No Rice Policy

As I have said before, I am a dancer. But not just any dancer but a ballet dancer.

But I can't guarantee you that I'm good, probably average but not a wannabe.

There was a time in my dance life when our teacher required us to "NOT eat rice ANYMORE". This was when we had our scholar's meeting (I'm a scholar in a prestigious dance school).

She goes like "Dancers, starting today you are not to eat rice anymore. If you want to dance you'll have to be less than your normal weight. For a dancer you need to be 5-10 pounds less." Almost all the girls were thinking: "So this is not enough?" or like "I'm gonna die in hunger!". Then my teacher continued:

"There was a time that Teacher N said that your body carries 8x your weight if you stand on pointe shoes. Standing flat using your two feet, that is your normal weight. Standing on one foot, that one foot carries 2x your weight. Going on a releve, it carries 3 or 4x your weight and so on."

It was an equation that I haven't really thought of. But the harder I think, the easier I get the conclusion. The reason why it's hard to balance on one foot is because all our weight depends on the ankle or the balls of that foot. This makes it heavier and harder to balance compared to using two feet in the fifth position releve.

But not eating rice is not a very pretty thing. Since most of us grew up eating with rice and ulam, Filipino style, it's hard to just eat ulam (food) by itself. It doesn't really taste good. So what I did in my diet was to make fried potato (natural french fries made from real potato cut into strips and fried) my alternative. I am not really sure if it's good for me but my teacher said it's fine.

So these are the 3 things that we have to avoid:

1. RICE

2. JUNK FOOD

3. SOFT DRINKS

And start eating these:

1. FRUITS

2. VEGETABLES

For some people, it may seem understandable and not really a big deal. But for most of us, especially Filipinos so in love with the traditional rice and ulam custom, it's hard I'm telling you now.

It's been around 25 days since then. I made a small conclusion on how much rice I ate in 25 days and what I ate as an alternative:

3 CUPS of RICE is more than ENOUGH.

            We had our vacation at the Golden Sunset Resort and there I ate 2 cups of rice in Tagaytay for the delicious bulalo! It's not really very delicious to just eat the soup. vThe other cup of rice I ate was in a birthday party when we had dinner. We were eating at Max at that time. But seriously after those 3 days of eating rice (1 cup each day), I gained around a pound or 2. And it's not very nice to gain what you lost for 3 weeks! But after not eating rice for a long time, it felt like I felt lighter, my weight became lighter and kind of a bit slimmer. Just a bit. But after eating even just 1 cup of rice, I'm telling you, my body felt like frozen in a dessert.

I seriously couldn't move too much. That 1 cup of rice was actually just a small fraction of my regular consumption of rice  before! I used to eat 2 cups of rice then, but I can still move normally but after eating a cup of rice, after 3 weeks of  not eating rice, it was like i was carrying a stone in my stomach. And it's not very nice to see myself with a big tummy But that past weekenend vacation of 2 cups of rice made me gain around 4 pounds from my lost weight. And it's hard to lose it again.

ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES of NO RICE POLICY

After weeks of no rice, some friends of mine had a discussion on the dis/advantages of this policy.

ADVANTAGES

1. Makes you feel lighter. Having no rice for a while, felt that my body is lighter and I get to jump higher.

2. makes it easier to lose weight faster. we just need to eat more healthy food and do daily exercises.

3.We also became more healthier since too much carbohydrates is bad especially if you're a person who needs to lose weight. (glucose)

DISADVANTAGES

1. We start to eat more than 3x a day. Usually we at 5-6x a day now: Breakfast, Recess, Lunch, Afternoon Snacks, dinner, and sometimes midnight snacks.

2. It's harder to maintain energy without rice. We feel lighter but we become weaker since we're not used to eating no rice.

3. The food choices become more limited. Even with fries/fried potato, there's still a lot of difference between eating food with fries and eating food with rice. So the food we eat are those that tastes good even without rice but it's not very nice to eat the same thing over and over. Though people may say that there are other variety of foods out there, it's just really hard to do so because people like me don't eat too many kinds of food.

But all in all, I am not discriminating the no rice policy because there are really people out there who were born without really much for rice. It is just that, for our group, rice is important and was part of our eating habits. It's just hard to take it all out all of a sudden! But all in all I conclude that the No Rice Policy is something easy and hard to do. it has its advantages and disadvantages. 

But I'd probably thank my teacher the most for giving this policy because if she didn't i'd probably struggle to lose weight!

Till then, Comment, Rate and Suggests! I'd love to see your opinion about this!