University Days Part 1

Hey you! How was your week? Mine was a little bit hectic but I was able to take some time off for myself. If you’ve had a hectic week, don’t forget to take time off for yourself to do something relaxing.

I came across a post by Clara Tan, one of the models from Asia’s Next Top Model, on how she had gained 17 kilograms. To put yourself in front of your audience who has known you for another body size is traumatizing. Many people avoid showing their real selves in social media. I feel that following such accounts are so important. We are what we consume. I used to follow skinny girls on Tumblr and felt that I was never enough. Did you feel the same too?

I too feel pressured to always be “perfect” even if I am not a model. When I was 16, I started gaining the weight I lost from my Herbalife meal replacement shake diets. I ended up putting more weight because the meal replacement shakes were not sustainable. How can anyone live only by eating a “normal” lunch everyday?

The weight gain was steady. In 2009, I also had no idea what exercising meant. I remembered if I wanted to lose weight, the only way was “to diet”. I also didn’t really care about what I ate and definitely did not control my food options. This is a picture of me in early 2009. During this time, I was also really terrified of stepping on the weighing scales because of my previous experiences in high school.

When I left for university in late 2009, I went through significant changes with my lifestyle. In Sydney, I had to cook my own meals (to save money) and walked to my school (it was about 6KM in total) daily. As my activities increased, my food intake was still similar. I ended up losing quite a bit of weight naturally in my first year in Sydney.

This was a picture taken in 2010. You could see that I was much smaller than I was in 2009.

I think I lost about 7-8 kilograms (can’t really remember the exact number but I knew through my clothes). In 2011, I started my undergraduate programme. During this time, I had lesser time to cook for myself, came off a long-distance relationship and started to party a lot. During this time, I never really took care of myself. I consumed a lot of alcohol, slept very little and ended up gaining weight. I also remembered that a boy that I was close to told me that I was fat, and that made me very self conscious. How I wished that I could go back to a decade ago and tell myself that I was definitely NOT FAT and I was already enough.

At this time, I saw a friend on Facebook who lost a good amount of weight. I asked her what she did and she told me she started running helped her to achieve weight loss. I remembered feeling so jealous about how even she could lose weight and decided at that moment that I cannot lose to her. At that same week, I got a gym membership at school, and started rethinking different ways to lose weight (again).

My past taught me replacement shakes were not going to be effective, but I knew that I had to eat lesser (this is such a misinformed knowledge of nutrition). This got me to looking at popular diets during 2011. During that time, many people were trying the 4-hour body diet.

In my part II of my University Days, I’ll share this crazy diet that I did during 2011 to 2012.

My question for you this week is — if you look back on your own journey, was there any moment you felt like you had to lose or gain weight? Why? Did you feel that made things better? You can leave a comment on this post.

As always, if you’ve enjoyed this post, I hope you can take a moment to share this on your social media channels (like IG story!). If you have any suggestions what I can share next, do leave me a message as well. Talk to you next week!