My brain has undergone a multitude of switcheroos in the past two or three years. I used to think I wanted to be a fine artist, then I decided I wanted to be a filmmaker, then I thought hey, I mostly like to take pictures and people have hired me for photography, so I must want to be a full-time photographer.
I now think that this is not so. I’ve struggled with putting myself and my talents and abilities into a box thinking that this or that one thing is all that I should focus my energy towards. And while it makes sense that if you’re a jack of all trades you will likely be a master of none, I do now think that it’s important to have more than one feather in my cap.
I’m full of cliches today.
Cutting to the chase, I enjoy photography, I enjoy making videos on the occasion that I do; when I’m particularly farigh I also enjoy making the odd drawing or painting too.
But what have I, like I said before, been focusing my energy on for the last 16 or so months of my life?
Let’s recap.
Around about two years ago I started to get into fitness as a regular activity. I started going to the gym, making few to no changes in my food and nutrition, although I did consider myself to be pretty healthy where that was concerned, relatively speaking.
Forward a couple months, I started strength training. I did that for a couple months and then was on a bit of a hiatus after a short vacation and the start of my first year of university. (I didn’t stop working out though. I did HIIT and other forms of training.) And through this summer of 2016, I was obsessed with protein. I didn’t make my own food much though apart from scrambled eggs and shapeless omelettes; I asked my mother to help me make very basic food items like grilled chicken #BodybuildingStaple) and stuff.
Forward another 5 or 6 months. I was making my own breakfast. I developed a breakfast obsession, and even started making and providing ‘healthy’ breakfast food to people at my university, as a tiny two-person business with a friend of mine. That lasted about a month, lol.
I really love bananas. It’s almost comical. Ask my mom.
Healthy muffins I made for our lil bizniss.
Forward a couple more months. I had slowly started to make pretty simple meals for myself that weren’t breakfast, making it a point to meal prep for the other days of the week. Yes I have previously mentioned that I may or may not be Youtube-washed. But it was fun, I enjoyed feeling my way around the kitchen and using my own andaaza to tweak white-people recipes to be suited to where I live and what’s available to me.
And that brings us to the 9th of September 2017, when I challenged myself to be “vegan” for a week. That means to not only not eat meat, but stop eating other animal products as well (i.e eggs and dairy). I had considered changing my eating habits to be more vegetarian before, after watching documentaries like Food Inc. and reading up here and there about the cruelty that takes place in the animal agriculture industry. I also considered the fact that these documentaries and facts largely came from the ‘West’, particularly the USA, where I would imagine the industry is comparatively less humane than it would be in Pakistan.
But then I thought about bakra Eid, and the aversion I felt this year to eating the qurbani ka gosht. I thought about how mindlessly people eat meat and chicken as if it was never an animal before it was on their plate.
My trial-veganism worked for that week, and like I’ve mentioned before, it has now been a month. I could finally stop feeling guilty about eating what I denied myself for over a year: fruit and rice and other carby thangz MY FAVOURITES.
Yes, it is safe to say that in the past year I have become obsessed with food.
I love it though. It’s so much fun to experiment in the kitchen even if it doesn’t turn out great. As of late, I’ve actually been making dishes my parents not only approve of but even enjoy. That’s an accomplishment for me. I’ve moved from selfishly preparing my own meals to be consumed by my protein and chicken and anda obsessed self, to cutting out adding to my diet a bunch of other far healthier, non-animal, non-hormone-injected, and as they say, cruelty free food items to my kitchen to work with.
This is what I spend 70-80% of my day thinking about.
I thought I’d shoot out this post to float the idea that maybe this means something more than just an obsession. Hopefully in my next post, I’ll talk about what direction I think this could possibly be pointing me towards.
zoomkawali 