A 90 Day Transformation – Mind, Body, Spirit

I think I’ve spouted enough about my health to my friends over the last year to bore an elephant. I’m certain my 60 trillion goals, plans to lose weight, new diets and other resolutions that I have told them are beginning to lose their oomph. In fact, I’m sure that many of them roll their eyes at me by now and think, “Oh, there goes Miroki again…trying to lose weight,” and know that I’m going to fail.

Last year was extremely hard for me. I had probably gained more weight than I’ve had in my entire life, and hormonal changes deposited all that weight in areas I’ve never experienced before until now: love handles, butt…

I’ve always been more the belly fat gainer, and bra bulges (urgh), but these new spots added on top was a huge down turner for me. I was an Asian actress, and I was (in my eyes) obese. I think the most frustrating part was that I was eating mostly raw vegan, and was wondering how could I be gaining so much weight eating friggin green smoothies all the time.

Well…I found out back in July (7 months later since a hardcore raw vegan regime) that I’m one of the small percentile of people that cannot digest raw food. And it literally burned out my stomach, small intestines, kidneys, liver and thyroid. Go figure… and the result? Weight gain, which fueled bad skin, which fueled my blue mood. And I was blue for most of last winter (you probably also notice a huge gap in my blog posts back then too).

I had intended to write a detailed post about Raw Veganism, since it has been such a huge trend in the holistic market, but realistically, I’m a crazy busy person, and to sit down and carefully structure out my blog posts will mean I’ll never get to them at all. So I thought I’d touch base on it quickly, and perhaps write more on it later.

Now, I know my weight gain was more than just being raw vegan. Outside of the smoothies, I did do a lot of unhealthy bingeing, which I tried to counteract by fasting, which lead to more bingeing. I was taking handfuls of supplements a day trying to “help” myself (I wasn’t). I was extremely stressed out and slept very, very little. Weight gain is nothing more than a symptom, a response, to all the emotional and mental things I was going through as well. Each were perpetrating the other into one vicious cycle.

It’s complicated, the ideas of weight gain and weight loss. It’s more than food. It’s more than exercise. If one is stressed or unhappy, one turns to unhealthy food. One feels sluggish and doesn’t want to exercise. And then…the mental rape begins as we turn into pools of self hatred.

I don’t like telling these stories about myself. I want the world to think that I’m a thriving, successful and driven performing artist. That I have it all together. And you know what? I still am that person. But I have to be honest with myself and my issues surrounding my health. And I want to share it with you, my literal and metaphorical audience, if nothing else but to make my next 90 days an obligation to not just myself, but to the people around me.

2012  is the Year of the Dragon. My year. Only every 12 years do I get this opportunity. So I believe that with this opportunity comes the greatest power to grow, to change, to prosper. Already around me I am noticing a HUGE tumult of things happening that is throwing people’s lives into chaos. I think once the dust settles, and we start reassembling the pieces, that it will be a very good thing.

I have a lot of things hinging on the precipice right now of my life: my career, my finances, my health, my physical appearance, my mental clarity. All these things are now are balancing finely on a thread where if I make the right switches, it will make or break me.

I intend to flip the switch so that these changes will augment my prosperity, my growth, my power.

Inspired by a 90 day transformation set of photos that my bootcamp instructor posted on her Facebook, I intend to do something of the same. But more than just working on my body (because as I said earlier, the body is also a response to the tortures of the mind), I am going to focus on transforming my mind, my career, my soul. It will take many small steps, and in no way does the journey end after 90 days, but these 90 days will give me a bit of a goal to work with, a jump start.

And so, I share a little outline drawing of the photos I took of myself in Week 1. I admit I’m too conservative and self conscious to outright post images of myself running around in underwear, but the outlines should give you an idea of where I’m starting physically. I acknowledge that I’m not horrifically overweight, but as someone who used to be a lean mean fighting machine, I could stand to drop a few. In the meantime, here are some things I’m doing for this week…

1. FlorEssence Cleanse – a gorgeous and gentle natural cleansing kit that I recommend to anyone. I was advised against detoxing (something I was also obsessed with doing last year) because of how much it was throwing off my body, but this is very, very gentle and I wanted to give my body a boost in releasing the toxins I accumulated over my Christmas feasts.
2. Getting together with a good friend of mine to work on a 5 year plan together (her suggestion, which came at an awesome time).
3. I went out and connected with a bunch of people, both former and new networks, either one on one or at events. I need to surround myself with the people who are important to me (and my career, but I like to think that I’m not merely just seeing them as a stepping stones – I truly value the people I am with).
4. Sleep more.
5. I made a big change recently, but I won’t share it yet because I haven’t made it public even with my own community. But I will soon. I just wanted to write it down so I know where and when I did things.

Anyhow, thanks for joining me on this personal journey. And perhaps my story will give just the tiniest inspiration for others to take part too. I think it will be fun to great a small group of people supporting each other on their transformations.

Welcome to the Year of the Dragon.