, but in the end, I know, we will meet again… in the Finish Line.
Feb 11
LouieRandom digital audio recorder, essay, PowerPoint, writer's block, writing
It sucks when you have writer’s block and end up staring at the blinking cursor on your monitor or doodling on a yellow legal-sized paper. But what really sucks is that while you’re writing, you get stucked halfway. You write blah-blah-blah, then, dot-dot-dot. You can’t write anything else. All of your thoughts get muddled. It’s like popping popcorn in the microwave oven, you get excited eating it, the popping sound makes you salivate. You enjoy seeing the bag of popcorn rotate inside the oven. The smell of freshly popped popcorn tickles your nose, then suddenly a power interruption interrupts your popping business. Annoyance takes over your excitement. Everything you’ve written goes to a waste, well, unless you find someway to recycle your thoughts.
This is what’s regularly happening to me for the past I-don’t-know-how-many-months. The connection between my brain and hands is completely compromised. My hand would be flaccid, and my brain would drown in words. The outflow of ideas from my brain to my hand or hands to the paper or computer is obstructed.
As I write this, I’m actually feeling afraid that I may suddenly stop writing it. LOL. You’ll never know when the bug that every single writer avoids would bite. But the probability of that is very small because I’ve got so many experiences of getting frustrated due to writing to write.
Before I start to write, when I conceive the idea of writing an essay or whatnot, everything seems to be organized in my head. I practice writing in my brain — it’s my blank slate where I write my thoughts. But when I actually start writing, I always find myself rewriting sentences over and over again (perhaps because the sentence that I wrote was a deadend) until I stop because rewriting, rewriting, and rewriting starts to get to my nerves. Ah, writer’s block, what a sweet bliss.
While I was trying to catch my sleep on the first day of the year, I told myself that I have to write something. I badly wanted to write, but I’m really tired of wasting my energy and time in producing half-finished essays, or worse quarter-finished ones. I wanted a topic that I could talk about for a very long time (so I could avoid stop writing while I’m in the middle of it). Then an idea came to my mind. Aha! Why not write about getting frustrated with writing? For the very first time in months, I was able to tell myself that my neurons are still functioning. I was spontaneously writing on my brain. I only encountered a few bumps while I was doing the preliminaries in my brain.
But how I wrote this in my brain is very different on how I’m writing it now. I’ve already forgot how I wanted to arrange my thoughts in a way that my readers would understand them. But nevertheless, I’m happy with the outcome of this essay… so far.
Because of this, I want to buy a digital audio recorder, a device that I could bring everywhere, so I could digitally record my thoughts as soon as they enter my brain. You don’t know when your brain would produce electricity and make that bulb inside your brain light. You want to be prepared everytime. I’ve tried using paper and pencil; I would bring writing material with me, just in case a good thought would occur to me while my instructor is busily figuring out how to make his PowerPoint presentation appear in the LCD projector. But it’s not a foolproof method: while I’m trying to write my idea, I would actually forget what I was supposed to be writing. This usually happens when a lot of ideas accumulate in my brain. Also, the paper that I used would sometimes go missing. And there are also times when writing them on a paper is very inconvenient, like writing while taking a bath. Okay, that’s a stupid example. The point is that, having a digital audio recorder will be helpful to me.
I really enjoy writing and I like sharing my thoughts. It has been an approximately five years ago that I learned to appreciate the business of writing. I think removing this out from my system will be difficult. Writer’s block makes me one step away from fully enjoying writing, but that should not stop me from airing my thoughts. Okay, that’s a very lame conclusion from a lame writer.
Jan 30
LouieUncategorized
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