Today is the 31st of July 2017.
More than half a year has gone and what have you achieved in this seven months?
Did you stick to the resolution that you made for yourself?
I don’t really remember mine or I can’t even be sure if I had one but I think I said I wanted to be better. To be a better person in general perhaps, a better daughter, a better friend, a better employee, just to be better.

Well I’d like to think that I am finally making a greater effort to be a better person.
For a start, I am finally paying attention to my health and what I am eating. (Of course the secret to this is that I gained almost 3 kilograms which is totally unacceptable.)
I guess the reason for my weight gain is that I binge eat on my road to recovery from a bad break up.
I remember myself binge eating a lot of years back after a break up and I gained weight to the point where a mamak guy told me that I’m getting fatter haha. That is so embarrassing.
Eating makes me happy, it still does but I would like to do it more consciously.

So my brother asked me what have I been eating in Melbourne. :(

So now I am just trying to shed some fats by doing it the right way.
I went to gym and did exercise at home 5 days in a week which is shocking because I’ve never really been this dedicated.
I have since stopped eating butter and I won’t eat butter until I lost my weight. In fact even after I lost my weight I still wouldn’t eat butter like how I used to with exception at fine dining restaurants cause their bread and butter are always super nice haha.
I’ve also cut down sugar which is the number one source for weight gain. I didn’t realise how sugar is in everything until I became more concious by checking on the nutrition information on food packagings. Just because you don’t eat ice-cream or cakes doesn’t mean you’re not having sugar intake.
SUGAR IS EVERYWHERE! Wanted to put tomato relish on my toast but I realise the existence of sugar in it so I ended up slathering mustard instead which have zero sugar by the way.

I’ve cut down my rice intake as well and it has been four days since I last had rice. SHOCKING seeing that I am such a rice freak. Instead of eating rice for dinner I eat my roast vegetables with fish or chicken with quinoa wraps.
I’ve cut down red meat tremendously, only twice last week and this is a news because if you know me I am a fucking carnivore. I eat like a man, I need my meat and rice.
Now I’m just like, roast vegetables without oil and sauce wtf.
For breakfast I just have bircher,chia or rice flakes with soy milk. Me, soy milk. Me and soy milk.
It’s a joke, I never drink soy milk in Australia.
Even when I get a free cup of chai I was asking questions like are there sugar and milk in it.
I can have soy milk with anything but not coffee. I need my coffee with full cream milk and my way of cutting it is instead of drinking a 7oz coffee at work, I now drink piccolo instead.
It is not entirely for health and weight issues, I also want to be more ethical towards animals.
I know I cant be vegetarian but I just want to say no to red meat as much as I can.
The image of these animals screaming while being slaughter kinda makes me go…….. I don’t know how to put it in words.
I know I will never give it up entirely but I still want to make an effort to cut it out as much as I can.

I’ve been buying free range eggs for a long time now and although the price is almost double from caged eggs I still tell myself to make peace with the price. It’s a pity to have a life being caged, no where to roam and then ended up in someone’s dinner plate.
I talked to my mom a couple of days ago and said that we need to start eating free range chicken and she said one free range chicken is equivalent to two chickens she bought from market.
So I said it’s okay, we cant bring the money along to our grave anyway and she said, ‘yeah but you never ever pay for the chickens.’ HAHAHA, yeap sorry mom. I’ll still convince her none the less.

There are people who decided to be a vegetarian or vegan and if you are one of them, good on you.
Sometimes being a vegan seems like a hipster thing to do but being vegan doesn’t equals to not eating meat and eggs, or not drinking milk. The commitment is more to that.
It means no honey and mayonnaise. It means no leather goods and if you want to be a vegan please give up your channel bag or prada shoes. It means no fur and no down jacket that contains real feather. It really means so much more.

I’m not a person who can do something so great that I can change the world but I want to do my small part as one of the residence of this earth to make this place less shitty that’s all.
If I can make a change in my eating habits and diet for animals, all the more I should do better in trying to make a change for human beings.

All my life I’ve been the kind of consumer who buy cheap things, buy loads of them even if they’re of the shittiest quality. I went to Bangkok with an empty luggage bag, filled it all up with new buys and home it went with me.
All the clothes that I have is weighing me down (and probably 25% of them I have yet to touch). Like it is giving me mental frustration because it is so cluttered.
So now I made a promise to myself to declutter my wardrobe and in the future shop from ethical and sustainable clothing brands, to go for slow fashion instead of fast fashion. Buy quality instead of quantity.

Don’t spiral into that consumerism hole whereby you feel like you need to buy the newest collection from places like Topshop and Zara every other week, wore it once and never be seen by the daylight again.
I’ve seen people like such because they cant be seen wearing the same clothing because really, you gotta be trendy to be cool.
If you’d like to check on how ethical a certain brand is, you can download this app called ‘Good on you’ and they will have ratings with descriptions on how the company is doing for you.
As far as I’m concern, Adidas seems like a more ethical brand than Nike.
Although brands like H&M or Zara are fast fashion but in my opinion as long as you take care of your clothing and willing to let go of being on trend, it doesn’t really matter if you shop from these places with the condition that they are being ethical to their factory workers.
Sustainability is not only buying from ethical brands, it is also about not having your clothing end up in landfills. It is going to end up being the same if you buy from ethical brands but only wear it twice. In a way you can still very well purchase that dress from Zara as long as your dress has a long life span. H&M has got a ‘concious’ collection so despite not being 100% ethical or sustainable, brands like such are also trying. Zara also discloses details of factories and do not use child labour so it really is a good start.

I don’t have the habit of taking good care of my belongings but from now on I will take good care of my clothings so that they can last longer. I think buying from ethical and sustainable brands help cause they aren’t cheap in the first place and because they’re not as affordable I have to look after them otherwise I’ll be broke as shit.

You know what else is good by shopping ethically?
You actually save so much more from not buying fur or leather goods.
Because you want to be ethical and live a sustainable life you will be able to give up the thought of owning branded leather goods and by that you get to put your money into better use.
I only have two leather goods in my life right now, one Louis Vuitton bag which is a hand me down from my mom (actually I snatched it from her HAHA) and my Chloe wallet which I bought last year.
I’ve always wanted a Prada wallet because I reckon a good leather wallet can last me a long long time (but I’m not willing to pay the price and I lost interest in the design so I opt for Chloe instead). Now that I’ve changed my mindset towards leather all the more I will use it for an extended time.
I’m not sure if I want to have more leather goods because most of the leather goods created made our world a much more harmful place to live in as much as it is a by product from meat industry.

Modern leather tanneries and the leather they make are frighteningly toxic. So toxic, that there are more tanneries than any other business on the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Superfund list, the list that identifies the priority environmental cleanups in the U.S. So toxic, that 95% of U.S. tanneries have moved their operations overseas to avoid environmental oversight penalties. So toxic, that many old tannery sites can’t be used for agriculture or built on or even sold.” Rowan Gabrielle, from “Leather for life” White Paper.

Unless it is stated that said leather goods uses vegetable tanning or is made from recycled leather, I might very well give it all up all together (and not like I can afford anyway).
We really should start checking the sources of our food and clothings, which we often spend the most of our money on. Vote with our money, we shall.

We can never do a 100% but we can each do 10% and with today’s earth population, imagine what 10% from each and everyone of us can do to make a change.
As the year and technology moves forward, our humanity, our conciousness as a human being and our earth are moving backwards. It’s a shame, really.