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Just trade in any phone from our top brands on any unlimited plan.
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Welcome to the A to Z English podcast.
My name is Jack, and I'm here with my co -host, Sochal.
And so, Sochal, you came up with this idea to have like weekly challenges.
And last week, our first weekly challenge was 20 minutes of meditation every day.
And so, we'll start with you first.
Like, how did it go?
did you um follow through did you find it difficult um how did it go for you i'll be honest i kind of struggled to follow through i'm not a huge like i wouldn't say that i'm not a morning person but it takes me a minute to defrost in the morning maybe and yeah yeah you need like time to wake up right
like yeah yeah um but i think but i did still do it some and i think i i i struggled with it a little bit like it's hard to like not think about anything especially i've never like meditated before okay so i think that made it like extra difficult and but i will say that despite that i did feel like
it helped improve of like my focus like kind of just like having 20 minutes to just like defrost in a different way maybe and gear up for the day or like decompress maybe something like that yeah decompress and like center yourself you know yeah it kind of made me feel a little more motivated and i
did find like more clarity and focus probably than than i when i don't meditate right because you're like you're kind of turning off the noise in your head i i couldn't believe how kind of um frazzled i've been lately frazzled is a new word for our listeners out there it just means like i'm i'm in like
in my brain i'm just like go go go all the time um and uh so the so i'm not gonna lie okay i i skipped the first day i just couldn't i did too i forgot about it the first day okay i i remembered but i i was just like i'm like i just couldn't get myself to do it the next day i did it on tuesday and um
20 minutes is like in eternity so i was like 20 minutes is not going to happen so I reset my my goal to 10 minutes of uh immediately I cut it in half to 50 percent um because uh when I started meditating on Tuesday um I I didn't realize how stressed I was like that was what it kind of taught me it was like
how like how my brain is just so in such a hyperactive kind of mode recently or maybe it's always like that because i could not get rid of the thoughts in my head like no matter what i did when i tried to just like um only focus on my breath and not not thoughts i would it would i would drift into the contest
you know that we're having or the the challenge or i would drift into thinking about the song I'm composing or some errand that I have to run later in the day, you know, and it was just like, and I think that's normal.
I mean, I think that when I was meditating before, I remember going through that in the beginning, but I don't remember my brain being so active.
I think they call it the kind of the monkey mind, you know, like, it's just like our kind of like basic you know our base like evolutionary mind you know is this like to always be always be aware of some kind of threat in the in the jungle or on the savanna of Africa you know where when you know humanity
began we we had to be very cautious of like attacks from other animals or whatever and so but these days we we're we're safe but our minds our brains haven't evolved yet so i think it's it's really a challenge to get to that point where you can like only focus on the breath and not have any other thoughts
in your head and so that's like the kind of master level of uh of meditation and i never reached that so basically i i did like five or ten minutes throughout the week.
But it felt like an eternity.
It's so weird. Because some people say 10 minutes or 20 minutes goes by in like a minute.
But for me, it was like five minutes goes by in like an hour.
So I had the kind of reverse feeling.
But I guess it's because one week is not enough to really get into meditation like fully you know you need more time center ourselves well I'm interested in adding a new challenge this week but maybe continuing meditation how do you feel about that yeah for sure like let's just do like a kind of progress
report I would say let's reset to like 5 or 10 minutes a day yes yeah something like that something that's not so intimidating like everybody has five minutes you know and you could do it on you could do it on the subway you know if you're sitting on the subway on your way to work you could just meditate
for five minutes it'd be easy so you know yeah that yeah that's fairly easy well what are what are you thinking any ideas for our challenge for this week jack besides the five minute meditation to add on um you had some really good ideas i mean i guess um eating a balanced breakfast was one of them
I think yeah you know what I would be interested in in following up with that eating a balanced breakfast every morning and we probably should operationally define what a balanced breakfast is right yeah we need to do that so for our listeners uh the phrase balanced breakfast in traditional uh well
in in American English really just means I think traditionally back like in the 1950s they had a very different idea of like what a balanced breakfast was which is like pancakes eggs bacon um coffee milk juice do you think that was like the typical thing for 1950s right like a yeah before before before
like a cold cereal was introduced you know yeah in the old days yeah yeah so so after that period american breakfast became very quick like a bowl of cereal and a cup of coffee or just a cup of coffee or just like like as i said when i did my when i questioned on facebook a lot of people answered like
just eating things like a granola bar a red bull which is a type of energy energy drink and a cigarette or a coffee and a cigarette like very unhealthy yeah so those are examples of of unbalanced breakfast if anything so i'm thinking like um i guess i'm just trying to do some research like quickly like
um how many should we do it should we break it into like carbohydrates fats and protein like something like that yeah i think one thing that i've read from from um intuitive eat see how they're scoring on us shots left and right i know they know our next play before we even make it.
We got to tighten up off the court too.
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This app is like having a personal trainer.
Yeah, but those apps collect a lot of your personal data.
Aren't you worried?
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being coaches like intuitive eating is defined as like listening to your body when you eat but doing so like in a healthy way obviously like sometimes your brain's going to be like just eat these 12 donuts but you don't want to do that like you you want to get to a point where your body can kind of monitor its
hunger and fullness cues and can like and craves healthy things.
And, you know, you can't eat the occasional treat, but you're not going to overstuff yourself or binge eat like five pastries in a row.
So to me, I think for me, a balanced breakfast would include protein, healthy fats and carbs.
And it should be like 40, 40 to 60 grams of carbohydrates.
so somewhere between that between 15 and 30 grams of protein and between between 10 and 20 grams of good fats yeah healthy fats yeah and healthy fats are things like avocado nuts um yogurt you know dairy products stuff like that i would say yeah it's just to make it easy like like it say 50 percent
carbs so half like a piece of toast or something and then uh a couple eggs for protein and um and then fats would be like maybe some like some butter on the toast or something or right or the butter you saute your eggs and right yeah yeah okay yeah so i think that's pretty easy so that's our goal is to to
follow the the kind of 50 30 20 rule something like that okay all right All right.
So no more protein bars for Jack.
Yeah. And I've actually I've been doing okay at a balanced breakfast, but sometimes I do skip breakfast or I just have like coffee and a pastry, which isn't good either.
So no more pastries.
Well, you can maybe if it has between 40 and 60 grams of carbs, although the sugar element.
The amount of sugar is like a crazy blood spike, I think.
Yeah, that's going to put your carbs over.
Yeah, it's going to have a lot of carbs.
You could have like half a Danish or something like that.
Yeah, probably with something else.
But it's probably just going to be easier to eat like a wrap or like a bagel with something, you know, something like that.
Like maybe heavy, but still healthy.
Right, right. Yeah, I'm interested because I think as this goes on, I'm interested to do like a just eating like no added sugars for a week or something.
And then I think we're really going to suffer, at least for me.
What do you think for you, Jack?
Well, lately, I've been really good.
I've been following a diet of a very low, low caloric diet, somewhere around 1200 calories a day.
something like that 800 to 1200 calories a day um i've upped it a little bit like uh for a person your size geez that's so little good uh i've yeah i got quite heavy so i've been you know i was like um really determined you know to like lose weight and i've lost like seven or eight kilograms so far
so it's like 15 pounds so uh but it it's not even like uh it hasn't even scratched the surface yet really of like what i need to do so um it's it's but you know my wife says uh you know you gotta you gotta do it slowly and over time you know it's gonna take three to six months and i want to do it in 30
days you know no it's definitely a marathon not a sprint when it comes to weight loss i think right because otherwise we'll just gain it gain it back yo yo yeah also another thing that happens is like i'm surprised you're doing 800 to a thousand two hundred calories because a man your size can still
eat like one thousand five hundred to a thousand six hundred calories like there's a calculator but you can at least eat that much and still lose a significant amount of weight yeah and it's better for you because if you under eat like one thousand two hundred to eight hundred calories um it can a lot
of the weight that you lose can actually be your body's like eating your muscle oh i know i know but that's the good thing is I don't have any muscle so uh yeah no it's it's definitely it can be dangerous I used to like I have gained quite a bit of weight but I will say that one that there that I've had
a couple positives because I think before I used to under eat a lot so it's like finding a balance but before I I had a very poor appetite like I wasn't hungry a lot of the time and so I would under eat a lot.
And my stomach hurts so bad, because I would skip meals a lot.
And I always was in stomach pain.
And now that I eat like pretty regularly, I would say my, my stomach feels a lot better.
So it just there's a lot of Yeah, there can be a lot of negative effects to under eating as well, for sure.
Oh, yeah, I absolutely, absolutely.
Yeah, that you have to you've got to you've got to eat.
I think my maintenance level is like 2100 calories, so if I eat over 2100 calories, I gain weight, but if I eat below 2100, 2100 keeps me the same, because I used to count my calories on an app.
You don't do that anymore?
I don't do that anymore, but I'm going to start again.
It's really helpful.
It really does work.
yeah because it tells you like because it the app doesn't lie you know what i mean like yeah yeah yep yeah i'll lie to myself you know i'd be like i didn't eat that much today and then i count it and i'm like oh my goodness you know yeah you know that's true it stresses me out to count it like count
them on the app but you're right it'll show you like things you don't want it it tells you what you don't want to know yeah yeah i feel like i i know that i eat a lot i'm not one of those like fat people or overweight people that are like um oh i barely eat i don't know why i weigh that much like i'm
like no i eat a lot especially for someone my height i'm really short which means there's not a lot of leeway for like how much you can really eat when you're short you know um i'm gonna have the opposite i'm six eight i'm super tall i'm over two meters so i yeah i can carry a lot before it starts to
show but when it starts showing it's i'm in the danger zone you know so right yeah but anyway listeners if you're interested in following along on our um weekly journey make sure to send us an email at a to the english podcast at gmail .com leave a comment down below at a to the english podcast .com or shoot
us a message on the wechat and whatsapp groups we would love for you guys to jack what was our goal this week i got sidetracked We're going to eat a balanced breakfast.
Oh, balanced breakfast.
Yeah, 50 -20 -30. Or 50 -30 -20.
50 -30 -20. So 50 % carbs, 30 % protein, and 20 % healthy fats.
So if you guys are interested in following along on our journey, make sure to listen in for next week's episode.
And we'll see you guys next time.
Bye -bye. Bye -bye. See how they're scoring on us?
Shots left and right.
I know. They know our next play before we even make it.
We got to tighten up off the court too.
Businesses track and sell our personal information.
They dunk on us all the time with that data.
Wait, what do you mean?
You have to exercise your privacy rights.
If you don't opt out of the sale and sharing of your information, businesses will always have the upper hand.
The ball is in your court.
Get your digital privacy game plan at privacy .ca .gov.
There are some things you wouldn't mind being stuck with, like a large unexpected inheritance.
An always -on -the -verge -of -death phone that has to be plugged in just right so it charges is not one of those things.
Switch to Verizon and we'll pay off your old phone.
up to $800 via prepaid MasterCard so you can get a new one.
Just trade in any phone from our top brands on any unlimited plan.
With new line on MyPlan, additional terms apply for trade -in and pay off your phone offer.
See Verizon .com for details.
