Grace, a Singapore blogger that talks up her love for real (unprocessed and mostly homecooked) food on Vegsmoothiebunny, recently underwent the painful and uncomfortable process of renovating her house.
As a result, she was unable to access the kitchen to cook her meals and had to eat out everyday for a week, something she looked forward to doing because… hey, no dishes to wash, right?
Unfortunately, eating her favourite hawker food — yong tau foo, caifan, Hokkien mee, char kway teow, you get the idea — for seven days straight produced changes in her body so shocking, she has decided to champion homecooking and a healthy lifestyle more than ever, and she’s already doing a lot!
In her blog post, Grace described her diet as starting “innocently enough”.
“I think for my first meal I had kaya toast and Milo (standard kopitiam breakfast food, aye?), lunch… yong tau foo and dinner perhaps a soup or caifan. And so it went on the next day, and the next and the next for a week,” she said.
Grace felt the effects within the week. She said she was constantly thirsty and lethargic, and even her skin, which usually had a rosy glow, became dry and unsupple.
“My stomach felt funny and I was constantly craving for something sweet or salty or stronger tasting food. By the end of the week, the yong tau foo no longer satisfied me and I had turned to choosing dishes that were heavily seasoned or fried to satisfy my tastebuds,” she added.
But that’s not all.
Grace had also begun developing a muffin top, a layer of flab that was fast expanding and folding over her waistline.
Other than her diet, not much of Grace’s lifestyle habits had changed and the originally svelte 25-year-old could only attribute the horrific change to the water retention and bloating caused by all the oil and salt present in hawker food.
Grace also wrote a follow-up post explaining how she ‘debloated’. In the post she explains it wasn’t a detox programme that she followed but her original eating habits.
Photo: Grace’s tummy during the experience and four days after returning to a home-cooked diet; Vegsmoothiebunny
