Healthy lifestyle for dummies

I am an ex-Taekwondo player. For over 16 years it was my sport, I won national tournaments and joined the national team until I ruptured my ACL (elrobat el saleeby) I reconstructed it, made my rehab just fine and decided to quit. Taekwondo is a very intense sport on the knees and I wasn't willing to take that risk and undergo another operation. The key to me was staying healthy, or what I sometimes call improving the quality of life. That was to be done in other methods.

What I'm about to share here is nothing professional, it's what is commonly known in Egypt as "ask someone who tried" (es2al megarrab) It's my tried and tested, revised and revisited, taught and researched simple manual for staying fit and living healthy.

Leading a healthy lifestyle couldn't be simpler. Stick to the basics and prioritize the priorities.
The basics are: exercise and eat clean, I like to add rest well to the mix. Easy, right? But it's definitely easier said than done.
Here's the truth that you know too well but you're hiding it from yourself. You say you want to lead a healthy life and remain fit but you don't really want it, you just kind of want it. If you really want to do something you have to give some sacrifices for it, you have to challenge yourself a bit, get out of your comfort zone and just start making a difference in your life.
What is needed of you is nothing radical, nothing shocking. You only need to start making a gradual change, bit by bit, and the results on the long run will be of a scale that will make you stand proud. Just make for yourself a bit of a timed goal of increasing your physical activity and improving your eating habits and stick to it. After all what comes easily goes away as easy, and almost everything in life that is worth having is hard to get.
So here's my take on each factor (exercising, nutrition and resting) in a bit of a nutshell.

Exercising:

• Find a physical activity that you enjoy and just do it.
• Go an extra mile every now and then, it is there where improvement happens.
• 45 minutes 3-4 times a week is perfect to maintain your form.
• Over training is a myth.
• Gradually increase the length and intensity of your workout routine.
• diversify and change your routine every now and then.
• Stretch.

Here's what I do:
There's always the problem of finding time, and in our beloved Cairo and its traffic time comes even more scarce, I personally build my days around the avoidance of the most catastrophic driving times. So what I do is that I wake up early around 6 AM go to the gym work out and do cardio for an hour to 90 minutes total, shower and head to work fresh and at the peak of my output from minute one while everybody else is still reaching out for coffee to sober up. It was a bit tough for me to get used to that system but after the first week it was free sailing.
If your work location or gym timings wont help you with that then I suggest heading to work with your gym bag and head to the gym directly after work. Don't go home first you'll end up doing nothing.

Nutrition

• Eat smaller portions more meals. aim for 6 small to medium meals a day.
• Don't deprive yourself from anything. But generally, no soda or salty snacks and extra sweets.
• Drink water forcefully. Winter is coming and not feeling thirsty doesn't mean that your body doesn't need water.
• Fruits instead of deserts, baked better than fried, don't do fried food at all.
• loose the salt shaker.

Here's what I do

I always go for whole foods over processed ones. picture this: a tomato vs tomato paste. Read on the pack of the paste the ingredients you'll find plenty of stuff that you're body will have to process and sometimes it'll fail; where the tomato has only one ingredient, tomato. Same dilemma strikes me with soda and diet soda, I believe that the body is better equipped to process the sugar than the chemicals added to make for the sweet flavour.

One thing I never do is counting the calories, of course common sense dictates that if you burn more than you take in then you'll loose weight, nut not all calories are created equally. 500 calories obtained from a bar of chocolate isn't the same thing as 500 calories obtained from a spinach and grilled chicken meal. So instead I concentrate on eating clean, whole foods, I get the protein, carbohydrates and fats my body need in a balanced fashion (30, 40, 30 percent roughly) and keep off from the usual suspects in food.

Rest

Here's what I do
Don't plan your resting days, train everyday if you can, because at the end there will be days where you wont be able to train and these days will be your rest days. I do that and I find myself training 4-6 times a week, never more than that .

Finally, don't major in the minors, keep it simple and stick to what is more important, the recipe is easy just take it step-by-step and you'll get there. You'll be fit, healthy and happy.

Always strive to be the best person you can be.

Women....Why so complicated?!

This was meant to be published in the March issue of Campus magazine but it wasn't because of technical reasons. So there you go.

“This month’s theme is women” – said Wessam, Campus Magazine big kahuna by day, Cairo city Batman by night.

“How original” I thought in silence, since its March with Mother’s day and all.

So I started my monthly quest of picking up a topic to write about and compile a thousand to fifteen hundred words of eloquent coherent thought, incredible wit, being sexy but not trashy and with a potential to...oh wait! You get the point... A good piece that the reader would somehow enjoy reading.

The quest started and most cheesily my first thought was writing about strong women and portray in an indirect way how women are equal to men and even better. I even transcended the cheesiness of the notion and thought of writing about the greatest strongest woman I ever came across in my life, my Mother, that brave single Mother with her inspiring struggle story, uncompromising principals and the shining beacon that she is. That was until I sat down to write and realized the cliché den I was entering and how uninteresting it is for a magazine reader to read an article about a boy praising his mommy.

I then decided to call Wessam and ask him for topic suggestions. The conflict arose between the ever-asking for a topic suggestion that is me and the ever-so-generous to leave the topic selection liberty to the writer that is Wessam. This time I won and I got two suggestions and here’s my take on them.

First: Why are female superheroes such losers with a constant need to be saved?

Well, most of them do suck big time! I mean think of Faten driving Aphrodite in Mazinger. The awesomeness was about two rocket-boobs less effective on the bad guy than actual good old saggy boobs, matter of fact, boobs can be quite effective as a weapon (think that body guard in ‘the dictator’). Anyhow, Faten always ended up in need of saving which means that she is a constant liability, dead weight that mighty Mazinger desperately needed to get rid of!

Now I’m no expert on superheroes or comics in general, but all I know is that super-heroines are there to look sexy and sex sells!

Second: Teachers during our adolescence.

I was expected to write (matter of fact Wessam thought I was submitting an article about that) about teachers during mid and high school, how sexy they were and how we as guys/kids in that critical age dealt with them. The pranks the peeks the gibes the gabs. I told him that such a topic would end up obscene and belonging to Hugh Hefner’s Playboy magazine, his response was that coming from me it wouldn't be. Well, at one end I was a rather good boy, shy and polite, during my school days. However I do hardly remember one teacher, an employee in the school rather, who came across as a proper MILF, mind you the term wasn't coined by then; and it was her, and only her, who I ever dropped a pen to sneak a peek or stared at her cleavage during school days. Then again my experience at that wouldn't compile a thousand words for an article. I could definitely borrow a tale or two from a friend or make up one but still I had the problem with maintaining that fine line of becoming trashy so I passed.

Now that’s it. My ideas are unoriginal and Wessam’s are...well they’re cool and all but they didn't exactly work for me. And I’m stuck again with the deadline fast approaching where out of nowhere I stumbled upon a great article by Omar Taher, my favourite contemporary Egyptian writer, he wrote a short story/article about women in Islam and the style was beautiful; the idea I already shared, which was about the proper definition of a verse in the holy Qur’an that spoke of men’s superiority over women due to them being breadwinners and all, where in reality the interpretation of the verse spoke that men were merely considered servants or helpers rather and how that word or term interprets a divine trait that god described men with to exert on women which is a responsibility and a liability rather than superiority. So that inspired me write about women in Islam and how people look at it from a wrong angle and how women pre-Islam were in a terrible shape and the prophet came and freed them of the medieval life they led. But I got stumbled upon linguistic issues this time, Islam as it is complex to describe in its own rich language, and I’ll definitely need to interpret a lot of verses and research material and that just was not going to happen with the deadline looming in.

So running out of ideas and running out of time I met a friend and started telling her my predicament and how it’s bloody hard to write about women so she suggested to me to write on relationships, we had a laugh since I mostly advise on the matter and almost always fail at it. But the topic was so last month! And while speaking with her I remembered Anis Mansour, the great writer, the very person who lured me into reading at the first place, and how he was so entertaining while sometimes speaking about nothing in specific, just like a friend chatting with you, albeit a very entertaining and rich-with-experiences friend. He also had a very complicated relationship with women. He adored and hated them, spent all his life with one woman but always spoke of his flings, always defamed them for their complications.

And with that I realised that my quest for a topic to write about was long enough to be put into words, and I decided to write about that.

If there’s anything to get out of this, and it wasn't meant to have an inspiring message, is that women are hard to get and rather complicated. I spent ten days trying to pin point a topic and keep it interesting and failed, whether that is down to my own incompetence or not is yet unclear, but checking my track-record I’ve never had that severe problem before. And my take on women generally is not exactly about equality, feminism power or else, it’s just that god created us differently, men have certain areas where they are naturally better at, and women as well have areas that comes more natural for them but these are not absolute rules, they are more like general elastic frames that bend easily with enough will power.

I finished writing the article and realised I missed mentioning that women can’t parallel park to save their lives. So there you go. Mischief managed.