My month on all things vegetarian, fish and biodynamic yogurt by Claudia

This month as part of RNIS's healthy living month I decided to embark on all things vegetarian, fish and biodynamic as a chance for me to learn about being fit and living a healthy lifestyle. A lot of the times International students eat too many fatty food as it is cheap. But what they don't know is that all the fatty food is doing a lot of damage to their systems which might not be covered by OHSC (eg liposuction).

What they also don't know is that being healthy is not that expensive at all.

A wee bit about myself and why I decided to do this challenge

I am a student who didn’t do much exercise and ate out too much. As a result I have put on 15 kgs in the winter time. I had my heater on too high. I also had a coffee addiction to flat whites.

I also developed sore knees due to having to carry too much weight. As a result of all the fatty food during the winter months and being cooped up indoors I developed a lot more pimples. During wintertime I had irregular sleeping patterns which contributed to my weight gain.

Healthy eating

This month I ate salads on a regular basis as well as homemade pasta. I did not know that most of the foods outside contain MSG (known as a type of fatty oil). A lot of the meat dishes outside contained this.

Outside I ate a lot of seafood and vegetarian dishes. Sally was very understanding about this and so were some of my other friends. I did accidentally sneak in a piece of meat but that was from a Teppanyaki.

I had many juices, yoghurts and museli to get rid of the fat. The first few days I had a little bit of diarrhea because of all the bad fats stored inside during winter. One place that I went to was Five Plus smoothie and you can read about it when it is posted.

During this month I learnt about portion control. During winter because I was stressed out a lot due to uni and family pressures I ate waay too much. In winter I ate about 3-4 servings of fruit which had a lot of sugar. In wintertime I didn’t eat as much vegetables as in the summertime.

Some habits that I changed was enjoying a long black rather than a Flat white. Flat Whites have a lot of milk and calories. I started enjoying muesli and yoghurt and plain bread. I also started loving tomatoes and fresh produce. During this time I went to Fredericks. I also started seeing that soup and sushi are full meals not just snacks.

Losing the weight

It was quite hard at first as I am a slow weight loser, but slowly the weight came off. During that time, being a girl I had a very heavy menstrual flow hence it helped to take some of the load off.

Exercise and play

This month I did a whole heap of exercise including walking in the park and playing in the park. It was so much fun but it took some time to get used to. I also did some incidental exercise such as crunches whilst waiting for the kettle to boil. I also ended doing some of the housework for my flatmates for once

Doing a lot of exercise made me sleep better at night. By day 5 almost all my pimples were gone.

Our tips

• Your plate- it should be half veg, 1/4 carbs, 1/4 seafood and meat.
• The carbs should be the size of your fist
• Wake up early in the mornings as it helps your metabolism.
• Drink lots of water

Our resolutions
 We have started writing and road testing healthy solutions for next years Bupa Health blog competition. We are not in it to win but we would like to pick up lots of good things along the way and share them

This post is a part of Bupa's best blogs competition for 2015