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I’ve been re-reading my copy of “Unlimited Power” by Anthony Robbins and I finally came to the chapter on improving your physiology through what you put into your body.  It seems I’ve completely forgotten all the reasons why I remained a Vegetarian for so long after my bet that I couldn’t remain a vegetarian was over.  Now that I review all the reasons why I returned to eating meat, it is starting to appear as though all of my reasons were completely unfounded.

I’ve become as unhealthy as I ever could be.  I did such a great job of converting myself to a vegetarian and a state of healthy eating that my stomach would feel queasy at the thought of eating KFC.  I would be so contented with my main meals that I never felt the need for dessert (and this is coming from a chocoholic and dessert-loving person).  Now, I have reverted back to my former state of craving desserts, chocolate and ice cream after meals.

There was a period when I was actively a vegetarian when I remembered talking to a friend about chocolate.  I remembered that I used to love it with such a passion and I could talk as if I knew every chocolate as intimately as I knew it back in the good old days, but when I said the words, they felt hollow and false because that was no longer how I felt about it.

It was only when I became pregnant that I started eating meat, chocolate and ice cream again.  It took me some time to get used to the idea of eating all this stuff.  Initially, I would eat them just because I was pregnant and pregnant women are supposed to crave this stuff.  By the end of the pregnancy, I was eating them with gusto.  I think the only thing I really had a true craving for was the meat.

So I guess you can condition yourself not to like something or to like something and I didn’t do it the way Anthony Robbins suggested in his book either.  It was just something that grew on me.

Now that I’m back to being an avid meat-eater, I’ve also discovered something else.  I don’t love my veggies as much as I used to when I was a vegetarian.  Somehow or other, they don’t taste as great as I remembered them to when I was a vegetarian.  It’s almost as if the meat has affected my tastebuds. 

After reviewing Anthony’s dietary recommendations, I would do well to spend more time back in my parents’ house where they buy fruits by the box-load and switch back to my vegetarian diet.  I don’t think I could strictly follow the Robbin’s diet, but I’m sure I could come close to it.

If you’re interested, here’s the gist of the Robbin’s Diet:

1. Start your day with fruits and only eat fruits for as long as you can - preferably up to 12noon if you can.  I can do this.

2. Never eat fruits with anything else because fruits are digested in the small intestine and consuming foods with other foods will cause the fruits to be trapped in the stomach where they will ferment and create gas that disturbs your intestines.  The easiest form of fruits to absorb is fresh fruit juice and it takes about half an hour for the juice to clear your stomach before you can eat other foods.  I can also do this.

3. Don’t mix your proteins and your carbohydrates because one requires acids for digestion and the other requires an alkaline environment.  When you mix the both, you’re mixing an acid with an alkaline which neutralises each other and impedes digestion.  If you have to, eat protein for lunch and carbohydrates for dinner. Unfortunately, if you’re Chinese, since rice is the staple at almost every meal.

4. Ensure that 70% of your diet consists of water-rich foods.  Water rich foods are fruits and vegetables of the green leafy variety (potatoes and the like belong to the carbohydrate category).  Well, I could have done this if I was still a vegetarian and I lived with my parents who practically own a fruit store in their house.

5. Limit your protein consumption to one portion a day.  You really don’t need as much protein as you think.  The only people who need a high protein diet are children and guess what?  Breastmilk contains about 2-3% protein (I can’t remember the exact percentage) and it drops to about 1% by six months.  Excess protein can’t be stored by the body and has to be excreted by the kidneys, so the more you eat the more you are taxing your kidneys. I can do this.

6. Eliminate dairy from your diet altogether.  The only animals that should be taking dairy are the animals for whom it was originally produced.  Cow’s milk is intended to grow a calf from 90 pounds to 1000 pounds in two years.  Babies aren’t intended to grow that quickly or gain that much weight.  In fact, cow’s milk contains a large amount of casein which cannot be digested by humans.  As for the bit about calcium, you can get that from your dark green leafy vegetables.  Ironically, it was also found that people who drank 3-5 glasses of milk a day had less calcium than those who didn’t.  Oh, tough one!  I love milk.

If you want to add to the diet, Anthony also recommends a breathing pattern you should do for at leaset 10 breaths, three times a day (exercising is also great - yoga, which focusses on your breathing, swimming and trampolining).  The breathing pattern involves an inhalation for 1 count, hold for 4 counts, exhale for 2 counts.  If you can, increase the counts in the same proportions, for instance, inhale for 4 counts, hold for 16 counts, exhale for 8 counts.  Keep increasing the counts as you get better but make sure you aren’t straining yourself to achieve each breath.

Why in these proportions?  Well, inhalation is self-explanatory.  Holding helps a more effective transfer of oxygen to your body’s cells.  Exhalation helps the clearing of toxins in the lymphatic system (which is pretty much the body’s sewerage system).

Try this for 30 days and see how you feel at the end of it.  Anthony Robbins lost 30 pounds following just this.

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My FIL has a life-threatening penicillin allergy so he has to wear a silver bracelet that notifies any healthcare personnel just in case he needs treatment but is unconscious.  Usually before medical treatment of any kind, it is important to take a patient’s medical history to determine if the patient has any conditions that contraindicated certain treatment regimes.  For instance, my FIL can’t be given penicillin to treat any bacterial infection that he has because it has the potential to trigger a life-threatening allergic reaction in him.  If you’ve got an allergy to penicillin or any other medication, it is worthwhile getting yourself some Medical Jewellery to notify healthcare workers just in case you need treatment but are unconscious and can’t provide a medical history.  If you want to order one online, you can check out these bracelets or necklaces.

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Anthony Robbins believes that one of the steps on the road to success is to create your own magnificent obsession.  While on the road to climbing a 7A, I did just that…  I created an obsession out of rock climbing.  If you really want to nail that project route, here are some tips on how you can send it.

You have to walk, talk, eat, breathe, dream climbing in everything that you do.  That means climbing anything and everything possible.  Even the pedestrian crossing:

Any walls that look remotely climbable (read: as long as it has some sort of feature) you should attempt to climb it:

Never mind if it belongs to a Salsa Club - just as long as nobody comes out to chase you away, you’re good.  Don’t worry about the passerbys either.  A little performance pressure won’t hurt you.

Although it’s probably better if it isn’t and I’m sure you can find something at your local park’s obstacle course that you can practice on.

When it rains and you can’t climb, the beams in the shelter you’re taking cover under make an excellent project to practice your campus power. 

Although a more conventional approach would be to practice on some monkey bars at a park:

Or any weird structure hanging out of nowhere.  As long as you can create some rule that everyone has to follow, you’re good to go.

Climb anything that looks interesting, even if passengers on the train yell at you as if you’re crazy and they think you’re going to kill yourself.  Hey, you’re the climber - you know perfectly well what’s safe and what’s not.

Beach boulders are fantastic as long as you don’t fall and maul yourself on the rough edges.

In fact, any boulder you can find is fair game.

When there aren’t enough ropes or belayers to go around, practice climbing trees.  It’s unconventional, but I’m sure you’ll be learning something.

Climb even after dark.  You really have to squeeze every last climbable hour out of your weekend unless you can get a full time job climbing.

Climb even after a hang over from the night before.  That way, you’ll have a good excuse for your mates even if you can’t send an easy route.

Spend all your birthdays at the crag.  Your friends will think up all sorts of crazy schemes to make you climb just to get your present.

Like make you climb barefoot…

Practice balancing - it’s good for your climbing, really!  Poles like the one in the photo below are great.  The first one to fall off is a rotten egg.

If you don’t have those, a canopy walk’s about the next best thing you can try.

Or one of these lacky band thingos:

Practice your pinch power on a set of scales.

Practice dyno-ing across a chasm - using a rope of course! We’re crazy, yes, but not suicidal!

Travel all day by train,

van,

and boat to get to the climbing mecca in Asia - Krabi. 

Spend Christmas, New Year and every public holiday climbing.  Climb until you miss all your dinner dates, when nobody but your climbing buddies will ever want to plan dinner with you ever again.

And that’s how you get good enough to climb a 7A…

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Since I haven’t been working out at all and have nothing much to report on the fitness front, I decided to take another trip down memory lane with a few old photos.  Over the last week, I was down with a touch of some stomach bug which left me unable to eat.  Needless to say, I lose a few kilos while my stomach squirmed at the thought of eating.  Since then, I’ve been actively putting them back with a couple of midnight forages, polishing off my chocolate stash in the refrigerator that will soon need replenishing.

During my brief adventure stint, I only even went caving twice.  The first trip was to the Dark Caves near the main Batu Cave Temple.  The second trip took place some two years later when I finally managed to drag myself away from the crag long enough to do something other than rock climbing. 

Gua Batu Maloi isn’t a true cave per se, but it is a series of fallen rocks that form a covered area that can at times appear to be cave-like.  During the wet season, the water levels can be quite high, so it is wise to get an experienced guide if you’d like to experience this particular little adventure.

The day began with a bit of breakfast near Sunway Pyramid with our guide, the Mountain Goat and his side kick:

I came along for the ride.  You can glimpse the pyramid behind me:

Here’s the rest of the crew:

The path towards the “caves”:

The first bat cave: 

Waterfalls:

A little 5C climbing required to get through the natural obstacle course: 

Swimwear is a great idea, since it can get pretty wet in there.

Taking a bit of a breather while we wait for the others to catch up.

Getting out of the caves is made a little easier with a helping hand.

Another break and some food before a bit of trekking.

More of the crew just chilling. 

The only way is up. 

So I did get a chance to put my climbing skills into practice after all… 

Washing up by the river at the end of the trip.

The short ride home at the end of the day.

All in all, the experience was enjoyable.  It wasn’t a particularly tough trek, nor a very challenging cave, but it is great for a bit of light fun for those with an adventurous spirit.  You don’t need a high level of fitness to make it either, but I highly recommend getting a guide.

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It has been a long time since I went climbing and it has probably been as long since I last read through my old climbing journals.  But just when I think that I finally have the rock climbing bug completely out of my system, I read some old posts I had written about climbing experiences and find my palms sweating as I read through the descriptions of routes I have climbed in my climbing history.  Is it ironic or significant that no matter how much time has passed, my hands still remember the touch of rock?

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It’s been a long time since I’ve had any contact with the rock climbing community.  Sure I still keep in touch with a few climber friends now and then (although I have to say that most of them have either hung up their shoes for good, or climb so infrequently that they could hardly still be called climbers), but mostly, my circle now revolves around Mums with young children and other related people.  So it was with a bit of a shock that I received news about a climber I had climbed with had passed away. 

As is often the case whenever youth is robbed of life, our thoughts will inevitably wander towards the cause of death. But today, I’d like to write not about how he died but what little I knew about how he lived.  However, before I do that, I think I should state first that Liong’s death had nothing to do with climbing, so please don’t leave thinking that climbing is a dangerous sport.

Liong was a climber. I first saw him when the Thin Man and I were still relative newbies in the climbing arena.  We arrived early at Damai on a Sunday morning and sat in the car watching two climbers anchored at the top of the first pitch of Monsoon - whom I later discovered were Liong and Supermei.  Admitedly, I was more in awe of Supermei than I had been of Liong because the idea of a girl being a great climber seem to strike well in my mind.  Suffice to say that Mei was not called “Super” Mei without reason. 

Supermei began to lead the second pitch and we continued watching with bated breaths, marveling at these two awesome climbers.  It was to be the first of many more times that we were to see Liong and Supermei at the crag, however, we never really climbed with them because we considered them way out of our league.  It didn’t seem right to be pestering two great climbers to babysit a bunch of newbies.

It was hard to imagine that I eventually became good enough at climbing to hold a decent climbing conversation with Liong, as I did when I was projecting “Pear”, my first 7A route, at Nyamuk.  Yep, I was finally “good enough” to climb in the company of Supermei and Liong - not by their standards but by mine.  It was Liong’s pep talk on falling that helped me conquer my fear to lead Pear and red-point it.  If I’m not mistaken, I think that was also the day Liong had to leave early because he had some things to do for his wedding. 

I think it came as a surprise to me that Liong was getting married.  In all the time that I knew him, I had always seen him with Supermei.  Though I knew that they were not a couple, it still came as a surprise that he had a non-climbing partner.  At a time when I was still single, the idea that a climber who spent as much time climbing as Liong did could have a healthy relationship with a non-climber seemed at odds with my belief that I must one day evitably end up with a rock climber for a partner.  Perhaps learning about Liong’s marriage to a non-climber was the opening of the doors in my mind towards the idea of a non-climbing partner.

I didn’t see too much of Liong after that, presumably, I guess, because with married life came different priorities.  And though at the time I could never see what else life might have to offer beyond climbing, being in that situation now has made me realise that the answer is “a lot”. 

A close friend of Liong’s had said that Liong felt he had done 75% of the things he had wanted to do in his life before getting married and that the remaining 25% of the things he wanted to do, he could do with his wife.  Well, I hope he managed to do the 25% of the things he had wanted to do before he was cruelly snatched away by death.  And to his pregnant wife and child, I wish to send my very deepest condolences.

They say that life is short, live it to the fullest.  I don’t think I can really express how important that is.

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