Posts by darylmorgan

Hello ladies,

I'm checking in in the hope that logging my weight today and reading up on your adventures will get me back on track.  After losing 10lbs and almost getting back to my 'normal' self, I fell off the wagon a little.  My diet and exercise routine took a hit to the head after I met a very nice man while out walking and who has since taken me to dinner several times.  After a whirlwind few weeks I finally stepped on the scales this morning to find I've gained 4lbs - almost half of my weight loss so far! 

I'm sure this is just a blip and some of it is water retention, but I have my family coming over on vacation in 2 weeks time and I was really hoping to have left myself a little room for expansion by then as I'm sure to be savouring the cuisine around Korea while they're here.  Oh well, I can always start again in September!

Hi everyone

It's times like these when I need a support group! 

Yesterday I had my annual health check as it's coming up to contract renewal time here.  I was so disappointed to find that they recorded my weight EXACTLY THE SAME as when I first arrived in Korea a year ago!  According to my scales I've lost 6lbs since I started CC and I'm sure I'd lost a couple more before I bought my scales too.  My clothes fit better, I feel slimmer, but apparently I'm just the same weight.  Not only that, but I'm 3 cms shorter! 

Undeterred I went out with my neighbour that evening to meet up with some other friends and see a band.  My neighbour, in the course of a conversation, happened to mention his girlfriend's sister who, and I quote, "would make me look slim"!.  This from a man who is around 5' 2" with a serious weight problem and, I might add, a slim and pretty Phillipino girlfriend 20 years his junior - something not uncommon here for Western men.

Determined to step up my exercising, I went out for a walk today to find that the legendary heat and humidity has finally begun and after 10 minutes outside I had to retreat to the aircon of my apartment. 

I'll carry on logging my calories and exercise, but it does feel like I will die of old age while trying to lose the next 7lbs. 

Have I missed something? What is Alli?

I can understand that - I always found that divorce was the best diet aid I ever had, so it stands to reason that falling in love would have the opposite effect.  Is he a 'feeder'?  I always seem to meet men who want to cook for me.  I suppose relationships at this point in our lives are an opportunity to learn sharing and caring while maintaining out own sense of self- our body shape being just one of the ways we decide on who we are.  Good luck, you can do it.  And still enjoy the romance too.

Hello ladies, am I too late to join this group? You seem to be a pretty lively forum.

I'm 47, 5'5", cw 150lbs gw 135lbs,  2 children (living elsewhere) ages 18 and 24. 

I live alone in a small town in South Korea and trying to lose weight here is a bit of a nightmare.   Being one of the few foreigners here it's important for me to 'fit in' which often means accepting food offerings from well meaning folk.  Just figuring out what I"m eating, let alone the calorie content, has been an adventure.  In addition, Koreans tend to be quite small and slim and the few other 'foreigners' here are mostly fit young things in their 20's and 30's, so I feel comparatively huge.  On the plus side Koreans are very health conscious so I have a beautiful sports park a stones throw from my apartment where I can walk and work out if I want to (they put exercise equipment everywhere, even half way up mountains!) and at any time on any given day there will be dozens of locals out keeping fit.

Right now I'm feeling totally disheartened.  I've been on CC for nearly a month, started out well losing a healthy 2 pounds a week then suddenly seem to have gained the 4 that I lost and am stuck back where I've been for the last 12 months.  How can that be when, compared to pre-CC,  I have cut portion sizes, cut out all snacks, walk 2 hours a day, limited alcohol and increased water  --- with zero result!  It's so frustrating as, like many of you have said, it used to be so easy to drop 10 pounds.  Now I feel stuck with a frumpy middle-aged paunch.  I really feel the need for the support of women my age and culture.  Am I being impatient or am I missing a trick here?

Theatrelily - I found the menu with estimated calories in my school lunch room!  Thank you for putting me on the trail - it is in a totally obvious place and I should have noticed before, but it's so easy to just blur all the 'foreign' stuff into the background.

 And yes, every day they estimate around 800 calories.  I'm not sure what they consider an average portion - everyone seems to get a different amount and I think they have been piling it on mine, probably as they seem happy that I love most of what I'm served.  Still it's not been too hard to let them know that a little less is better and I just ditch the fatty meat, the hotdogs, the spam and anything else that looks like it is just wasted calories.

Things are looking good so far, though I'm still in that manic first few weeks when I'm losing quickly but probably due to initial enthusiasm.

Hope all you other Korea dwellers are doing well.

My school's lunches are on the whole pretty healthy, though there are off days with fried stuff and my personal bugbear, spam/hotdog combo.  There's always a veg option, at least once a week an entirely vegetarian menu and once or twice a week it's fish.  I have never seen french fries here ever, and the only concession to Western food I recall is the spaghetti like stuff. Super bad days are jjimjangmyun which I don't like at the best of times and stir fried rice - both being an eat it or starve option.  Life's too short to starve, so I eat just as much as I need.

Have you ever had school lunches back home (the US I'm guessing?)  I was a high school teacher before I came here and my kids are both grown up now so I heard their opinions about lunch at school and despite best efforts by the government, lunch in British schools are absolutely dire, or at least they were 4 or so years ago when I was there.  I wouldn't feed that stuff to a dog I didn't like.  It's nice to see the kids here eating everything they are given (not that they have a choice) and sad to find that many of them hate it and would much prefer burger or pizza.  I'm sure that this generation will grow up with the same health issues that the West is facing now, not just because of the diet but also as I work in a boys school I see so many boys who happily admit to computer game addiction and rarely leave the house evenings and weekends to do anything else.  I'm not exactly a health freak, but it's pretty scary seeing the high-speed nose-dive into the fast food computer game life style that is happening here.

Why do forums always have to get edgy?  Chill, girls.

I don't really have a problem with white rice, I just know it's not as good as brown, but white is so much easier. Often at school it is mixed with beans or grains.  It's not a real issue, I'm sure I make some much more radical and unhealthy lifestyle choices than that without a second thought.  I do cook Korean at home and can do a mean doenjang jjigae, soondubu jjigae and a passable kimbap thanks to Maangchi whose advice saved my life when I first arrived here.

My main problem about food intake does come back to the cultural desire to feed and to share meals.  It's a great cultural trait on the whole, but difficult when you are a foreigner being welcomed and trying to diet at the same time.  The school lunch thing is my only real hurdle and I can deal with that.  I appreciate the offer to look up meals on the Korean website but if it's something I know and can make myself (like Kimchi jjigae) I can calculate it myself from base ingredients.  It's when I'm served something at lunch, for example the fish in some kind of spicy sauce yesterday - I don't know its name or even what kind of fish.  My colleagues don't speak English well enough to tell me what it is so I'm stuck.  I can make an educated guess on most things of course and I'm intrigued by the idea that there is a menu with calorific breakdowns somewhere - not found one yet but I'm still trying.

It is interesting that Koreans are generally very thin despite eating loads.  Having said that I've seen young female teachers here eat like birds and complain of being fat when to me they look underweight.  There is a lot of pressure to be thin and pretty in this culture.  We need to remember that as Westerners we have several generations of wealthy society, surplus food and good nutrition behind us so are now genetically predisposed to being fatter. I was born in the early 1960s and haven't had any of the weight issues faced by by daughter's generation - I'm simply dealing with middle-aged spread!

Weight gain is coming to the Koreans already - just have a look at your teenage students; they will find it harder and harder to remain skinny and I suspect that the two obvious factors affect them and are a lesson to us too. 

First, teenagers are moving away from a traditional Korean diet, which suggests that the traditional food is more useful to us in dieting than imported Western options.  Though it may not seem that way when we look at some of the menu options, consider this - a TV program was made in the Czech Republic based on 'Supersize Me' - I'm sure you're familiar - with someone substituting burgers for traditional Czech food - considered by the modernists to be stodgy, fatty and unhealthy.  The guy actually lost weight.  I guess that Korean food is the same - traditional food is usually somehow well balanced and healthy - otherwise they wouldn't have survived as far as this generation.

The second factor was exemplified this week when I decided to get up early - around 5.30am - to have an hours fast walk in the local sports park.  It was humming with life - old and young, chubby and slim, fit and otherwise.  Koreans do take their exercise seriously.  And, as my final defense of Korean food, though I am trying to lose about 12lbs now, I gained that before I came here.  I only began a determined effort to lose this a week or two ago and it is a testament to a basically healthy food culture that in the six months since I arrived I have started menopause and quit smoking but not gained anything.  I'm thinking losing 12lbs with a conscious effort shouldn't be too hard.

Yes, it's all possible and it's all just a matter of making choices when we can, based on information if we can find it. 

That's really interesting, thanks.  I do actually love school lunch and I don't want to face the nightmare of refusal - yes, they do take it very personally, don't they?  700 to 800 calories seems like a lot - about half my daily intake!  Still, if it's my main meal of the day that's not so bad.  I'll try and find if they post the calories in my school - I know there is a menu somewhere.  I'll try cutting the rice down a little - I already avoid as much meat as I can.  I was a happy vegetarian before I left the UK - it's too hard to keep it up here, though I usually avoid the chunks of pork and beef.

I suspected high sodium, but also a deceptive quanitity of sugar in the form of corn syrup or just plain old white granulated goes in lots of stuff too. 

Part of the problem is that, while they frown upon anyone who is even slightly overweight, any suggestion that I need to eat less because I want to lose weight is met with a 'no, no, you don't need to' or 'this is really healthy' (as is ALL Korean food, regardless of obvious lumps of fat and copious amounts of sugar).  I'll keep trying though.