Stage actor Deng Jiuyun shares her secrets to maintaining good figure (Part 1)

I'm talking about body shape, not weight! To be admired by everyone, you must first defeat the inner demon of numbers. However, after seeing this, more than half of the people will probably lose interest. This is really a very wonderful phenomenon. The reason why weight is important is because it is specific. In the specific appearance, all things can be easily classified, and the result is just for comparison.

Many girls who are over 160 cm tall pursue a weight in the 40s. Once you reach 4, you become skinny. Even if you don’t eat enough every day, you will feel tired easily. What’s worse is that after you turn 35, you will immediately look like you are in your 40s. (I'm really not trying to scare anyone. In my industry, I've seen too many people around me who ate like chickens every day to maintain their weight when they were young, and once they got older, they looked older!)

I had just started the industry a few years ago and knew nothing, so I went on a crazy diet. However, my crazy dieting might be similar to other models' crazy eating, so I only lost a little weight reluctantly. But due to the rumor that the whole world said that you can't eat starch, my temper was extremely bad during the days when I was dieting. Fortunately, I am a person who can adjust myself well. After one or two years, I immediately saw the truth: I was not cut out to be a model.

I can't not eat or eat only one meal a day. I am a foodie and body proportions cannot be controlled by dieting. No matter how thin I am, I will always have to buy higher heels than others to make up for my legs that are not long enough and not thin enough. I soon realized that I cannot change my body shape naturally just like I cannot change my facial features. Which part will gain weight first and which will lose weight first was decided in my mother's womb. Everyone knows that eating less and exercising more is the healthiest way to live, but there’s actually a lot more to it than you can imagine. How to eat? How to move? How to deal with a tired body and mind?

I started exercising seriously in March 2009. At that time, I was in the UK. I had classes at 9 a.m. and ended at 6 p.m., so I started to get up at 7 a.m. every day and jog for about 25 minutes. Basically, I would go around my home for about three or four kilometers, with slight ups and downs. At that time, I had no control over my diet, but because British food was both unpalatable and expensive, and there was a desolate area near my home, I cooked for myself every day. There was only a microwave in the school at noon, so I mostly ate simple tomato pasta, but it was a very large bowl, with about more than 600 grams of dry pasta!

I was really hungry when I got home at night. Almost all of the time, I make myself a big burger with bagels and eat it with salad. Then, when I prepare for homework at night, in order to satisfy my sweet tooth, I will cut three kinds of fruits and add low-fat and sugar-free yogurt, and mix it with granola (a sweet whole-wheat cereal, which will make a huge bowl in the end!), and then spend my long night.

As for breakfast, I will eat it after running. I eat the breakfast companion I brought from Taiwan every day - a mixture of powders of various grains and cereals mixed with granola. It is very nutritious and can supplement various nutritional needs. The most important thing is that it is very filling and can meet my body's needs before ten o'clock. At ten o'clock, we will take a break and eat a banana, and then continue to support ourselves until lunch time (chocolate and bananas, which can instantly increase blood sugar, are our actors' best friends!). That was when I was in the best shape, about 55~56, and my body fat was only 17~18%!

You see, I wasn’t on a diet, and I was past puberty (the so-called prime metabolic age, I was 27 at the time). Basically, I just did a run every morning, and I lost almost 4% of my body fat in just over a month. Of course I don’t remember my initial weight, because as I said, weight is a mental demon. You have to look at body fat. When you start exercising, you can use body fat to observe your progress, but that’s only at the beginning. When everything is on track, none of this matters. I’ve always had a belief in my mind that exercise is addictive, because human nature is to survive, so when exercise becomes a habit at a certain stage (but the speed at which it becomes a habit varies from person to person, and usually the people who can push themselves the faster), you’ll just be afraid of not being able to exercise. By then, weight won’t be that important anymore.

But now comes the problem. In fact, if most people follow the healthy weight standards set by the Health Bureau, they may be a little too plump according to current aesthetic values. Personally, I think being healthy and happy is all that matters, but when we face more stringent standards at work, how to achieve those standards and still be healthy becomes a science! Simply put, the best approach is a combination of the following three: weight training, high-intensity aerobic exercise, and smart eating habits.

I know that in Taiwan, or in Asia as a whole, the acceptance of weight training for women is very low, and they generally prefer a slender and well-proportioned appearance rather than the healthy and solid lines of Europe and the United States. And probably more than 90% of people would think that they can turn into a King Kong Barbie by practicing! Haha, there is nothing in this world that you can get without hard work!

I can vouch for myself that I have been doing weight training for more than two years. It's definitely hard work (often after a workout, even my chopsticks are shaking), but I haven't built many muscles... but the benefits I've gained are innumerable. Many parts of my body have become stronger, my spirits have improved, my skin has become smoother, and more... I don't have to diet at all, I eat my fill every day, and I can even have a big meal occasionally ~ sounds good, right? Because weight training can increase muscle mass, and the source of calories needed by muscles far exceeds fat, etc., the body's metabolism will increase, so you will not gain weight by eating too much! Although weight training is an anaerobic exercise and its fat-reducing effect is not as good as aerobic exercise, the amazing thing is that even a few hours after you stop training, your body is still burning!

But if you really want to lose fat, you still have to focus on aerobic exercise. The general recommendation for aerobic exercise is about 30 minutes, with a heart rate of about 130 beats per second (depending on age), which is roughly the intensity of jogging in the UK. But with my height and weight, I should be a healthy baby, so I found that if I didn’t diet, even if I added weight training, but my aerobic intensity didn’t increase, I could only maintain it forever! So when the body has become accustomed to this amount of exercise, it's time to push it upwards! Simply put, there are four types of aerobic exercise: running, swimming, cycling, and skipping rope.

(to be continued...)

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