Living A Healthy and Environmentally Friendlier Lifestyle

I’ve been trying to live healthier these days. Not only that Fred and I didn’t get to eat out that often anymore, but we also try to avoid eating junk food (that includes my favorite Samyang and Indomie), or any other kind of processed food. That means, say goodbye to our favorite KFC! 😦 And, we try to opt for the natural ingredients whenever possible.

There are many aspects of this new lifestyle that I wanna talk about, but let’s start with the simplest one. The one we take for granted on our daily basis. Food.

FOOD

We found scary facts about the salt we’ve been using. You know that refined table salt, the white tiny things that will beautifully free flow when you sprinkle them on top of your sunny side up? It has its minerals removed when being processed. Those minerals are actually needed to balance our blood pressure. So we thought, ugh it’s probably better for us to use the more natural one: sea salt. Sea salt is what you get when you take the water from the sea and evaporate it. What’s left is sea salt. It has all the minerals we needed and does not contain a bleaching agent. (That is why table salt is so white). I know, right! Ewwww. Okay, one problem solved.

Then we found another. Our normal sugar contains a lot of calories and hence it causes so many bad effects we want to avoid. So that’s not good for us either. We now use coconut sugar or sometimes honey as our natural sweetener. (You can search for other kinds of natural sweetener out there like maple syrup, dates, molasses, stevia or really, anything natural). We just use what’s locally available here. Just DON’T ever think about substituting your sugar with the commercial sugar-free sweetener, like you know, those so-called “sugar” for diabetics. It is the worst.

Even the simplest ingredients that we thought are safe, are actually not. This was very frustrating at first.

We substitute our white rice to brown or red rice. Because apparently white rice is also processed. It has the bran, germ, and the husk removed. And it is polished to bright white. This processing thing reduces the nutrient and fiber from the rice itself. So it’s not really nutritional.

We limit our coffee intake daily, but sometimes I still take more than I suppose to. Hehe.

Then, of course, we try to eat only the local fruits and vegetables, assuming that it doesn’t contain a lot of pesticides or preservatives or whatever that is. So, goodbye New Zealand fruits. Apparently, we thought that there must be something bad on you because you look really fresh here, even fresher than the local fruit. And you stay fresh for too long, we think. That’s suspicious, oranges.

We also plant our own herbs. So far we have basil, peppermint, key lime, coriander, and chili.

Most of the time, I made overnight oats for breakfast. The thing about overnight oats is that you make them the night before, so you literally have nothing to prepare in the morning. Basically, you just soak your oats (rolled oats or instant oats, doesn’t matter) with fluid (water or milk). I use milk because I like the taste of it, but my mom can’t drink milk so she uses water instead.

Of course, soaking your oats with just plain milk won’t be such an interesting meal to eat in the morning. It’ll make me angry. So I usually toss in some other ingredients like raw almond, chia seed, flax seed, coconut flakes, honey, goji berry, and fresh fruits. Basically, I just toss everything I have in hand. I once tried mixing it with matcha powder and I really like it. 

If you want to see how easy it is to make one, check out my video below. And don’t forget to subscribe to our Youtube channel! We are new on Youtube so we need your support 😉

So… yup, I’ve been doing a lot of cooking lately. And I find it easy to do on a daily basis when I’m taking days off from my baking routine. But when I’m back to the kitchen? I don’t know yet. But yeah, so far so good.

EXERCISE

I’m pretty aware that I have this lack of physical exercise and that it’s not good for my unfit body. I quit my Zumba class because, after months of doing it, I got bored. Don’t ask me to do yoga because it’s one of the things I can’t do – it’s even more boring. Don’t worry, I’ll figure it out later. *excuse*

Meanwhile, I just need to play with @totopotato. And that should count as an exercise 😛 *another excuse*

Oh besides, mopping our room, doing the dishes, and wiping our windows clean are physical exercise, right? *another excuse*

PLASTIC WASTE

At some point, Fred mentioned about this book called No Impact Man. This book struck me so hard and made me realize how I never thought about the environment. I never cared about my plastic waste, which in fact can not be decomposed in hundreds of years. I never cared about throwing toxic waste in the water because I thought it was the easiest way. I didn’t know that the toxic will eventually affect the river and the sea, and the creatures living in it. And sooner or later it’ll end up on our dinner table. And then we ask why people nowadays are always sick. It’s scary. 

So anyway, a small change I did was to bring my shopping bag (which I already have in hand) so I don’t have to use plastic bag whenever I do shopping. I tried to buy things from the local market because they don’t give us veggies in plastic wraps or plastic container. They just give us the veggies – which is exactly the only thing that we need.

I still buy things in container or plastic packaging, so I’m not totally plastic free. But if possible, I try to buy things in bulk size. Like dish soap, cooking oil, and anything else that come in packaging. So I only end up with one plastic waste (although it’s a bigger size) than several small plastics that I can reuse later for another purpose.

I try to reuse the jars I got from buying jams and honey. I use some for organizers, some for storing my super food like chia seed, flax seed, and all that. Some for my homemade jam. I don’t know, in short, I just use it for something else.

What else…

I can’t remember what else. But I’ll update this post when I do!

The next thing is to …..

SAY NO TO DISPOSABLE THINGS

That includes paper napkins, tissue paper, cling wrap, or anything that you normally throw away after minutes (or hours) of using it. I still use cotton pads and cotton buds, though.

So, we changed our tissue paper with some washcloths. My sister Karen gave us some cute little cloth and we cut it into smaller pieces. Then we use it as our tissue paper! It’s even better than tissue paper I think because it is much more absorbent and actually is quite easy to clean. Besides, we don’t have to run to the grocery store when we run out of tissue paper! Win win.

One of the extreme things I did this month is to change my menstrual product from disposable pad to washable cloth menstrual pad. I’ve been using disposable pads for my whole life, so this is a big change. I went through weeks of consideration. Mainly because the thought of cleaning cloth from my blood made me sick. So I was being hesitant.

But then I found that not only that the disposable pads are obviously bad for the environment, it is actually also bad for ourselves. It’s not breathable. It is sometimes irritating (admit it! Or, try to feel it on your next period), and cause sweating which makes us feel uncomfortable during the period. Some people also are allergic to the bleaching agents used to get our pads white (ever wonder why it’s so white? uh-uh). And the pads themselves contain pesticide and plastic chemicals which (the internet said) can enter our bloodstream. It’s scary! So yes, I took the cloth pad. I chose the one from Dewi Rungu because it’s made from 100% natural cotton flannel. And it’s unbleached. And it’s just simple cloth that you fold and clean easily. It has this little holder thing. And this no-leaks thing. It’s a great product. (I swear this is not an endorsement). I got my Dewi Rungu cloth pad from Hug Mama Store because they have the stock in my hometown! 🙂 It’s not easy to use at the first time. But we can only appreciate things when we get the hang of it, right? But I’d say, you just gotta try. Because now I don’t think I can go back to the disposable one.

Some of my friends suggest that I use a menstrual cup instead of cloth pad so I think I’m going to try that one later.

HOW’S IT?

So far, I’m happy with what we’re doing. Now, writing this piece, I feel overwhelmed because I never realized how far we’ve gone from the unhealthy lifestyle we’ve been living our whole life to this. I know that this is still far from the ideal idea of healthy and sustainable living, but the thing is, you just gotta keep going. And see how far you can go. A small change is better than nothing at all 🙂

Plus, this whole go-green thing saves us a lot of money 😛 Main contributor of money wasting: eating out & disposable menstrual pad.

Until the next post, guys! I’m planning to write more about Home, Style & Living. (This one is Living, I think, I don’t know) if you like this kind of post. What do you think?

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SHARON LOH
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