The Most Effective Diet is to Love Yourself

This is a post event blog for the screening of Hungry For Change at The Hub (Singapore) on 17 April 2013. (Event Page)

Hungry For Change (Official Website) studies the ineffectiveness of various contemporary diet plans and why they may fail to create any actual weight loss at all, despite advertising promises to the contrary.

Dieting is a big thing today

Everywhere in our social circles we encounter people telling us, whether we want to or not, what is 'healthy' and what is not. Once I even overheard a colleague asking his business contact what type of cooking oil was healthier, amid a sizable debate on legal proceedings!

Suffice to say there's a lot of good ideas and good intentions out there but no real actual good coming out of them, because one person might be trying to tell you not to eat any bread or pasta, while another may be trying to convince you to spend a couple thousand dollars on the latest miracle hi tech health elixir (scam?) from Japan! Random Facebook sharing does not constitute constructive advice!

The Truth Hurts... But is Necessary

Hungry For Change is an 'in your face' no nonsense presentation intended to help viewers understand why buying into a diet plan does not guarantee automatic benefits. It showcases personal experiences from persons who have tried to lose weight from diet plan after diet plan yet ended up gaining weight each time, because the diet plans contradict each other, demand illogical change of habit and are ultimately doomed to fail.

For instance, its no use to adopt a zero carb diet in a vain attempt to get the body to burn fat. Someone who does this is definitely going to feel very deprived and even tortured by such a drastic and unnatural change in nutrition, and as humorously illustrated in the film, may even resort to having two 'diets' at once: zero carbs by day and maximum carbs by night! So what's the point?

Dieting can be made much simpler if we identify and scrutinize the type of foods we eat today. Mankind can survive vast extremes of climates while subsisting on almost any kind of food types in any combination. There never was a problem with widespread obesity until modern times when food is easily accessible and people no longer had to worry about food shortages but rather more contemporary stresses like managing finances and mastering complex social responsibilities.

A biological system designed to operate in hunter gatherer survival mode is definitely not programmed to deal with the kind of fast paced, hi tech, non physical threats we face today, so under siege from stress reactions, it tends to crave sugars and fats (comfort foods) to try and stock up the body's energy reserves for when it would be needed. 

Chances are, these 'combat reserves' would never be needed, but our subconscious asks us to eat anyway!

This problem is compounded by food availability in modern times. Look around you in a supermarket and you see garishly colored packages of highly processed foods. Many intended for the majority of consumers are even specially  designed to make the consumer look cool, happy, even sexy.

Herein lies the main danger of modern processed foods: they are not actually meant to be nutritious. They are meant to be profitable, simply by looking attractive and tasting good. But they have little nutritional purpose.

Artificial flavorings and syrup concentrates lack the nutrition of the actual organic tastes they are meant to simulate. Some taste enhancers are even known to be industrial chemicals. Glycol antifreeze for instance. And I always wondered why some biscuits contained powdered iron on the ingredients list!

Deceptive product naming and packaging makes so called fat free products a dangerous weight gain risk due to high sugar content or dangerous chemical additives, aptly illustrated by the example of 'the fizz' of a diet soda caused by aspartame and caffeine stimulating brain cells to cause a possibly dramatic increase in appetite.

Knowledge is Power

Hungry For Change does not really ask you to lampoon the modern food industry but seeks to open your eyes to what your body is actually being exposed to, especially when craving for certain comforting tastes.

It doesn't ask you to say no to comfort foods, but instead empower you to make informed decisions about your biological systems' requirements and how to optimize them for modern living.

And indeed successful dieting isn't really about depriving yourself. You have to be happy with who you are too. There's really no point hating yourself for being dull or ugly or fat. Your subconscious will simply listen to you and just keep things as you are.

But if a person can transcend this 'feeling like shit' mood and instead think positively and to make incremental changes to his or her outlook in life, then the subconscious can readily assist the body to detox, self repair, and seek balanced, effective nutrition from less processed or even natural sources.

In the end its not the diet that counts so much but the mind behind it. A healthy positive mind can responsibly manage the body's food intake and energy output, balancing it in such a way nutritional objectives are met yet avoiding pitfalls of gluttony and temptation.

A healthy positive mind also visualizes to want to achieve a better, healthier state of being, in effect creating a powerful self sustaining loop of empowerment. And empowerment is what allows us to deal with all the stress and drama in our lives in an effective manner!

Conclusion

What an eye opener this film screening was! I never knew I could be a wannabe nutritionist much less learn about such powerfully emotional coaching tools such as affirmations, self appreciation, visualizations and such. It all reminds me of the very advanced therapies made known to me by my favorite mentor Rachelle :)

If you're interested to read more on the subject, here's an excellent article on the film.

Turning Oppression into Empowerment

Today at work in my day job as a legal secretary I attended to a property sale appointment with a lone lady client. It promised to be a short and sweet lunchtime meeting as I was intimately familiar with conveyancing (property trading) cases.

However I detected one or two problems not directly related to my legal work, that I wanted to get to the bottom of regardless, for ethical reasons.

Someone was pressuring my client to allow the purchasers of her property to inspect the premises shortly before the sale, and that person is attempting to force her to agree without giving a good explanation as to the urgency or seriousness of it all.

She took it in good humor and was polite about it, but asked me if the inspection was compulsory.

I got suspicious immediately and after a cursory inspection of the Option to Purchase, I confirmed that indeed the purchasers were not privy to such and are possibly acting in bad faith.

Such forced inspections taking place right when the sellers are at their messiest (literally, due to impending house moving) usually carry a malicious ulterior motive in my experience, and I was not hesitant to share my experiences with my client.

After all, if the purchasers had a need to conduct re-inspection or pre-renovation measurements in the subject premises, they could have easily added special clauses to aforementioned sale and purchase agreement or had informed the lawyers to obtain the necessary consent from both parties way in advance.

I would stress at this point that legal cases require lots of planning and lead time. Last minute requests introduce unnecessary risks to all and may very well cause unwanted delays to case completion.

What then can the purchasers and housing agents gain from forcing my client to grant them a last minute inspection?

Their true motives are very simple: gain access to the property when it is possibly in a state of house removal, and when my client is either caught up with work or busy with her weekend schedule. This allows unscrupulous buyers and agents the opportunity to fabricate untruthful observations about the property being in bad condition then proceed to make claims for damages close to the end of the case!

My point for bringing up the issue is this: No highly educated, well to do property buyer or agent would knowingly throw a monkey wrench into everybody's hard work at the last minute. It is totally idiotic.

So why? Obviously they think there is something to gain from it. But here's a lesson for chauvinists who think a lone lady client is an easy target: Being the bully does not make one stronger in any way. It only serves to highlight the fact that empowered women in today's society are extremely powerful.

Just because someone is friendly, polite and compliant does not mean that anyone has the right to abuse her!

So I was quite amused over lunchtime for people were calling my boss seeking explanations as to why this nice, friendly lady suddenly gave everyone hell from trying to take advantage of her!

In the end, my boss did ratify my decision to empower my client with the knowledge to make the right decision, which is to deny the purchasers any further opportunity to mess up their own purchase!

Empowerment of women is for everyone's good, and we can learn a thing or two from stalwart ladies who are calm under fire, never judgmental and eager to seek knowledge to better herself.

My client might have wondered why I went out of my way to grant her the opportunity to seek social justice, but there was no mystery about it in the end - I told her the story of my hairstyle, and my ongoing battle to uphold women's rights.

A Call to Arms

"If you focus on doing what you love, you'll go far without fatigue..."

- Rachelle Weisel

Unlike dear Rachelle, I am not a good salesperson or actor and would probably never be. She also is many years my senior and in our little Californian startup business, she does most of the field work meeting people and securing deals personally. She also teaches me Yiddish!

My role in that partnership appears strictly secretarial in nature, but there is one aspect of being a personal secretary that most disregard as being fictional. Secretarial jobs often put employees in well connected positions with ample access to operational data. So theoretically, a secretary with the right training can convert operational knowledge into decisive action. What?! Ninja fantasies, maybe, you say. But wait, I do have ample experience being such a "secretary"!

When the main forces are bogged down by short term setbacks or trouble from malicious clients, the "secretary" can be deployed as a potent crisis management unit to save the day. It's a little homage to the "Fire Brigades" of the Second World War, small, fast moving armored forces that plugged holes in the frontlines and conducted swift counterattacks.

I know, that's not what a secretary does historically, save for those redneck "Secretaries of Aggression" featured in some science fiction Texas-inspired space cowboy stories!

But when your partner is playing the role a one-woman army, you use unconventional tactics to secure victory, non? Clear division of roles, coupled with individual plans of action, are crucial to ensure team performance in any condition and against any threat.

It is this concept of a "paramilitary organization" that drove me to propose to my Half the Sky discussion group that, while there are many, many individual solutions capable of bringing change to the oppressed, it is necessary to band all those separate efforts together under one unified banner.

One person blogging cannot be expected to change anything outside of her immediate community, but a team of bloggers retweeting and reposting each others' content across a multitude of social media platforms will have exponentially greater reach. This is how bloggers "look after" each other and ensure their survival in the vast, fast moving expanse of cyberspace. This is the kind of "combined arms warfare" that makes modern armed forces so powerful. We can use the same tools in our fight against oppression. So team up! Don't fight alone, when a team effort is a dozen times more powerful.

Even in the context of large scale human rights interventions, media outreach must go hand in hand with efforts in the field. Efforts in the field likewise must be connected to strong economic and political means to secure effective, long term improvements in the target nation. Without "strategic command" support plus support from our citizens back home, an individual operation might as well be completely forgotten in the days and weeks to come.

Okay, so we have come to that juncture. I am right now in the "one person blogging" scenario. Where do I get support? Surely, bugging people I've met during the Half the Sky screening would come off as annoying. Why, me the upstart, loudmouthed newbie having the chutzpah to personally stalk the organizers! Tailgating is not a sound strategy!

Speaking of chutzpah (it's a Yiddish word to illustrate gall, epicly silly bravery, etc) I decided to confront my worst fears to secure support from my local community. I confronted my employers, in line with what I had pledged to do during Solonia's Half the Sky discussions earlier this week.

My pledge was thus (in summary):

"To spread awareness that traditional chauvinistic / male psychology is indirectly encouraging gender exploitation."

In this regard, certainly, realistically, we do not expect everyone to be renaissance men, (Rachelle! Explain this term of yours to us please, por favor!) but earlier today a little heart to heart talk with my local Asian employer made him realize that even dominant males today must learn to be sensitive, adaptive and responsible in his actions and decisions.

I then stated that the modern professional world does not welcome the sort of gross ignorance and abusive attitudes shown by traditional male authority that forces women and girls to assume submissive roles. And my boss agreed wholeheartedly and indeed apologized for his past behavior towards me, promising me a secure future as a manager once the next senior colleague retires soon.

All this started from his commenting on my hairstyle and how it was improper for a male in a one to one meeting. I turned it against him by mentioning I went to a Half the Sky screening!

It is only a small battle won in a campaign of massive proportions, but to have confronted the main source of resistance to change in my life, on such short notice and with no support other than "God as my co-pilot", this is most encouraging to me indeed. And I hope it would be for you too, dear reader...

In closing, I state thus:

Outreach is not work. If you seek to fulfill what you love, cultural revolution is inevitable.

And secondly:

Sometimes you have to be David and take down the Goliah in your way, otherwise we will always be stuck in ground zero. Shock and awe is always effective against long term, static opposition, for their set ways make them vulnerable against post-modern "science fiction" adaptive tactics!

"What does not kill me... "

F.A.Q.

"What, how did the hair win over my employer!?"

You might want to refer to the concept of maskerovka - i.e., Russian style Strategic Deception, in yesterday's post!

And an Angel Fell from Heaven...

"I Walked Alone"

Did you ever grow up with an ambition? We all do. That's how we ultimately ended up who we are today.

But some aren't so lucky. Some children want to be a certain someone in life, but are brutally put down by peers, family, friends, made a laughing stock just because their choices in life are "not normal". This discrimination often comes with malicious intent, designed to discourage people from walking the "untried path". An example of someone who was and still is subjected to this little known form of abuse is yours truly. The humiliation was such that I never wished to be known by my real name again, instead developing my crafts through a fictional identity named after a piece of classical music.

"Carmen, Les Toreadors" - by George Bizet, 1875 - get it?

Welcome to my little world, where prosecution and neglect appears to be the common response to, well, most of the things I wanted in life. And when I finally stood up against domestic violence in the family, I was put down by the very people I helped, instead of receiving credit where due - the broken future I have today is a far better outcome than having no leeway to decide at all.

This thing about "clients" biting back at me once I helped them would rear its ugly head from time to time, but that's another story for another time.

It is this suppression of my development as a child and young adult that had me empathize with the women who suffer in silence against impossible odds, with no means of breaking free from the chains that bind them. In these circumstances some have the opportunity to fight back and win. But most do not. And that's the worrying thing, because a successful resistance against oppression relies on numbers and numbers en masse.

Or else you wait. And wait until it was the right time to strike back. No one said cultural change was ever easy. And it takes a different form of warrior to reach out to others, vice battling for self-preservation.

"What Doesn't Kill You, Makes You Stronger"

I may have been a 'freedom fighter' in my own right since the age of 15, but it took another 15 for me to begin my campaign for outreach. What didn't kill me made me stronger, but strongly discouraged me from ever connecting with others on an equal level. And as a result of practising my crafts in closed circles (usually on Facebook) if not outright isolation, many people in my life have a wrong impression of my person, thinking that, in one instance, I am some traditional Chinese person who requires a translator to even communicate with my American business contacts!

But this accidental deception is not all bad. In another much more recent case I assisted one lovely Californian actress in a matter requiring swift social justice and sound domestic prowess. No one knew a mere Facebook friend from Singapore could have that much of an impact... until the job was done and done well. It is this maskerovka, Russian for "strategic deception" that allows me to fight back against impossible odds and win. Surgical strikes against key targets are sometimes far more effective than resistance en masse. And yes, I found you could apply sound military logic to almost any challenge in life.

This is the kind of mission that requires not a familiar friend but a mysterious stranger with a unique professional code of conduct, supported by an employer who knows exactly what she wants to achieve. And unlike all of my past and present local employers she was willing to give me a chance to strike out and achieve something big for my future. I waited 29 years for that chance to prove my worth, proving that the feminist values and ethics I hold dear throughout all these years of suffering in silence, were ultimately correct.

"Marta's Legacy"

It was not my first intervention on behalf of "clients" - I had previously turned the winds of fate around for a young Portuguese girl, turning her hurt and neglect into strength. Marta went on to become Portugal's first policewoman and my first love, who passed away 5 years ago. It was the hurt from her loss that drove me to re-prioritize my life, making sure that her death was not in vain. She had, before my knowing her, endured a lifetime of abuse at the hands of a violent father, a school that did nothing but bully her, and a society that was preying on young vulnerable persons just like her.

I went on to apply experience based on my mission to Portugal to force social change in my current workplace, which had used to be male dominated and oppressive towards female employees and staff alike. It was indeed ironic that law firms were in the past employing ladies only yet discriminated against women and had no regard for human rights. My local employer had time and time again, complained loudly and in public earshot that "women clients are always troublesome".

One day he made the mistake of telling me in private that "women are always like that one" (in Singlish) when commenting on the words and actions of a lady client. I replied if he knew I was a feminist and that I keep this hairstyle of mine to convey just that.

He was embarrassed. And for the next few years he went out of his way to make sure my life was a living hell in the firm, making sure I received nothing in the way of training, support, or even the opportunity to network with my peers and fellow paralegals in other firms. He blamed me for every single wrongdoing in the firm and denied me the right to seek counsel or to resign. My pay was cut $300 below market rate, leaving me to try and support my mom and for a time I was living on a salary that was less than that of an average McDonald's part-time staff.

But whatever does not kill me, makes me stronger. Like a ship in the storm I managed to maintain steerageway through constant effort while pursuing a campaign of constant learning on the Internet. I did well publicized community service after work hours and made sure everyone knew of my commitment to promoting road safety for young motorcycle riders through engineering excellence and combat aviation-derived "piloting" psychology.

In the end, when my list of hobbies included being a crime-fighting volunteer in my neighborhood, I could tell that they "have had enough" and quit their campaign of harassment. By that time, hilariously, I even saved up enough money to display Victorian finery in my office and wear the most extravagant Indian traditional fashions - I dressed in that fashion because my local employers too were outright RACIST towards Indians!

No one said anything in protest. After all, my Victorian stuff are too awesome!

Pillows, dolls, Victorian pictures, finally added civility to a formerly rude workplace.

"And an Angel Fell from Heaven"

But being a survivor and winning the respect of my (incredibly stingy, Oriental) local employers was not enough. I have an elderly mom to take care of and a lot of catching up to do with regards to my future. I am not afraid to admit that I was living on "a wing of a prayer" for some time thanks to job related stress and an inability to make a move anywhere due to lack of finances (Dad passed away years ago and left me no inheritance - refer to Chapter 1 of this blog post with regards to the family attitude towards my person since I was born).

Then one day while browsing through a Facebook doll collectors' group I saw this lady being harassed by other group members just because the dolls she posted pictures of were "different" to the typical picture-perfect Barbies and Victorian heirlooms common in the group. I swung into action and in my following comments assured her that her collection was in good taste and that she should "ignore the naysayers" because they evidently do not realize that her Spanish dolls were designed for a wholly different and higher class of doll collectors than the norm, being of a "fantasy" appearance very similar to the alien races depicted in works such as J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings.

Things were quiet for a while after our initial conversation; I was involved with assisting another "client" in Georgia at that time, who in "thanks" for my counsel decided to declare openly that "I was an affront to her soul" on religious grounds!

Rachelle contacted me soon after and in catching up with me, I openly admitted I felt a bit depressed due to the previous "client" I had. Long story short, she helped me and I helped her deal with commercial legal matters (I had to learn the US Uniform Commercial Code in one night flat for that mission) amongst other things, and she now is my sponsor for a secure future in the United States, just like I've dreamed of for ages but passed it off for lack of family support and funding from my seniors (what good they were).

I found it very fascinating that Rachelle was a stand-up comedian of some renown and she respected very much my thinking and way of life. Unlike virtually all of my local contacts (family, friends, colleagues and whatnot), she accepted me for who I am and never forced any ideals on me.

And I was not joking when, during the first time I spoke with her on the phone, I remarked that I felt like I was speaking to an identical copy of myself.

With backing secured, I actively sought community events in Singapore to have some practise at outreach (for my future and all, you know). The screening for Half the Sky at The Hub was just my second community event I attended, and in one short 40 minute session, I realized the true meaning of the path I've followed since childhood.

It might have been a dark, impossible tunnel to traverse for all (almost) 3 decades of my life, but I always believed that one day there will be light.

And what glorious light it was. No doubt, I will continue to lose friends for daring to openly present myself as a feminist, but that is nothing new. 

Picture credits - Secret {W} Business & Solonia Teodros

Resistance to change is so yesterday!