Ah, the age-old question, and of course it does dear reader. If you are overweight it can lead to health problems, sleeping problems and nagging wife problems. Wait? What do you mean this isn’t why you clicked on the title? I am sure I have no idea of what you were originally thinking when you saw this. (This isn't a picture of me by the way)
I will deal with that particular issue in a later blog post eventually but in the meantime, I want to talk about weight. Once we had finally managed to return to Shanghai after being in lockdown for 3 months, I realized I had put on a little more weight. Rather, my wife realized I had. She said “You’re nearly twice the man you were when I married you!” I initially took this as a compliment, but then she followed up with “You’re fat. You need to lose weight.” Chinese people take delight in discussing people’s weight and have no filter when it comes to telling people they need to lose a little weight.
The problem is of course I hate to exercise. When I run my shins really hurt and so do my knees as well. I had to tried to run or jog in the past but ended up just being in too much pain. I tried swimming but the swimming pools are always crowded here and so it is difficult as you need to keep stopping for people who like to cut across lanes just to annoy the laowai. I don’t especially like swimming either, especially when the pool is cold.
So, I tried to lose weight by restricting how much I ate and looking at what I actually ate. I looked into the keto diet and realized that yes, I was eating too many carbohydrates (rice and potatoes). The portion sizes were also too big. I often skip breakfast if I am too busy sorting out cover or if it’s noodles in the school canteen (I like beef noodles for breakfast but always tend to spill them on myself). Lunchtimes I am on duty either walking in the playground or encouraging the children to eat their vegetables in the canteen. Because of that I did tend to snack a lot and so I decided to change the snacks to fruit and nuts.
I gradually started to lose weight and actually managed to go down 8 kg which was great, but then I stalled. I’ve been at 85 kg for about 6 months now. This may not seem a lot but I’m only 5ft 6” so really I need to be about another 20 kg lighter.
With the decision to sort myself out back in January I kept researching as I knew I was going to have to exercise but wanted some way of making it enjoyable and less painful. I came across an app called Sweatcoin which combines my new love of crypto currency with the thing I loathe- exercise. I had actually played with the app when it first started a few years ago but then changed my phone and forgot to reinstall it. I will post a more in-depth review of Sweatcoin next after this one but if you want to go ahead and research it yourself please go ahead and download to your phone. You get awarded coins for the number of steps you take and there are bonus activities too. You can then spend the coins in different ways or even save them up to use in an auction.
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