: : Bento Boxes : :

I think I may have found a better solution to portion control than I realised. Because it looks like the Japanese have already come up with that solution. Apparently, all one needs to know is 3 parts carbo, 1 part protein, 2 parts vegetables and select the container based on the volume.

Guide to Choosing the Right Size Bento Box
Translation of how to Select Bento Boxes from Yellow Studio, Japan

So, it looks like the Tupperware lunchbox that I’ve been carrying around is the 900 ml one and what I really should be eating is a 600 ml container.

Anyway, there are lot of inspirations online. Some links are here :
Bento Challenge
Video Games Characters come alive!

Well, have ordered some bento sets from ebay Malaysia. Now all I have to do is wait for them to come but in the mean time, just use what I currently have at hand.

: : Oxidative Stress relating to Cancer, Diabetes, Heart Diseases & Other Chronic Modernday Diseases : :

Another article that I wrote on the Health and Fitness Section of the Lowyat.net forums. The original discussion is here.

Introduction

Some of you may know that I’ve been spending the past week with parents and doing a bit of research on diabetes. Somehow along the way, I stumbled across something interesting that touches upon cancer and other diseases / illnesses as well as the impact of exercising regularly. Thinking of parking this post under some of the other posts such as cancer, diabetes, heart disease, didn’t quite seem to fit because it also covers the impact of exercises and other illnesses.

 It started out coincidently by a book called “”What Your Doctor Doesn’t Know About Nutritional Medicine May Be Killing You” by Dr. Ray Strand at a local bookstore. Surprisingly, it didn’t turn out to be a boring read but an interesting one, especially from a medical doctor who can explain in layman terms about modern day illnesses and issues. Plus, the approach is different where he admitted that he had been wrong about nutrition supplements and that it took his wife’s disease and cure to finally convince him.

Oxidative Stress

He gave an explaination about a bodily process known as Oxidative Stress which is currently link to modern day diseases. Click here for an explaination about it : http://www.nutritional-medicine.net/oxidative-stress.asp . The fire-place analogy is a good explaination of the process that is hapenning in our bodies. If you Google “oxidative stress”, you will find more info but it’s written in medical terms that it takes quite awhile to digest.

This includes cancer, diabetes, heart problems, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, lung disease, eye problems, arthritis, osteoporosis, neurodegenerative disease (Alzeheimers, Parkinson although his remedy is only to slow down the disease and not eliminate it like the others). What he says is gleaned from medical research evidence and through google searches, there’s a lot of talk about Oxidative Stress impacting people and that doctors are now looking to see how to get the body to react better to such stresses. And that’s where antioxidants come in.

Continue reading : : Oxidative Stress relating to Cancer, Diabetes, Heart Diseases & Other Chronic Modernday Diseases : :

: : Weight Loss + Eating Healthily : :

I’ve been hanging out at the Lowyat.net Health and Fitness forum lately. So, just to make my life easier, I’m pasting one of the articles I wrote about the diet that I’m doing atm.

So far, the kgs drop since 14 Feb 2009 has been 8 kg in the past 2 months. That included the time I lost 2 kg in the week I was ill as well as the 2 kg that I gain my trip back to Miri. Please excuse the red color, it came together from the site as that colour. >.<

Also, hopefully Dad will be reading this. 🙂  The original post is found here.

I tried to write a post about nutrition and realised it is probably too big a scope so I’m just going to write about some concepts of eating healthily.

Note that this is a generic post for weight loss and not for maintenance mode i.e. maintaining your target weight and definitely not for athletes/body builders who may need a different diet altogether as they use up more energy. Also, the tips below may not be so applicable to people who are ill or not feeling well : you may have to check with your doctor, nutritionist or do your own research.

How much to eat?
I tend to follow information from the MyPyramid.gov and Harvard Healthy Eating Pyramid as well as various food websites but I do a lot of cross-referencing as well. It’s mostly the same but I tend to just use the plate as a gauge as it is easier to go by. I seldom go by the serving size recommended as being an Asian, I would tend to eat a lot less than the Americans do (and I have seen them eat. It’s scary, even with healthy food). That’s why I use a plate to gauge the portions as well as my fist. As long as I have eaten enough to have the energy to carry out my daily activities, it means I’ve eaten enough.

I divide up the plate into 4 sections (into quarters). One quarter is grains (rice, multi-grain, pasta, etc.), another quarter is meat, last 2 quarters are for veggies.

The other thing I do is use my hand to agak-agak/gauge portion control. Here is a link about using the hand.

And I make sure the size of the place is not too big. Too big = too much food.

When it comes to snacks, I usually don’t take more than one fist of fruits / veggie or 3 slices of biscuits (low salt high fibre).

I try to make sure that I eat enough to have a steady weight loss of 1 kg per week but once I switch to maintenance mode, I will review my diet again (not to eat more fat or meat but maybe more proteins / complex carbo from veggies to slow down the weight loss).

Food Planning
It takes practice. The first week that I started dieting was bad and everything was so red and boring. It’s now been 7 weeks so it’s getting easier.

I goto websites and look at pretty pictures of food that make me hungry. I see the recipe and start planning whether it’s easy or not. If it’s going to be tedious, then I do it over the weekend. If not, then I do it after dinner, preparing my breakfast and lunch.

Some sites that I go to :

Sometimes, I just google somethign that I want to try and make. Say like tomato sauce as I can’t take the ones with salt in them. The Google Search yielded a lot of blogs with recipes so I picked one out to try it.

One thing about websites is that it’s not easy to decide whether what they say is correct or not. You’ll just have to do some comparison and hopefully they all don’t go and link to the same website or same text. If the text is writtenly differently but the information is essentially the same, it’s usually ok but then again, there is always the possibility of that one problem case.

I also browse through cooking books at the bookstore and buy something that is relatively easy to do. I’m toying with the idea of going to baking classes just to learn how to make some of the more complex pastries like puff pastry etc. Just for the heck of it. Doubt if I can learn it properly through youtube.

I talk to colleagues and friends about food preparation and recipes to share. I exchange emails with family and we really get into the habit of food preparation.

Shopping
This is fun. I spend usually about 2-3 hours just waiting through the supermarkets looking at labels and food and remembering where to get stuff. Also, because of my high blood pressure, I can’t eat salt in food so I also occassionaly look for stuff in Organic Shops but even they have stuff with MSG and too much salt inside so I do have to read labels a lot. Wet markets are also a good sauce but some stuff, I still prefer to get it from supermarkets because it’s surprisingly fresher.

The problem with Malaysian food manufacturers is that they seldom put the Sodium Content on their labels as it’s currently an option. However, if you check out the World Heart Federation and click South-East Asia, you’ll notice that there are a lot of deaths due to heart diseases (remember to add 3 more zeros at the end and you’ll end up with millions). Makes one wonder whether the govt is really taking community health in the long run but admittedly, it is extremely hard to give up soy sauce. After getting diagnosed, I’m off the opinion that the govt doesn’t have a long-term strategy that meshes food manufacturing with the health problems currently faced by the community. But there’s not much of an avenue to properly voice it up and it’s not easy to find the time to do the information gathering.

At the moment, I buy a lot of vegetables and fruits and coming up with different ways of preparation. I don’t feel the need to go to the extreme of boiling and steaming yet although some of my food preparation are like that. It just depends on my mood and whether there is something I would like to eat. I can’t eat fast food anymore or goto restaurants as often so I am slowly experimenting with different recipes to see if I can make something.

Your Health
Depending on what kind of health problems you have and where you want to end up, this will greatly determine your food selection. It’s hard to advise more than that but I would suggest to search some sites and see what they say.

: : Lunchie in Miri: :

Ok, so the no-salt diet is not exactly that easy when one is in a different house. I’m now in Miri for a week and finally managed to have a lunch where I can make my own lunch. So here is a simple lunch that I normally eat during work and would have prepared the night before. Although this time, I made this during the day itself.

Hmm…preparation was easy. The multi-grain mix was the one that needed to be pre-soak an hour before as well as the frozen fish. The fish, I put them into water to defrost and in an hour, it was compeltely defrosted.

So, the finish food looks like this :

Carbo : 2 spoons of multigrain mix
Protein : Fish cook with garlic and tomyam
Veggies : Stir Fried Sweet peas + Oyster Mushrooms with Garlic

The multigrain was a pre-mix grain mixture I got from a supermarket that was imported by Taiwan. I think the name of the manufacturer was Sungrass Farms or something like that. It was pre-soak in water for an hour and cook in a pot until soft and most of the water has dried up. It’s a bit grey because of the black glutinous rice in it. It doesn’t taste too bad but I guess it helps that I cut down a lot of salt.

I love sweet peas. It’s great to eat and not so dried up. The oyster mushroom also helps because it doesn’t smell too strongly. Then again, the garlic helped a lot too. The garlic was chopped into small bits and stir-fried in a teaspoon of olive oil until it was slight browned and fragnant. Then I put the sweetpeas in and about 10 seconds later, the mushroom. Add in about 1/4 cup of water, a dash of pepper and about 1 teaspoon of balsamic vinegar for taste.

One thing I didn’t check was for leftover lemongrass and I think there was none. Anyway, have cut some garlic slices and totally forgot to put in some shallots. I rub about 1/2 teaspoon of tomyam paste on the fish. I put some water into a frying pan and poached the garlic + 1/2 teaspoon of the tomyam paste. Then added in more water and brought it quickly to a boil before I added the fish. Then I covered the pan and every few minutes, turned the fish so that it gets cook. I top up the water when it got too low. It turn out pretty nice and the fish tasted like it was steamed. The only problem was that I underestimated the salt content in that one teaspoon of tomyam paste so it ended up too salty. So, next time, it’s going to be 1/4 teaspoon of tomyam paste. I didn’t finish the fish and kept half for the next day.

So, this is a really nice meal. But, I now have to exercise hard because I’m heading out for dinner with parents to have crab and a favourite prawn dish that I can never get it done right in Kuching. Gulp!