Mood: Irritable 
Weather: 28°C, clear
Location: Mont Fleuri, Mahe, Seychelles
I sometimes wish I was living somewhere else, I often miss the city life. There’s a certain feeling of extreme “aloneness” when I live in a city that is impossible to feel while living in an island. It’s a wonderful feeling – knowing that there are so many people around you but nobody cares about what you’re doing because they truly are wrapped-up in their own problems. I especially love Shanghai during the winter and Spring Festival when the population feels as though it has halved for a very brief period. Seychelles has its own advantages too, but it’s no place for the recluse.
I had boiled, unseasoned quinoa with pasta sauce and edamame boiled in soy sauce, for lunch. I’ve been posting pictures of my lunch daily and I’m starting to wonder if what I eat is considered gross or not. The pasta sauce is a modified version – it’s basically pasta sauce purchased from a jar (never a good thing!) and I include canned whole tomatoes with vegan pea protein “meat”. The “meat” is first air fried for 10 minutes, grinded and then fried with a bit of vegan margarine. Quinoa is supposed to consist of 15% protein, while edamame is supposed to consist of 37% protein. That’s a good percentage. I make about 3-4 days worth of this modded pasta sauce at a time, I’m pretty sure it’s quite low in calories. That said, I estimate the total calories for that meal to be at 400 or so.
What I eat daily is by no means what the “typical” Seychellois eat. I’m Asian, a vegan, and I practice 16:8 intermittent fasting. Absolutely nothing I do is “typical” of a Seychellois lifestyle. The closest thing would be that takeaway of chips doused in sunflower oil I had yesterday. The other night when I was having dinner with my mother, we were talking about cutting down on food. She said she can’t go on a diet because she “chooses health”. While my siblings and I are already trying hard to keep the weight off because we are choosing to be healthy, my mother believes we are trying to be skinny so we can look good in clothing.
I mean yes, I do want to look good in that dress, but my primary reason for losing weight is because being heavy is extremely uncomfortable for me and I don’t need anymore experience in being heavy. There are a few things I had to learn the hard way:
- Gaining weight stretched out my clothes and completely ruined them. I had to spend money to purchase new clothes, and on top of that, I couldn’t donate the ruined clothing.
- I was sweating in places I didn’t know I could sweat in. So I had to apply deodorant in places I don’t normally do. Do people know about this?!
- Wiping my butt was not an easy task. You have to kind of twist to wipe and my flabby arms and chubby waistline made it difficult to reach over the added junk to the trunk. Nobody ever mentions this!
- Walking up stairs is a feat in itself, and even more so if you’re carrying groceries.
- My self-esteem took a serious dip. Some people look good chubby, I definitely don’t. There is a stark contrast with the amount of attention I get in public when I’m chubby compared to when I’m not.
I finally watched The 2 Popes. It was alright. I wouldn’t say it was an awesome movie, I just didn’t get that vibe. I had to pause the movie halfway through it because it was boring. The second half was a lot better. The most memorable movie I watched this year was Nyad (2023). Now that’s what I call a good movie!
I spent half the day on Youtube and the other part of the day on Reddit. I wish I had better online habits. I’ve been trying to upload all the contents of my hard drive onto the cloud so that I can just throw away as many things as possible as I attempt to live minimalistically. What’s taking a lot of time is the quantity of files and folders, as opposed to the size of the files and folders. I have a 2TB limit and I won’t even need half of that. Looking around my room I already see so many things I don’t need. I have an old Sony Cybershot I bought in 2005 – what am I still doing with it? Throw away stuff like these today, you won’t even miss a thing tomorrow!
