My partner often calls me a weirdo for this, but one of my favourite pastimes is experimenting with my body’s physical limits. As a medical student at my junior college year, I underwent quasi-military training with the first responders unit for six months, pushing my physical boundaries with very little to no food. It was intense, but I was surprised at what the body was capable of doing in extreme conditions.

This experience led me to start my adventures with diets, shifting in between diets, quick to follow the ever-changing internet trends. My latest musing was intermittent fasting. Having tried…

Diets do work for some people. For others though, deliberate food restriction — or more commonly referred to as diets — could ironically be counterintuitive for losing weight.

Several studies have demonstrated that the dieting mindset can lead to food preoccupation, binge-eating behaviours, and weight cycling. As illustrated by this 2006 study by Professor Neumark-Sztainer from the University of Minnesota, dieting predicts a 5-year weight gain and increases activation of areas in the brain that is responsible for attention and reward in response to food.

Why then, do we still fall to the temptation of diets? The same reason we…

Calories Out > Calories In = Weight Loss

It seems quite simple, doesn't it? Considering the above equation is true, there are two strategies to losing weight. One could plan a rigorous exercise regimen to keep caloric expenditure constantly above the intake, or one could just simply eat less.

While the idea appears convenient, our biology does not conform to those premises. Homeostasis seeks to maintain nearly constant conditions in the internal environment. Any biological function will therefore oscillate around a predetermined mean, within a range that is considered normal.

The concept of homeostasis is rarely talked about outside medical…

Last year was tough on all of us.

I was bound to start my penultimate year as a medical student, finally stepping feet into the exciting trenches of the clinical scene and getting a feel of what I signed up for almost half a decade back. Instead, I saw the academic schedule halt indefinitely by mid-March, and by a matter of weeks, the impact of the pandemic came into full swing.

Medical training screeched to a standstill, and I was forced to retreat into physical isolation.

Life in isolation was very uninspiring. With the absence of social company and interesting…

The vegan diet has gained major popularity in recent times. The diet, often deemed as the healthiest diet in the world, has shown to be able to promote heart health and reduce cancer risk. But some people see beyond the health reasons and instead owe it upon ethical concerns for their dietary preferences.

I first came across the concept of weganism through Tim Ferriss’ Five Bullet Fridays newsletter, who also wrote New York Times bestsellers 4-Hour Workweek and 4-Hour Chef. Here’s how he defines weganism, quoting from his blog post verbatim.

Wegan /ˈwēɡən/ noun. Someone who follows a vegan diet…

Since I started incorporating intermittent fasting into my daily routine late last year, I began to observe patterns and reactions that would otherwise have not been brought to my conscious attention.

One rather interesting observation I noticed had to do with meal timing and hunger patterns throughout the day. To my surprise, the longer I held myself off of food, the more comfortable I became with hunger. It seemed paradoxical that the longer I chose to stay away from food, the less my body wanted it.

While that sensation is intuitive with the practice of intermittent fasting, as most long-term…

While this may seem obvious, I sometimes marvel at the sheer prevalence of conventional thinking in communities, organisations, and businesses. Conventional is at the surface, a safe bet. It rarely offends, but great things are almost never squeezed out of conventional thinking. Conventional thinking is like ordering a vanilla ice cream. It’s predictable; you can’t really go wrong with vanilla.

With an unconventional mindset, you’re more likely to order a chocolate chilli ice cream (which is amazing, by the way). Or study two majors at once. …

Granted, the word ‘unhealthy’ does not convey any sort of objective truth. Scientists and researchers have been documenting the effects of food and diets on weight loss and diseases for centuries, but studies are never concluded in terms of healthy and unhealthy. Scientific papers are excellent at conveying their objective findings, but they are often difficult to translate to daily English.

The field of nutritional sciences strives to constantly improve dietary guidelines and recommendations. It is their duty to deliver accurate information to help us navigate through the cacophonous dieting scene and identify which foods to incorporate into our diet…