Wonderful outing place for friends and family to get along during weekends

Hi all, currently I’m organizing a small trip with my colleagues to our MacRitchie Reservoir Park.

MacRitchie Reservoir is one of the four reservoirs that bound the nature reserves. Other reservoirs include Lower Peirce Reservoir, Upper Peirce Reservoir and Upper Seletar Reservoir.

MacRitchie Reservoir was constructed in 1867 as the first reservoir in Singapore. It resulted from an increase in demand for water in the mid-19th century, which grew beyond the capacity of ox-drawn water carts. In 1891, the reservoir was extended and the enlarged Impounding Reservoir was renamed as Thomson Road Reservoir in 1907. Then, in honour of the Municipal Engineer, James MacRitchie, who designed and built the reservoir, it was renamed again as MacRitchie Reservoir.

This place is just wonderful for family or friends outing if you just wanna hang out without need to spend a lot. Yes, this park is entrance free! How good is that?!

We gathered at Yishun MRT station at about 9:30am. Then, we went to McDonalds to grab a nice big breakfast set and went to bakery shop to buy bread for our short trip. Then, we took bus No. 852 at Yishun Interchange. We reached Macritchie Reservoir around 11:15AM. 

Estimate whole journey is 11km. We started our journey at the Start point. The trail is actually along the reservoir, the view is just superb. You can see a lot of kayak activity going on as well.

 

Walking along the jungle trail, breathing the natural fresh air, feeling every bit of your body cells is being charged up by this beautiful forest. Just think that how you haven’t been close to mother nature? It really helps to release the stress and tense of the fast pace city life and start appreciate the nature. We had a rest at the ranger station and have a short break. We took out our food and enjoy eating and chatting among each other before we continue our journey to the tree top. After the tree top bridge, we went to the Jelutong tower. The tower was about 6 storey tall. We can feel the tower was kinda shaking when we reach the top of the tower. After having a few photo session, we decided to go down because it seems to be unsafe to stay there. Then, we decided its time to exit but we seems to have lost our way. Fortunately, we manage to asked a kind uncle and he show us the way out. Although we were tired, we continue walking and walking. Suddenly, we saw something funny and interesting that cheers the group up! A group of monkeys on the tree! Haha…. Yes, we were seeing the monkey mother was carrying the baby with love and care. They are so much like humans. Thanks to the monkeys, we regain our energy and continue walking out the exit. Finally, we reach the main road and got up a bus. We went to a nearby restaurant and had our dinner together and our topic is non other than the experience in the Macritchie park.

I’m glad that everyone enjoy the trip and will be looking forward to arrange another trip together again.

What is Meditation and how it affect our well-being?

I’m kinda feel frustrated lately due to workload and studies, not sure what kind of life path I want.Guess that some of you might have similar experience throughout your life. And I remembered one of my close friend suggested that I should try to practice meditation. I really don’t have a clue on meditation. So what I always do is ask Mr. Google. Currently I am doing a simple research on what is meditation and later on what benefits if I practice meditation.

Meditation is a group of techniques for mental training. Meditation can help to improve mental health and capacities as well as physical health. Some of the techniques can be learn through book, article or youtube, which is simple to follow up. Others might need guidance from those qualified meditation teacher.

Although there are many kinds of meditation methods, basically, meditation involves a calm state of mind with deep focus. There are some meditation involve in maintaining thoughts awareness in the mind, but not pursuing them. Other forms involve in deep focused attention to a mantra, breath or candle flame. The purpose of these is to bring the mind into a stage where it is slow down or stop, in order to achieve access to the inner peace within you. It is also possible to alter the state of awareness around you.

Control your mind. Practice to control your mind instead of it controlling you. You can achieve  everything when your mind is in controlled. Meditation is more to focusing on a certain thought. It does not allow you to race with many thoughts and without direction. It pulls you back to focus on a certain thought or idea.

How meditation will affect your well-being? Through practicing meditation, people learn to listen to their inner-self and recognize their own strength and weakness. It helps in strengthen the potential self inner healing power of the human body. As we know, our mind have very big potential power, and through meditation, we can enhance the power on the mind. Meditation can also help in getting back the balance when you feel stressed, lose focus or tired.

Of course, practicing meditation requires commitment and determination. Starting may not easy for you. But I’m sure that if you really want to make a better changes in your life and intend to practice meditation consistently, you will surely see the good effects in your daily life.

Through life, we all have good and bad experience. This is part of the journey through life, and through those experiences that help us learn and grow. Be positive in your life. No matter the experience is good or bad, it happened for a reason. Learned as much as possible from it. That’s why through meditation, we will learn to accept all our life experience, no matter it is good or bad, we accept it as experiences. We try to strive happiness and peace in our life by accepting all aspects in our life. This is why meditation is so powerful as it helps in achieving all these.

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Work out everyday differently

Muscles can help to burn fatty acids. But do you know that too much or too excessive exercise can actually damage your muscles? Try to do resistance exercise or weight lifting as same as every other day, don’t push yourself too hard. If you are just starting out, suggestion is do weight lifting not more than once a week to get a better result. Try to allow your muscles to have enough time to reshape and repair themselves between the workouts.

Relax, keep your stress away

I found out that stress hormones can actually add up additional fat to be stored in the tummy, become tummy fats! I do understand if we are living in city life, eventually we will stress ourselves up. Some people suggest that by doing meditation will really help in relieving the stress within. Try to have 5 minutes of meditation a day might just help you to release your stress. I might just try it, although not very sure how to do a real meditation, or is it the correct way. I always refer to Google on more information on these. Personally, I can tell you that through exercising, it can really be a BIG BIG stress reliever. When I am stressed out due to work or whatever, I will just go for a jog or a swim. After a 30 minute to 1 hour exercise, I can feel myself much more relax and start focusing back on the things that I need to achieve. Anyway, try to keep up with the total body workout, it will help in reducing overall body fat, tummy fat as well as more relaxing and focus.

Have enough sleep

A lot people including me overlook a very simple lifestyle that has a very big impact on losing weight. Normally, human need 7 – 8 hours of sleep in order to help in proper food digestion and also recuperate from our day. So, if you have enough sleep, your body will be able to digest well and have bigger chance to burn off the food that you ate for the day. There is a study show that those people that have less sleep are more prone to obesity. This is indeed a very simple and healthy lifestyle, but as I said, a lot people neglected or overlooked it.

Final word for today, fat loss is not easy, but it is not impossible. It requires consistency and determination to maintain a good and healthy diet along with exercise program that help in losing tummy fats. You might have some plateaus along the road, just take a step back and try to re-evaluate the situation and try to adjust so that you can improve on continuing your fat loss target. Good luck.

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Avoid junk food

Besides that, try to reduce junk food intake, salt intake as well as sugar, especially soft drinks which contain high level of sugar. Try to have more health proteins, fruits and greens throughout the day. Whole grain breads and beans are good for health and digestion too.

Blueberry helps

Important tip. I found that blueberry is believed to be a very good food ingredient to help reducing tummy fat. Study was done on rats, it as found that rats which fed on blueberry rich diet lost abdominal fat. So, it is time for blueberry love I must say.

Calories count does matter

You must stay conscious about your calorie intake. This is very important. You can find a lot of calorie chart in the internet which suits you. In fact, you can also try the calorie calculator in my other page as well, just to give you a rough guide on how much calorie intake you need. This is one of the free ways. You can also seek for physician or dietitian to help on preparing the right calorie chart that suits your needs. Please make sure that you have more or less the exact calories intake for your each meal. Remember that extra intake of food, means extra calories intake, which may turn out to be fats and attempt to store as tummy fats. So it is crucial to control the portion of food consumption and it is a must to have frequent eating.

Exercise and Cardio Exercise

Exercise and cardio exercise is quite different. Exercise is like walking. Cardio exercise or workout means that you get your heart pumping for a longer period of time. Examples are like cycling, running and swimming. Your body will need additional energy to keep up with the intensive activity. The energy will draw from fat. This is the time when your body will break down fat very quickly and covert it into sugar and hence supply it to your muscles for energy.

A word of advice, try not to wait until it is too late. You should really start your cardio exercising planning today. The main point here is, by doing cardio exercises, it will boost up your body metabolism. The best duration of each exercise will be at least 30 minutes a day. And try to maintain at least five times a week. Then only you will see the great effect.

After doing cardio exercise, you can do some abdominal exercise to burn your stomach fats. Through abdominal exercise, it will help strengthen your abdominal muscles and tone it up. Examples are like crunches and sit ups.

There is also another fun way to lose belly fat. That is by getting a weighted hula hoop. Try to buy a heavier hoop as it is a lot more easy to control and stay on your hip for a longer time when you play with it. Good thing is, you can buy hula hoop in a very cheap price, compare with those gym equipments which cost at least few hundred dollars minimum. You can even watch television and twirl hula hoop too!

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Hi all, its been awhile since my last post. I was very busy with my tight schedule, working and part time course at the same time. It was really tough. Yes that’s right, I don’t really have the energy to go for exercise! But, good news is, I’m still able to maintain my current weight as I am very conscious about my food calorie consumption. Anyway, currently I am writing a post regarding on how to loose my tummy fats and have fit nice abs. Yes, I always envy those people that have nice abs. So, I have decided to do some research on it and try to loose away my flabby tummy and also share with you all.

Fact is, it is very hard to achieve a beautiful and fit body with flat and slim abs, but it is so easy to just eat what you want. I know, there are a lot of people are facing dilemma on how to reduce the tummy fats effectively. In fact, there are a lot people are good at start and get tired after that. Results? Zero.

I have done some readings about how to reduce tummy fats, because I seriously want to have a better and fit body. There are some of the interesting points that I want to share it out.

To reduce tummy fat effectively, you must change some of the habits. You need to consider the type of food that you consumed, as well as adding exercises into your lifestyle. Exercises include normal exercise and cardio exercises. Try to avoid excess alcohol and beer, as those will really make your belly coming out.

You must eat

I find that most people, including me, is making the same mistake thinking that by not eating will solve their tummy fat problem. It is very important to get rid of this starving yourself idea out of your thoughts and start committing to a healthy way to reduce weight and tummy fats. Because, if you don’t eat, you will not have enough energy to go for exercise and this I confirm that it will not lead to a weight loss target. The most it will only maintain your currently weight. I know, because I tried it for a month time by only eating less without exercise, it really didn’t help to lose any weight, don’t mention about reducing the tummy fat.

Eat more smaller portions than three larger portion of meal

There are a lot people suggesting that instead of eating three larger portion meals per day, it’s better to have six smaller portion meals throughout the day. This action will force your body metabolism to work extra during the same amount of time as it will help to burn more fat. You may wonder why? Well, let me tell you this. By having larger portions, indirectly your body is going to a inactive phase which will slow down your metabolism. If you having smaller portions of meal throughout the day, it will tell your body to remain at an active stage, so your body will constantly burning calories for the whole day. They call this as calorie shifting. And it does works for many.

How to build muscle effectively

To build muscle efficiently, first of all you should follow a healthy lifestyle, which is free from any types of “medication” which they “proved” that it can help to build and grow muscles. It is not surprise if you can see there are a lot of different types of muscle building drugs selling in the market. It is best to avoid all these drugs as it might have different effects to the human body which might have side-effect or harmful to your body.

To have the best workout routine, most important thing is you must always change your workout routine to confuse your body in order that it can react to the unexpected changes. By doing this, it will have great effect on building up muscle mass in the body., it will have greater chance that the workout is ineffective once your body is used to the routine exercises. If you always change the workout routine, your body will have big reaction to the unexpected changes, thus leading to more muscle growth.

You can actually have your workout at home if you are those that always busy with work schedule and no time for gym session. Just a cheap fitness ball or a set of dumbbells will do. You can get them in a reasonable price at those sports equipment shop. Once you obtain either one of the equipment, you can start doing workouts at home too.

For dumbbells training, you can start training one limb at a time if you want to have greater results to attain faster and bigger muscle growth. By doing this, you can actually able to life heavier weights. This concept is called bilateral deficit. As the body is using more muscle to perform the weight lifting action, therefore, more muscles will be developed. Besides that, you will perform a longer training as well, resulting your body to be able to burn more energy or calories.

Please remember one thing for weight training that speed is not the most essential thing. Try to work out the muscles slowly to the maximum. It will have much better effect by doing this way.

Of course, it is not enough by just doing weight lifting. Correct nutrition intake is very essential as well. Although protein is part of the nutrition needed, a lot people thought that protein is the only nutrition needed, this is so not true. Balance nutrition is far more important if you want to have effective muscle building.

Actually, fats are very important to our body. There is two kinds of fats which is useful in building our body muscle, that is monounsaturated fats and polyunsaturated fats. Monounsaturated fats helps to reduce the fat stored in our body. You can get monounsaturated fats through olive oil, nuts and avocado. For polyunsaturated fats, you can get it through banana, salmon and whole grain food. Polyunsaturated fats can help to bring down cholesterol.

Muscle building really takes time and determination to do it. No matter if you have thin or fat, exercises and training determination is a must.

Simple Home-made healthy and low-fat cream of mushroom soup recipe

Do you know that those restaurant’s
mushroom soup are high in carb and calories?

I know because I have a close friend who is
working as a sous chef in a semi-fine dining french restaurant. I must say….a
lot of tasty food are really very high in fats and carb.

I love the mushroom soup served by his
restaurant as they are using 100% pure mushroom. And I do ask him for the
mushroom soup recipe and want to try it. After knowing the recipe, I notice
that the ingredients that they use is really high in carb which is not health
conscious.

So, I decided to try my own method in
modifying the recipe into a low-fat, low-carb, healthy and tasty mushroom soup.
I would like to share here to those that love mushroom soup like me….

Cream of mushroom (2 serving)

Ingredients

5     Button
mushroom 20 cal

1 tbsp(15g)     Plain
flour       52 cal

1 tbsp(15g)     Reduced
Fat spread              74 cal

1 tbsp     Olive
oil   126 cal

500ml     Skim
milk       192 cal

1 tbsp     White
onion

Salt and pepper

Fresh flat-leaf Parsley (minced)

Thyme leaves (minced)

2 pcs      Whole wheat bread       100 cal



Total calories about 570 cal for 2 person. Each person only take in 285 cal.

This can be a very healthy and delicious breakfast to start a day.

Directions

Clean the button mushrooms by wiping with
dry paper towel. Remember not to wash them. Trim off any bad parts and chop
them into mince.

Heat the olive oil in a pan. Add the
chopped mushroom, onion, 1 teaspoon salt, 1/2 teaspoon pepper and cook in
medium-low heat for 10 to 15 minutes. Check if they are browned and tender. This
is to bring up the fragrance of the mushroom and let it be soft as well. Add a
cup of water, bring to a boil. Turn off the fire and leave it there first.

Meanwhile, use another pot, heat up the butter,
add plain flour and stir it using low heat. Keep stirring until the flour mixed
well with the butter. Don’t get shock when you see a thick mixture forming in
the pot. Add in the mushroom mixed that we prepared earlier into the pot with
medium-low heat. Stir gently. Let it blend in for another 5 to 10 minutes. You
still can add in some water if is necessary. After that, add in skim milk to
the pot and mixed well. Try not to put high heat because we don’t want to burn
the milk.

Now, start adding in minced thyme leaves
and minced parsley. How much you need to put depends on your personal favorite.
If you can’t find any fresh thyme leaves, mixed herbs can be added in as well. Add
in salt and pepper and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat and simmer for about 15
minutes, taste it. Serve hot in a bowl with a piece of whole wheat bread. Final touch just sprinkler a bit of
minced parsley on top of the soup to make it delicate. 

Below is the mushroom soup that I cooked. Hope you guys enjoy the recipe.