Hi, I’m planning on studying in Taipei over the summer. For the past few month I’ve been working out and counting my calories in order to lose weight.
So far I’ve been doing good but I’m really afraid that my trip to taipei will mess me up because I’ll be unaware of my calorie intake while I’m over there. I’m also coming over there with a very basic understand of mandarin, so it’s going to be hard the nutrition facts for food. Are their any apps I can use to help me count calories while I’m over their or certain diet words I should look for on menus and food chains?
A lot of packaged food here will come up in my fitness pal. Additionally, all labels have calories listed for serving size and 100 gram servings. It’s super easy to track. When you eat out, you’ll have to do your best estimate for amounts, but it’s not too bad. Definitely over estimate for oil though.
Pointing gets you very far here, especially in self-serve restaurants -of which unfortunately there are less and less around campus areas. Second on the amount of oil in food: veggies are hardly ever found raw, salads are rare, and most places use way too much oil to stir fry.
Packed food is convenient and labeled and all but there have been problems with safety -more plastic in the food than in the packing.
Stay away from bubble milk tea -and most drink stands, unless you order your tea without sugar, and even so…
Take advantage of fresh fruits available and buy leaves to brew your own tea. Buy organic bread and foodstuffs, pack your stuff. Take control and good luck.
I don’t count calories but I find white rice and oils can (obviously) cause weight gain. I avoid them. This means I can’t eat in 80-90 percent of Taiwanese restaurants.
You can still find healthy street-food like chopped fruit, sweet potatoes, chestnuts, sweetcorn and other snacks where-ever you go. For sit down meals I normally choose medicinal soups from vegetarian restaurants, or red/purple rice + WuGuFan if I can find it. There are also health shops that sell organic grains like quinoa and buckwheat.
I cook a lot at home too, as I am tired of questionable food preparation practices. This is not exclusive to Taiwan, it’s a worldwide issue. Some restaurants make “fake purple rice” by adding about 10 percent purple rice to white rice, staining the whole batch purple.
Not exactly an answer to your question, but hope that helps.
I know it’s not what you asked, but I honestly suggest you try something else while you’re in Taiwan. What you want to do is going to make mealtimes a major pain in the ass. Calorie-counting doesn’t work anyway because it’s impossible to estimate food weights properly; it only appears to work because people instinctively aim for small portions while they’re doing it. In any case, caloric restriction is likely to make you feel like crap and isn’t sustainable in the long term. 90% of people who lose weight that way end up packing it back on again within 3 years.
As a workaround, try this: just don’t eat anything with rice or noodles; substitute extra veg or meat until you feel full. You might think that’s easier said than done in a country where everything is (apparently) served with rice or noodles, but you’ll be surprised. If you look around, you’ll notice all the skinny girls leaving their rice on the side of the plate. Hot pot (huo guo) is fine without rice; I eat mine with extra doufu. Buffet (bian dang) shops don’t care if you just buy a big plate of veg and meat, and tell them you don’t want rice. Salad is becoming a lot more popular. It’s simple, it works, and you don’t need to learn the Chinese for “how many calories is in this tentacled thing”? Also, if you eat this way, the fatty/oily cooking style becomes a plus, because that’s where most of your energy is coming from.
I think most of your advice is sound, but I would not want to get most of my energy from cheap reused oils and fats from adulterated cooking oils used in most restaurants. Who knows what they’ve done to them?
Their practices are a long way from healthy fats like flax seed + organic olive oil from City Super.
Well, I agree, but the only answer to that (as you said above) is to cook at home using known-good ingredients
Personally I eat an awful lot of huo guo. It’s cheap, convenient, comes in various different varieties, contains only “good” fats (animal fats, not dodgy recycled vegetable fats) and tastes good without rice.
[quote=“HenHaoChi”]I think most of your advice is sound, but I would not want to get most of my energy from cheap reused oils and fats from adulterated cooking oils used in most restaurants. Who knows what they’ve done to them?
Their practices are a long way from healthy fats like flax seed + organic olive oil from City Super.[/quote]
Students most often live in dorms and most of them have all their meals outside. Few have access to kitchens and if they do, they have little time to eat properly by preparing their own meals.
I’ve dropped something to the tune of 20 kgs since I moved to Taiwan about 2 years ago. Had I been stricter on diet and exercise no doubt I would have lost more, faster.
My general advice is to avoid anything obviously calorific; by that I mean crumbed/fried/deep-fried products, obviously oily stir-fries, obviously fatty meats etc. I prefer rice to noodles but I know a lot of people advise the opposite for weight loss, even though I believe noodles have a higher calorie load. I eat a lot of biandang, because I crave vegetables. My go-to is jiroufan, because it’s literally chicken breast and rice and tastes awesome. Don’t be afraid to eat soy either, it’s a lot less calorific than meat, and the fear-mongering over phytoestrogen has yielded absolutely no statistical evidence yet. They do some damn fine vegetarian food in this country.
The other thing is you have to exercise fairly religiously, to make up for being surrounded by high-cal foods. Especially don’t neglect your cardio. A lot of online fitness types will say lifting weights is sufficient exercise for weight loss, but anecdotally that’s total garbage. if there was one thing I could go back in time and tell my stupider younger self, it would probably be “get on the fucking treadmill already you fat fuck”. If you do a fairly intensive cardio program like C25K (Couch to 5K) and don’t eat like shit, weight will fall off. It did for me, at least. It’s just a shame that cardio is boring and painful, otherwise I’d be doing it all the time. Pick up a sport if you haven’t got one yet, my Chinese is too garbage otherwise I’d be in an MMA gym by now.
kungfuken, anecdotally what you suggest might work for you, but research suggests it doesn’t work for 90% of people. That’s not to dismiss your experience - anecdotes are data - but the vast majority have no success with what you suggested (I’m one of the 90% who, 20 years ago, thought: why is this not working?). Even so, 20kg in two years is a very poor result. You can easily achieve that in three months by eliminating starchy foods; I went from 80+ to 69kg (17%BF) in a matter of weeks.
Fatty/greasy food only makes you fat in the context of a high-starch meal. The reason is that the starch is metabolised to glucose, causing an insulin spike which signals not just the removal of glucose but also fatty acids from the bloodstream. “Removal” for most people means storage in fat cells.
I suspect your experience is more likely to be due to the (relative) lack of sweets and fizzy drinks in Taiwan. Have you noticed you’ve cut down on these simply because they’re not so visible in the shops?
As for the weight-training vs. CV debate, it’s really down to personal preference. Some people like weights and hate CV, or vice versa, and that’s fine. The results depend upon how you exercise. Whether you’re doing weights or CV, you need to exercise hard to have any real impact on your weightloss performance, and even then, it works not because you’re “burning calories” but because exercise causes general metabolic shifts that favour weight loss - your diet is still the primary factor. So many people still believe that “fat burn zone” nonsense and pound away for two hours at 60%maxHR. Far better to do 20 mins at 85%, and even better to do intervals at 60%/90%. If you’re doing weights, lift hard and lift continuously; you’ll get a serious CV workout in the process.
I can thoroughly recommend the books written by Phinney and Volek on exercise and nutrition. These guys are both athletes and physicians with an impressive track record of publication and clinical experience. They know what they’re talking about.
TBH, it’s closer to 25, but even so I could have lost more had I been better about it. I didn’t diet consistently the whole time, and really most of my results came in the last year. I got down to 69 kgs @ 187 cm, but now I’m about 72. I’m leaner and a little more muscular now though.
You don’t need to tell me about ketogenic dieting, I wasted years yo-yo dieting on keto, and I’ve never met or heard of anyone keeping any of the weight they lost due to keto off. Even Dr Atkins yo-yo’d, and died overweight. My advice is to eat less crap and exercise more, if that doesn’t work for someone nothing will. Also, that’s a pretty incredible rate of loss! Good work. At most I lost 1.5 kgs a week on Keto. Were you obese or severely overweight when you started?
Taiwan is completely overloaded with sugar. It’s disgusting what they put in their drinks. That said, I was already avoiding sodas and sweets for years before I came here. I lost most of my weight eating jiroufan, veggies and exercising 1 hr, 5 days a week.
Mostly preaching to the choir here, except I vehemently disagree on weights vs CV being a preference issue. Anaerobic fitness != aerobic fitness, and everyone knows the ‘unfit bodybuilder’ meme. As far as I can tell the jury’s still out on HIIT vs LISS, so I suggest do whichever injures least. Personally I enjoy weights the most, but I’ve never myself nor heard of anyone ever losing significant weight purely through weight training.
[quote=“Icon”][quote=“HenHaoChi”]I think most of your advice is sound, but I would not want to get most of my energy from cheap reused oils and fats from adulterated cooking oils used in most restaurants. Who knows what they’ve done to them?
Their practices are a long way from healthy fats like flax seed + organic olive oil from City Super.[/quote]
Students most often live in dorms and most of them have all their meals outside. Few have access to kitchens and if they do, they have little time to eat properly by preparing their own meals.[/quote]
I always hear people state that they simply have no time to prepare healthy foods so they end up picking up a piece of cake for their kids as they race to drop them off at school. What makes people so busy? We prepare fresh food every breakfast, sometimes salmon, pork, beef, eggs or my wife makes home made cereal from nuts and dates. She prepares the kids a lunch to take as well. Somehow they still manage to be dressed, fed, and out the door before 7. I shower, eat, often run 21k, and then walk to work by 9. Dinnertime same. It’s just a question of priorities.
Lots of healthy meals can be prepared with little more than a bar fridge and a microwave. If you can cover your breakfasts and lunches, than you are more than halfway there.
I have no advice as to how to count calories, as it would be very difficult to measure if you eat at inexpensive restaurants here. It tastes good but it’s hard to know what it actually is.
I think a lot of people have absolutely no clue what Atkins intended, hence the horrific writeups about people who tried to survive on steak and eggs and ended up in hospital, or less drastically the people who simply found their own bastardized version of Atkins too hard to stick with. I’ve noticed three variants that crop up:
People who originally lived on junk food and continue to live on junk food minus the carbs (eg., bunless burgers).
People who insist on “improving” Atkins by making it low-fat, ie., they eat nothing but protein. These are the guys who tend to end up in hospital.
People who think a diet is just for Christmas, and after they’ve lost some weight they go right back to eating the things that made them fat in the first place.
Ketogenic diets have been extensively studied over the last decade or two, and the general consensus today (which I discovered myself by trial-and-error) is that simply eliminating processed starches and replacing them with vegetables gets you 80% of the results. I just eat pretty much what I always ate, minus the bread, rice, sugar and pasta. People who have never voluntarily eaten vegetables in their lives would struggle with that.
Yeah, that’s pretty much what it boils down to Still, it’s amazing how many people just can’t deal with that simple reality.
I was … squishy. Poor fat/muscle partitioning. I had literally never seen my abs until I tried a ketogenic diet.
It’s true you can buy a half-litre of sugar and tea if you want to, but it’s consumed a lot less frequently (IMO) than sweet drinks and desserts in the West. In the UK I can buy a huge cheesecake (made with synthetic crap, of course) for about US$2. In Taiwan that buys you a single slice. Same with things like cola. I get the impression that a certain subset of the population are on a Western-style sugar trip, and they get fat. The rest of them eat/drink those things only once in a while.
True, but no exercise is either/or; any hard exercise has a component of both. Also, cardiovascular fitness has little to do with weight loss, although of course it’s a good thing in itself.
Basically I’d rather someone said “I hate CV, so I’m going to do weights instead”, than “I hate CV, so I’m not going near a gym, ever”.
Exactly. It’s actually quite easy to get a good, low-cost meal in Taiwan if you choose carefully. But I can’t understand people who insist they have to eat rubbish because they’re “too busy” for anything else.
You got nothing to worry about. I am trying to gain weight while working out here and its killing my food budget because the portions are so small.
I need to add extra eggs to everything, and consume oatmeal all year round.
[quote=“finley”]
I think a lot of people have absolutely no clue what Atkins intended, hence the horrific writeups about people who tried to survive on steak and eggs and ended up in hospital, or less drastically the people who simply found their own bastardized version of Atkins too hard to stick with. I’ve noticed three variants that crop up:
People who originally lived on junk food and continue to live on junk food minus the carbs (eg., bunless burgers).
People who insist on “improving” Atkins by making it low-fat, ie., they eat nothing but protein. These are the guys who tend to end up in hospital.
People who think a diet is just for Christmas, and after they’ve lost some weight they go right back to eating the things that made them fat in the first place.
Ketogenic diets have been extensively studied over the last decade or two, and the general consensus today (which I discovered myself by trial-and-error) is that simply eliminating processed starches and replacing them with vegetables gets you 80% of the results. I just eat pretty much what I always ate, minus the bread, rice, sugar and pasta. People who have never voluntarily eaten vegetables in their lives would struggle with that.[/quote]
I was a bit of a) and 100% b). I usually I ate from home, which was fairly OK. I found I only lost weight if I was ketogenic, and the all weight came back if ever stopped. These days I eat more or less how I want and I’ve gotten my alright results, as you say. That said I’ve had to redefine ‘what I want’, but I think everyone’s palette and priorities change as they get older.
Statistically, something like 95% of all people who lose weight will put it all back on. Obesity is as much a mental disorder as it is a biochemical one. I know my head was messed up when I was fat.
I still haven’t, but I’ve got veins on my lower abdomen… shakes fist
[quote=“finley”]
It’s true you can buy a half-litre of sugar and tea if you want to, but it’s consumed a lot less frequently (IMO) than sweet drinks and desserts in the West. In the UK I can buy a huge cheesecake (made with synthetic crap, of course) for about US$2. In Taiwan that buys you a single slice. Same with things like cola. I get the impression that a certain subset of the population are on a Western-style sugar trip, and they get fat. The rest of them eat/drink those things only once in a while.[/quote]
That’s true. I think there’s actually way more fat available in Western food, especially in snacks and desserts. Which is why I try to avoid desserts in general and eat Taiwanese-style ones like douhua or something if I do eat sweets.
[quote=“finley”]
True, but no exercise is either/or; any hard exercise has a component of both. Also, cardiovascular fitness has little to do with weight loss, although of course it’s a good thing in itself.[/quote]
Except that seriously training CV will almost guaranteed make you lose weight, unless you’ve got a full blown binging eating disorder. Then again maybe that’s just me and what I’ve heard.
I’d tell them to stop being pussies and do their 5k.
[quote=“finley”]
Exactly. It’s actually quite easy to get a good, low-cost meal in Taiwan if you choose carefully. But I can’t understand people who insist they have to eat rubbish because they’re “too busy” for anything else.[/quote]
If it weren’t for the overabundance of cooking oil or deep-fried bullshit, you could probably get shredded on a 75 NT biandang for chrisssakes. What’s your recommendation for people with no kitchens, like me?
Yeah, like, really. I don’t have much of a kitchen but it’s still possible to prepare (some of) your own meals. Example: if I’m in a hurry, I buy a salad from 7-11, add some homemade grilled chicken + yoghurt dressing, and wrap it in a tortilla. If I’m really in a hurry I buy a bag of fried chicken from 派克. You can do that with virtually no cooking equipment.
Funnily enough, that’s exactly what I did. Biandang buffet several times a week, with no rice. I would recommend that to anyone who genuinely has no kitchen, although it helps if you have 2-3 biandang shops to rotate through to avoid boredom. Likewise with huo guo.
A lot of people do this. Inevitably, it doesn’t work because, basically, it’s not “Atkins”. It’s just starvation. The low-fat meme is so deeply embedded in the public consciousness that people actually feel guilty if they flout it. Fortunately I have a fairly low sense of guilt and have never seriously attempted to do low-fat (except for a year or two when I was younger; I stopped when I realised it doesn’t work). If you follow Atkins’s instructions to the letter, it works, and keeps on working. I was incredibly skeptical of Atkins to begin with and bought the book (second-hand from a charity shop) out of pure curiosity. I attempted to follow the diet as an experiment, not expecting any useful result. Obviously, I had to replicate Atkin’s diet as accurately as I could in order to give it a fair test.
Finding something you can actually stick with is critical; if you can’t, then (as you said) you’ll be right back where you started when you “finish” the diet. This is the reason most people can’t stick with calorie-restricted diets (of which calorie-counting is a variant). It’s just too painful. Sooner or later, you can’t do it anymore.
Yeah, like, really. I don’t have much of a kitchen but it’s still possible to prepare (some of) your own meals. Example: if I’m in a hurry, I buy a salad from 7-11, add some homemade grilled chicken + yoghurt dressing, and wrap it in a tortilla. If I’m really in a hurry I buy a bag of fried chicken from 派克. You can do that with virtually no cooking equipment.[/quote]
So the general consensus is you’re not eating as healthily as you could unless you’re making it yourself?
Funnily enough, that’s exactly what I did. Biandang buffet several times a week, with no rice. I would recommend that to anyone who genuinely has no kitchen, although it helps if you have 2-3 biandang shops to rotate through to avoid boredom. Likewise with huo guo.[/quote]
Hotpot gets expensive, tho. Definitely cleaner than your average biandang however. I’m not convinced your options are much better being pure keto, considering there’s a boatload of carbs in most of the dishes you can buy outside; the sauces, breadings, the soy products, etc. You’d also have to avoid fruits completely save for limited quantities of berries and other low-carbohydrate fruits. Living in Taiwan and not eating fruit almost defeats the purpose if you ask me
[quote=“finley”]
Finding something you can actually stick with is critical; if you can’t, then (as you said) you’ll be right back where you started when you “finish” the diet. This is the reason most people can’t stick with calorie-restricted diets (of which calorie-counting is a variant). It’s just too painful. Sooner or later, you can’t do it anymore.[/quote]
The other thing I find is you really have to want to be healthy, more than you want to eat garbage. Most overweight people do not want it that badly and aren’t really willing to make permanent changes. They may think they are, but when it starts to get hard they start second-guessing and feeling bitter. I was the same way for years.
I dunno about that, but it’ll be cheaper, and often easier. At least 60% of the cost of a restaurant meal is overheads.
Not ideal if you’re on a budget, I agree. But you can get a pretty good one for around NT$120.
Well, you have to choose carefully, of course. When I first did “standard” Atkins, the local breakfast shop lao ban niang used to do me a tuna salad (off-menu) with a fresh-brewed coffee. There was a really nice vegetarian bian dang buffet nearby (not the usual stuff stewed in sickly-sweet sauces). I didn’t attempt to avoid soy products (although obviously beans contain a certain amount of carbs) or breading. I ate quite a lot of battered fried chicken and Japanese-style pork because they have more fat than carbs, which is what you’re after.
Where I live now, it’s not so easy to find that sort of thing.
However, you only have to do this for a few weeks while you’re attempting aggressive weight loss. Weight maintenance is much less restrictive.
I think Atkins was wrong about this, and it’s the reason I mentioned the Phinney and Volek books. They’ve done a lot of research on this and concluded that ‘all carbs are bad’ is not how it works. It’s really more to do with glycemic index, although GI is hard to measure and even harder to estimate. The bottom line is that heavily-processed starches will make you fat; naturally-occuring ones, not so much, because they’re bound up in a physical structure which prevents rapid metabolism.
They also have a theory that people have different tolerances for carbs in their diet. For any individual, there’s a sort of tipping point at which it all turns to crap. Thus some people can happily eat a potato-loaded diet for their whole lives and never suffer for it, while others only have to look at a slice of bread to develop diabetes. This makes a lot of sense: different populations do have wildly different sensitivities to “Western” food, so presumably there is also individual variation. Younger people seem to be able to eat more-or-less anything, and it goes downhill as you get older.
Anyway, personally I eat quite a lot of fruit. Maybe I just have a high carb tolerance
I’ve suspected this for a long time and made a similar comment at … the other place. However, say this in public and you’ll be pilloried. It’s quite obvious really that if you want something, you’ll make it happen; and if you don’t, you won’t.
