All aboard the all you can eat knowledge buffet, I hope that by now you are starving and are ready for some chowder or a hit of Ugali - for my non East Africans, Google that! I remember always having this desire to eat, and to anyone that is truly close to me knows how much I can and love to eat. In the recent years I have learnt how to control my cravings but growing up this was not the case. At the age of thirteen going to fourteen I weighed close to a hundred kilos, yes, you read that right. I was okay with it, and myself at that time. I used to eat anything and everything - I had no limits. In addition to all of that I was not as active as all the other teens to be very honest. 

One of the dishes that I always reserved a spot for in both my stomach and heart, was zege - Google that too and you'll understand why. But just in case you can't google for one reason or another, I'll break it down for you; cooking pan, oil, French fries / chips and top them with beaten eggs. I once sat down with one of my closest friends Aston, and we had shared 7 zeges, roughly around 3.5 each, and that wasn't us on a good day, plus we had eaten a Rolex prior to that. Lord! Allow me to change your lives; grab a chapati, put an omelette on top of it, roll it together and you will have one basic but delicious Rolex. You can always trick out your Rollie, add avocado, cheese, mayonnaise, salad, sausages, you name it. 

Back to the point, my diet contained a lot of fried food, high in carbs and growing up I consumed enough Soda for 1 lifetime - highest personal record is 9 bottles of coca cola in one sitting, highly dangerous but the truth is, it won't kill you. I mean I am still here. It will mess up your metadata but that's about it. But let us talk about being healthy, having lost over 30 kilograms of fat and gained "some" muscle mass, I think I know a thing or two about health. I am not saying that I am an expert, all I am saying is I would like to drop my fifty cents on this. What I have realised is that what works for me might not necessarily work for the rest of y’all. So the first tip I would like to give you is do your research on available information and on yourself. If you do not experiment, you will never truly know what would be best for you. Just like the YouTubers we watch, try the no carb diet and see the effect that it has on you, try the Keto diet, see if you manage to reach ketosis, try HIIT workouts and see how much weight you will lose within a realistic time frame. Each workout or diet plan will have a different effect on your physique, spirit and energy levels, ideally you would want to try it for a minimum of 30 days. You could try a week but I wouldn't recommend against it as you will have less days to evaluate yourself. Incase you were wondering which one I used to get rid of my weight, I did a very low carb diet, with extreme cardio in the beginning. Then I moved into weight lifting and as I write this I am looking to get into calisthenics - wish your boy luck! 

I also tried the Keto and a vegetarian diet January of 2019, and saw a lot of quick change in weight loss at the time, sadly my love for chicken, pork, and bread led me astray - I played myself. 

To paint a clear picture to you, I am still slightly overweight according to my BMI and thus still in my weight loss journey. But I acknowledge the journey that I've been through and super excited to see where I get to in the next 24 months. I guess only time will tell the true results in addition to the level of effort that I will put in as well.

The last element that I would like to quickly touch on, under the topic of health is our mental health; specifically what we consume both auditory and visual. In our current world, there is infinite amount of information coming to us at a rate of a billion bits per second per second - I swear at times I honestly feel like it is too much! Truth of the matter is, it is too much, and thus we need to be sensitive to what information we are soaking in as what we internalise will manifest itself into our reality. This is inclusive of the news we watch, the people we decide to follow online, the programs that we select, the music, podcasts and radio shows that we listen to! 

Be careful with what you use to programme your mind, if you continuously program your mind with garbage...SMH

I will not over elaborate on mental health now as I will give it a whole section on it's own and touch on mental health issues and stigma in humans and especially from an East African perspective - look at me promising all these things.