Poetry
Let me not pray to be sheltered from dangers
but to be fearless in facing them.
Let me not beg for the stilling of my pain
but for the heart to conquer it.
Let me not look for allies in life's battlefield
but to my own strength.
Let me not crave in anxious fear to be saved
but hope for the patience to win my freedom.
Grant that I may not be a coward,
feeling Your mercy in my success alone;
But let me find the grasp of Your hand in my failure.
When I was a teenager, I loved poems, especially the above poem by Rabindranath Tagore.
Now, I realise how lonely the author’s battle is in this poem, compared to what you see written in the book of Psalms. I even thought the poem was slightly religious, as it hints of a God. But I was wrong.
In Tagore’s poem, human strength — one’s own strength — is exalted. It speaks of human pride, where we think we can do everything alone. The book of Psalms is a complete contrast to that.
We can’t do everything in life without allies.
No matter how strong you are, how much willpower you possess, our strength is not unlimited. If we keep on going on our own strength, not relying on anyone’s help, we are going to run out of strength eventually and crumble into pieces.
Are you choosing the right oil?
I have been using Rice Bran oil for years, assuming that it must be healthy oil because it’s so expensive...
Turns out there are better alternatives!
Great things I love about Perth
Since 2018 single use plastic bags have been banned, and Coles and Woolworths have a collection bin where you can drop off your soft plastics.
TerraCycle collects your used cosmetics.
There are a lot of libraries! A good collection of Ebooks and audio books across all libraries, and free access to services such as Kanopy (which I mentioned in previous posts) and Mango Languages which I love and will be reviewing later.
SLWA is one of my favourite libraries. They even have a "ask a librarian" service which turned out to be more helpful than I expected!
The challenges of tracking calories in/out
One thing I really struggle with is overeating food that doesn't come with nutrition info, that you cook yourself, or others cook for you. When I'm eating out at KFC it's simple to make an informed decision because they list all the calories on the menu, but how on earth are you supposed to calculate how much is in your homecooked meal?
A while ago I saw an advertisement for a smartwatch, it was either a Samsung or an Apple smartwatch. In the advertisement, the smartwatch somehow records what goes down into our mouths and calculates how much calories it was worth! I wonder if this is for real or just fantasy.
Estimating the amount of calories burned off during an exercise is not as convoluted, but vague nevertheless. How this works is still a mystery to me, and one of my future projects is to understand the science behind calorie tracking (whether it's for food or exercise).
For now I use my smartband to detect my heartrate, input my average heartrate over the duration of my exercise with the Runtastic calculator, and that gives an estimate of how much calories I burned. Which is around the same number I would get if I used the standard calculator (which calculates the calories based on what sort of exercise you did, and for how long).
How about you? Is there any reliable, even proven way to calculate the calories that go in and out of your body? Is smartwatch food analysis feasible, or just fantasy?
Making use of nutrition labels
If you care about nutrition labelling, if you want to be able to read it and feel more in control of what you're consuming, these little cards may help.
I ordered a whole bunch of resources from Livelighter and this was one of them. It's a little card that you can stick inside your wallet or phone case. I've used it to compare between different brands of my favourite food. It hasn't made a dent in my weight loss but helps me think more about what I'm about to buy.
Recently, I completed an EDX course titled 2018 The Science of Weight Loss: Dispelling Diet Myths and discovered a new tactic that I have found useful. The concept is to calculate the amount of exercise you need to do to burn off food you have eaten.
So when I see something that I find hard to resist, like a can of coke or cake, I look at how many calories are in a serving. So if a can of coke is worth 500KJ I have an idea in my mind that it is equivalent to 15 mins of hard work doing zumba and if I give into temptation I'll have to work it off -- all for what? This has helped me resist buying coke from the store a few times but unfortunately right now there is a box of coke cans in the house and I'm drinking it up mindlessly now that it's so readily available.
This has also helped me resist a buying a pricey cup of milk tea at the milk tea shops. I take one look at the menu, one regular cup is like over 1000 KJ, around 1500-2000 KJ, which equates to 1 hour of working really hard at zumba. So I shake my head and think "No, it's not worth it. A little bit of sugar isn't worth $6, and isn't worth the effort either."
Weight loss with Kanopy
Today's question: Do you know of a good website/article that compares the caffeine content across different beverages?
If you're a member of a library in Perth, you have the privilege of accessing a website called Kanopy.
You get 4 credits every month to watch 4 videos. The downside is that once you use up your credits, that's it! I couldn't even find the option to purchase extra credits.
Kanopy is a streaming service that I like because it's got a lot of interesting documentaries.
My favourites are the videos they have on the subject of health.
The first video I watched was a documentary called Unsupersize Me - The Woman Who Lost 200 lbs in a Year. Basically she went on a vegan diet and started doing gym with her coach. Her whole body shape changed completely after one year. But I think her face kind of lost its glow for some reason I can't explain why, so I'm not really convinced about this vegan diet thing.
I really like this series called Changing Body Composition through Diet and Exercise. I'm in the process of organizing my notes, which I'll work on publishing one of these days.
One video called Evaluating Dietary Supplements claims that caffeine increases metabolism, especially when paired with EGCG (green tea has both caffeine and EGCG). So if you drink your coffee or green tea on an empty stomach, first thing in the morning before breakfast, and 30-45 minutes before exercise, apparently this will boost the fat loss from doing moderate intensity exercise.
Not the first time I've come across this piece of information, but it was exciting to see someone else reaffirm it and explain it in a different way. Last year I looked up some academic journal articles on green tea and obesity.
This is something I've been eager to try out, but there have been a couple of obstacles. First of all, I've been living in the middle of the desert this past month and can't get my hands on Japanese green tea, specifically matcha because matcha is a varient of green tea that has more concentrated levels of caffeine. Second, you're supposed to take 3-6 mg per kg of body mass. So if you're 70 kg then you gotta consume 210-420mg of caffeine. I'm still looking for good sources of information on how much caffeine is in your average cuppa, but from what I know, that's equivalent to either a potent blend of Starbucks coffee (which doesn't really exist here in Australia), or several cups of your instant coffee. Unfortunately, I am unusually sensitive to caffeine, and that's more cups of coffee than I can stomach.
Back when I was in Japan I lost a lot of weight effortlessly and was 38 kg at my skinniest. I am not sure why but there were a lot of factors I guess.
1. I drank Japanese tea (my favourite being 爽健美茶 straight from the vending machine) every day
2. I did not eat very much and sometimes survived on a takoyaki.
3. I was usually walking at a fast pace because I was always getting from one place to the next and trying not to miss the bus/train, browsing through shopping malls as fast as I could.
4. I did Kyudo every couple of days, even though it was just practicing the gomu-yumi hundreds of times over and over again just to strengthen my arms.
Onleihe German Digital Library
Recently a free service called Onleihe came to my attention. It's available for the desktop, as an iOS app, and Android app.
By signing up for the Goethe Institute library, you can use Onleihe to access thousands of German ebooks, audio books, emagazines/newspapers, and evideos.
... None of which I can understand at this point in time.
I had a look at the emagazine series "Deutsch perfekt" which I assume is targeted for intermediate German learners. Because I can still remember some German that I learnt back in high school, I can recognize a few words here and there. But after reading one sentence and not having a clue what I just read, I usually give up at that.
For some reason I have more patience with reading Korean -- enough to study a short article with 300 words per day, anyway.
I am looking forward to the day when I'll be able to enjoy and reap the benefits of this new Onleihe thingy.
Hope this helps.
Echan
