My diet

I am now taking a simple diet which I think is healthy though I am limited by my dietary knowledge which is in turn limited by human knowledge of our time.

Being born into a poor farmer’s family at the end of the Second World War(1944), we, for years, barely have enough to eat for survival. We normally ate three simple, small meals a day of similar food: white rice, vegetables of various types grown in the farm, fish bought from neighboring fishermen, eggs from chicken reared by my mom. Pork and chicken were only available on festive days when these were first offered to deities and ancestors that my family used to worship.

My parents held fast to their belief that rice is the only main food that we need for survival; other foods are appetizers or supplementary or condiments to go with rice and fruits are kids’ junk food that are harmful. We grew up till adolescence based on this dietary philosophy. In those days, instead of plain water, we drank plenty of a brand of green tea called White Monkey(白毛猴) which is still available in the market. At times of coconut harvesting, as we have to work laboriously the whole day, we also have morning and afternoon tea which normally consisted of coffee, biscuit or boiled banana, to give us enough energy. The water we used was either well water or harvested rain water from the roof. The cooking oil was home made coconut oil. This is a counter example to common belief that poly-saturated oil is harmful as my cholesterol and triglyceride have been low despite more than 15 years consuming coconut cooking oil.

I stayed in hostels from Senior Middle one to Upper six. In Senior Middle school I ate bread with jam and tea with milk for breakfast and similar lunch and dinner as before. In the two years in Form Six, I have similar breakfast as in Senior Middle School and an improved lunch and dinner which were prepared more in line with the food pyramid of the 1960s. In my 4 years studying in an Australian University, I have bread with butter or jam, or fruits only for breakfast, Australian dishes for lunch in the cafeteria, and I cooked my own dinner mainly consisting of vegetables and beef or mutton or pork or chicken and sometimes fish. Up till then, I knew little about food pyramid or dietary values. From the age of 15 to 25, my body weight remained more or less constant at 57 Kg, despite the Sydney winters and some fatty Australian diets and that fact that I ate as much every meal as my contemporaries during this phase of my life.

From the early 1970s, I have my own family and diets of our choice. But our dietary knowledge did not go beyond the popular food pyramid posters on the walls of private clinics in town. In the early 1980s, we started to read Western dietary books and started to pay more attention to our diets as we started to put on weight and feel fatigue due to age and workload. But there were not without controversies in these dietary books. Shall we eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a queen and dinner like a pauper? Or shall we skip breakfast, eat light lunch and heavy dinner? Shall we emphasize on carbohydrate or protein? These were unsettled questions that bothered us.

In 1992, I started to take up Yoga and follow somewhat faithfully a “Yoga diet for office worker”, a term I coined for my diet since 1992. This diet consists of fruit for breakfast, carbohydrate and vegetables for lunch and protein and vegetables for dinner; no supper, no snack, no coffee, no red tea and no refined sugar. When I first started this diet, within a month, I loss some 5 Kg extra weight that I didn’t need and I felt my health has improved. I more or less maintain this diet most of the time till date. I do take snacks and tea with milk at times in coffee shops though but not really very often. My weight is now 70 Kg with a height of 178 cm to match.

I mainly eat vitamin A and C-rich papaya for breakfast. Other fruits include pineapple, banana, guava, star fruit, pomelo, local orange, apple, dried prune, imported orange, mandarin, jackfruit, Kiwifruit, dragon fruit, grapes, avocado, water melon. I eat fruit breakfast generously. Sometimes I do take bread mostly whole meal bread, dim sum, oatmeal for breakfast. I hardly use butter or margarine to spread on bread. Yoghurt is a recent addition.

For lunch, I eat rice, now mostly unpolished local rice or rice noodle soup. Vegetables are either raw or cooked, mainly green leafy vegetable like kale, broccoli or spinach, tomato, cucumber, beet root, carrot, radish, cabbage, long bean, capsicum, pumpkin, bean sprout, garlic, onion, yam, egg-plant, lady’s fingers, Chinese cabbage, bitter gourd , sea weed, lotus root et cetera. Vegetables are steamed or stir fried or boiled in soup. Cooking oils are vegetables oils and are used sparingly. Very little salt is added to my food which is strictly free of MSG (Monosodium glutamate). Meat is consumed for lunch sometimes, but in small quantity.

For dinner, I eat fish, prawn, poultry, egg and pork meat or liver with vegetables. I seldom take beef or lamb or duck. Mostly the meat is steamed or braised; seldom do we fry or grill meat. I eat no rice or very little rice for dinner.

I also take soup that contains both meat and vegetable, and sometimes herds too during lunch and dinner. The other item I take is nut, such as almond, walnut and some seeds, mostly for breakfast. For each meal taken at home, we have soup and two other dishes, normally one vegetable and one meat dish. The meat dish may be meat fried with vegetable. No dessert is taken after lunch or dinner at home, whether it is fruit, sweet, cake, sweetened tea or coffee. The quantity of each of my main meal is small compared to what most of my friends are taking. Processed food such as canned, pickled, dried and preserved food is avoided almost totally.

I drink plain unboiled water mostly, green tea daily and sometimes a few pegs of red wine after dinner. Now I seldom drink Coke or other similar sugared drinks except iso-tonic drinks like 100plus occasionally.

The list is by no means exhaustive but it covers the main items I usually take. I try to eat what my body needs and avoid what is harmful to it. Based on my dietary knowledge, I eat more anti-oxidant food, low caloric food, wholesome, nutritious food with plenty of fibers to help cleansing and I eat about ¾ full each meal.

By Hiew Jan 2008