Food is medicine.

Growing up in a Peranakan family, where the kitchen is the heart of the family and eating is our love language, I've always been drawn to food. Its ability to bond strangers, its complexities and traditions, even food politics. My taste buds were first honed in my childhood kitchen, and then along the years as a food writer. The first juicy chomp into a loaded burger, the seawater creaminess of freshly shucked oysters, the last lick of a perfectly risen chocolate souffle. In that world, people spent hours debating on kitchen gadgets and Michelin-starred restaurants. Excess was celebrated. And taste was everything.

Fast forward to the world I'm in now – one of yoga and wellness, with trending buzzwords like raw food and juice cleanses. A week into my teacher training, I found myself once again drawn to food, but in a vastly different way. I wanted to know about nutrition, about eating for health, about gut health, about food intolerances and just what they did to the body. I wanted to eat a million things at a time, but this time taste was secondary – health, was key. However, there were so many resources out there that I didn't quite know where to start and which camp to follow. It got exhausting picking my way through the abyss of knowledge and opinions, and keeping up with trends that came and went in a snap – what do you mean raw juices are out and bone broth is in? On top of that, eating well on the go always felt like an uphill task in Singapore, not to mention a time-consuming and expensive one. Remind me again why I shouldn't eat dairy, or sugar, or holy moly – something that combines both!

Hence, it is always nice to sit down to a session led by an expert in the general field of nutrition who offers a broader view on the subject, as opposed to an expert in say, raw food, or the Paleo diet. Fagan and I certainly made the right decision to spend our Tuesday night date attending a talk by Suj of health consultancy Biotailor. Working in the health and fitness industry, we can't lie and say we don't have any nutrition knowledge, but we always struggle to make the right food choices – because really, what IS right? And true enough, the talk's pointed out several loopholes in modern urban diets, ours included! I thought I would share the five biggest lessons I took away that night.

1. Urbanites are experiencing what is termed civilised malnutrition – we live well, yet make terrible food choices like having cookies and coffee for snacks (or lunch!). Apart from fruit and greens, our diet is also lacking in good protein – think beans, tofu and white meat like chicken and fish.
2. We need enzymes to digest our food, and these can only be found in raw fruit and vegetables. An easy way to fit raw food into our diets is to have fruit for a snack. According to Suj, oftentimes, excess flab around the belly is because of a lack of raw fruit and greens. "Eat more of that and it will disappear," she said. Worth a try, for sure.
3. Food combination is very important, and it is a big no-no to eat fruit right after a meal! Different foods take different amounts of time to digest – for example, fruit takes 30 minutes to move through our digestive tract; chicken takes three hours. What happens when we eat an orange right after roast chicken is often flatulence and bloatedness. Why? Because the orange riding on the MRT is stuck behind the chicken, which is well, strolling.
4. Vegetables are complex carbohydrates. (I never knew that.) A recommended breakdown of a meal is 40 percent protein and 60 percent complex carbohydrates (veggies, whole grains, not too much of the white stuff like white rice and bread), along with good fat like avocado, oils and nuts.
5. Eat your fruit, drink your vegetables. Fruits contain natural sugars, and fruit juice is a lot of that packed into a glass. This causes insulin spikes, which over time, can result in Type 2 Diabetes, caused by our body rejecting insulin. The fibre in fruit helps to prevent the spikes, and it is also recommended that we eat fruit along with some protein, like nuts, to further level the blood sugar levels.

I don't reject the many specialised diets out there – something has to work in order for people to sing its praises – but me, I lean towards the sensible route. Eat clean, with everything in moderation. We put Suj in the firing squad towards the end of the session, asking questions like "So is coconut oil better than others?", and I appreciated that she didn't try to pretend to be a know-it-all. Instead, she weighed things out, and then suggested we try it out and decide for ourselves. That to be is both responsible, and sustainable.

Fagan and I left the talk feeling super inspired, and I am slowly incorporating her tips into the way I eat, making tweaks that fit my lifestyle along the way. It is one hell of a battle to change over 28 years of food habits – I kid you not – but Suj said something that made so much sense:

So many of us save and plan for our retirement. Shouldn't we eat and 'save' our health for our old age, too?

Manifesting magic.

 
Last Saturday, I taught a workshop about manifesting our intentions, and tapping on our yoga and meditation practice to quiet down our mind, so we can listen to our heart's desires. Often, when I coax my thoughts to a quiet (or at least a soft murmur!), and bank down on its sometimes unjustifiable expectations – it feels like I am sliding off my blinkers to see the world for the first time, a world brimming with possibilities that were always there, only disregarded by my narrow mind.

The thing about goal-setting is that it is rather two-dimensional in its approach – set a target and go achieve it. The emphasis is often this: How can I get this, do this or achieve this, so I will feel better? I will feel powerful when I finally drive that sports car. I will feel worthy when I get that raise, that promotion. Our ability to feel good is pegged to a target achievement. At the same time, we are often so driven that we develop tunnel vision, and with our blinkers on we lose sight of so many possibilities going by us.

Manifesting, on the other hand, is a lot more fun, because instead of browbeating our way to the goal, we invite it to unfold with grace. The principle of manifesting is simple – light attracts light. The key here is to create our reality based on how we feel, instead of what we think. The hard work comes not in achieving a set target, but in making ourselves feel good, so we can be an energetic match for attracting the goodness we want into our lives. By softening our expectations (these come from the head!), we also give the universe space to intervene as and when it wishes to work its magic, maybe sprinkle a little fairy dust.

One one hand, there's hard work, making choices that nourish us inside out to build the positive vibes; but on the other hand there's also surrender – letting go, trusting that what will be, will be. We may just be over a month into 2015, but already I have witnessed so many serendipitous opportunities, with some seemingly coincidental moments that made even my very logical fiancé go: "Wait a minute... Is this really happening???"

A big part of me believes that magic is out there – in fact, it is everywhere, as long as we put in the effort to quieten our mind and open our heart to it. Then again, could it be that magic really isn't magic, simply unrecognised potential and opportunities that are, until witnessed, floating right under our noses?

The (re)awakening.

I started blogging here on sarongskirts 10 years ago, during my younger days when I really loved wearing sarong skirts. I kept the blog all the way until mid-2012, when I decided to restart on a new slate on Tumblr. At that time, I was seven months into my renewed yoga journey after a long hiatus, and I felt trapped by the identity I had created on the seven-year-old sarongskirts platform. Unknown to me then, I was experiencing all these subtle yoga-illuminated shifts inside, so I was finding it increasingly difficult to relate to the written world I'd created over the years – a world where luxury travel and trending eats were of utmost importance. Sarong skirts had made way for chic dresses and heels in my wardrobe, and online, sarongskirts no longer seemed like the right home either for my new brainwaves on yoga and its grand philosophies.

For two and a half years, I experimented with various domains and platforms, and at one time invested much effort in setting up sproutblog, a website that I believed encapsulated the mindful life. It was certainly the right home for all my thoughts on wellness and yoga, but the tipping point came very quickly when I realised that writing for sproutblog made me feel like I was back in magazine publishing. I didn't quite care for that, so for most of last year, I stopped blogging completely. Teaching yoga full time and sharing all those yoga-related thoughts in class had taken all the big words out of me – I was left with non-related musings, but I couldn't find a home for them on sprout.

Writing is like coming home – an intangible emotion akin to each time I step onto my mat. While 2014 was the year that I truly felt like I was beginning to live my dharma, the writer inside me was constantly unfulfilled. I thought of starting over, creating a new platform, and I spent a long time pondering over which new blog name would fit. Should it be about karma, or dharma, or santosha, or maybe something cute like Buddha belly? I played around with countless word combinations in my head, but nothing felt right. I kept coming back to sarongskirts, but a part of me resisted it, simply because there was too much history.

Yesterday, I taught a workshop on Manifesting Your Life, one about wiping the slate clean. After the session, an ex-classmate who attended it came up to me to share a memory of us from 15 years back, a memory from a time that now seems so distant and almost unreal. Listening to her, I realised that I was silly for wanting to lock away my past, silly for constantly looking for new writing slates. I can't feel more different now than I was in secondary school, but if not for that now unrelatable past, the two of us might not be standing in the same place here in the present, connected by yoga and its profound impact on our lives.

I found my love for writing here on sarongskirts, and that love has taken me to so many places. While I can no longer quite relate to the things I used to write about, it seems to me that it is only poetic justice to restart the slate on this good, old one. And you know what – it feels right.