the fromtheheart agenda

hey hey!! if you read the blog before this 😉, you’re probably aware that I kind of wanted to change up this space, my blog format and what I write about. The whole agenda when I started this was to create a girlhood search engine. The vision was for younger me (and all readers) to search up anything related to the struggles/confusion about ‘wellness’ that we all go through and for a relevant non-BS big sister response to come up. So why the change of heart? Simply because I don’t have a foolproof big sister response to everything - I’m navigating my own ups and downs of life and want to be so immersed in life rather than in my head about it. Having created a format for these posts, I’ve started to feel exhausted thinking about them and writing them, it all started feeling a bit preachy - which is the complete opposite of how I want to write these.

I want to write from the heart. Not from the mind. I realised it’s probably time for a change when it felt ‘safer’ to keep doing blog posts like how I’ve done them in the past - patiently waiting to be struck in the head with content to write about that matched my old style. Welcome to a new era :) I’ll be curating more of a digital scrapbook, still very much an advocate for honest wellness advice but more centred on spur of the moment thoughts, visions, experiences and bringing the dreams on my heart to life.

do you notice any areas where you resist or deny yourself from having a change of heart?

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shower thoughts 

the classic yumcha gathering

the other day, my friend brought up societal messaging around food that I had never really pondered. But it’s one that we’ve all likely experienced once in our life:

That situation where people with a slimmer frame who eat ‘a lot’ are often celebrated and glorified, even told to eat more because ‘they must be starving themselves’ or the subjects of envy. Yet on the flip side, people with a larger frame who eat the same amount are seen as ‘out of control’, their portion somehow explains their body and they’re told to watch their portion. There was one point on tiktok/instagram where reel after reel was some influencer promoting intuitive eating by showing themselves eat fast food 24/7 - the epitome of the first category of people described.

It’s just such a double standard and a paradox - you literally can’t win in this situation. From my experience, it’s less about controlling whether other people think this way and more about noticing when you go on autopilot and your mind goes through the same motions as above.

I distinctly remember when I was on holiday in Indonesia, being petrified of respecting my hunger-fullness cues. A yum-cha gathering with my extended fam and saying ‘no’ to offered food are two things I had never experienced within the same time period and had hoped to never experience. Always, always (tous jour), on some level I suspected that a ‘respectable’ child in this situation would eat everything they offer, finish their plate and order more food than they’re capable of digesting. Turns out, when I give myself permission to do so - it is possible that the two can occur - even if it throws multiple people off. I literally remember thinking, you know what, if they think I’m starving myself…let them, honesty and honouring myself will always feel better than ‘keeping the peace’.

intercepting thoughts

my lil mantra: diffuse them don’t delete them. Often, when we catch ourselves thinking thoughts that spiral us into a negative frame of mind or self-destructive behaviours - we think that we’ve already messed up, and we have to replace the thought - as if we could delete it and insert something new. When has that worked? absolutely never (in my experience).

This idea of diffusing the thought pattern, letting it pass rather than grabbing ahold of it as a marker of how ‘judgemental/bad/cruel’ of a person you are. Being okay with the ‘bad’ thought, knowing you probably picked it up from someone/somewhere and acknowledging and congratulating yourself for wanting to think differently. You HAD to have that thought, be aware of it in order to think differently - so the thought is not the problem.

gradual delusion

I love being delulu but how do you balance being delusional/inflating the idea of yourself with real progress and visualisation? Like most people, I tend to visualise the dreamiest outcomes (which is the goal) but if it feels so detached from my reality - then it will actually always be delusion. I thought maybe I’ll delude myself gradually. Now that I know the outcomes, what does that person with those outcomes actually do everyday, what are the processes, risks, decisions, routines, mindset they built to be who they are. If I focus on realistic processes instead of the outcome, it will feel a lot less delusional. Like if the Olympics was my goal, I probably couldn’t visualise myself as a pro-breakdancer but I could visualise a better handstand (advice for raygun).

diet culture

Yesterday, this ‘simple Asian diet’ popped up on my instagram feed and it was like this scrapbook snapshot of different dishes; rice, veggies, steamed fish and I remember thinking, oh yeah that’s just what they eat - they don’t think ‘oh I’m on a diet and I have to eat these things and I can’t eat those things’. It got me thinking about how diets are formulated and why they rarely are a sustainable solution. Maybe someone just observed how active, ‘healthy’ people ate on a regular basis, then jotted down trends in their food pattern then made a fad diet out of it - telling others that if they eat like this they will be the active, healthy people. But the huge discrepancy is that for the active, healthy people - that fad diet is their intuitive way of eating, they don’t have to make up rules, restrict themselves from food - it is usually what is readily available to them and what they eat out of habit. Additionally, they probably stray out of their frequently eaten foods without any guilt. For them, it’s sustainable.

When a rulebook is made out of it with ‘do’s’ and ‘dont’s’, especially directed at people who don’t yet identify as ‘active/healthy’ - how on earth would this be sustainable for them.

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real rituals

1. night journalling. Journalling has definitely been popularised as the ‘morning routine’ ritual but I’ve fallen in love with journalling at night. Reading before sleep has personally never ended in a full, rested night of sleep for me because I get invested and can’t stop thinking about the plot whilst on the verge of sleep. Journalling in the morning kind of stalls my morning energy but journalling at night, literally the best - it’s just thought vomit. I also like to open up my pinterest at the same time and do a side-by-side journal whilst being reminded of all my visions.

2. whats-app hunger-fullness cue consultant. I found it the hardest to listen to my hunger-fullness cues when travelling - typically because if I was hungry food wasn’t always available and also the allure of eating food that I’ve never tried or might not get to try again. I made a chat with myself on whats-app with my first message being the hunger-satiety scale which ooh John Hopkins has a page about. Before a meal I would just jot down where I felt on the scale, and I would note down during the meal when I was starting to feel at around a 6. Sometimes I would also kind of elaborate, like what were the sensations I had at a 6 vs at a 3. And I would also note down how I felt after the meal, did I get hungry again? did I feel uncomfortable in anyway - e.g. super gassy or nauseous.

   

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vic’s vision-board

pinterest is such a vibe - blessing my blog with this:

find it here <3

mantra of the week

if I want to do something, I won’t need to tell others, they’ll just see me doing it

 

happy reading :) wishing you all the loveliest weekend.

from,

the heart <3