Fatty Cakes

The one nice thing that happened to me while traveling around China was that I lost weight.

Quite a bit of it.

Perhaps I did not lose as much as the picture above suggests, but it was noticeable enough that my co-workers kept commenting on it (apparently, I am wasting away). Indeed, I noticed that my pants became progressively looser as the days went by, but I chalked it up to stretching them out and just generally abusing them by walking around so much. That much was true, but it was also because my food didn't exactly absorb completely through my intestines.

In a nutshell, Shanghai is a fat man's heaven. Not only are there copious amounts of ridiculously delicious food (rice cake-filled lotus root, enoki mushrooms, fried sesame balls, turnip cakes, milk tea...I could go on indefinitely), but one walks so much that the food is magically burned off! Yes, unlike in America where people complain about parking 2 feet further away from the supermarket than their peers, people walk around in China. A lot. So much so that foot massages are commonplace and (I think) mandatory.

However, this is not why I dropped pounds. It is perhaps unsurprising that in a foreign country with sub-standard sanitary conditions, one is likely to have quick and dirty bowel movements. Due to the frequency of my own, I fairly guessed that my diet back home was so clean I had absolutely zero gastrointestinal tolerance for real Chinese food. This was a shame since there were many things that I wanted to try, but was deathly afraid of expelling all my guts into a squatting toilet. Each day, I made do with maybe 1.5-2 good meals. The rest of the time I was either trying to stay alive, not get cheated, or not collapse with exhaustion.

Moreover, I didn't drink at all. It's amazing what sobriety can do for the waistline.

It goes without saying that I will once again fill out. I tried to keep up the frenzied pace back home, but I can't get anywhere by walking and will most likely get run over if I try to bike. I always knew how commuter-unfriendly the US was, but never was it as apparent as it is now. No wonder we need diet books. Our way of life is so removed from evolutionary existence that it's amazing we can survive in the midst of obesity, diabetes, heart disease and myriad other epidemics caused by excessive eating and little exercise.

Thus, I shall inevitably return to my former size, which is a sad thought indeed. Oh well, they don't call it Happy Hour for nothing.