Chinese New Year: How to Slim Down While You Feast | Kouzi’s Foodie Views
This foodie never tells tall tales, and I have living proof to back it up.
The proof lies with my older brother, who is in his sixties. He not only discovered that the New Year period can aid weight loss, but has maintained this routine continuously since the celebrations began two years ago. He has shed 15 kilograms, dropping from 85 kg to 70 kg. This is thanks to my three-part dietary approach—unsophisticated, perhaps, but undeniably effective.
I. The Three-Part Dietary Approach to Shedding Weight and Burning Fat
The first step is remarkably simple: instead of reducing your dishes, you actually increase them. Start by making kelp, wood ear mushrooms, snow fungus, and dried or fresh mushrooms a permanent fixture in your kitchen.
Many people keep dried ingredients in their cupboards, but seldom use them. To ensure your staples actually make it onto the table, follow one simple rule: keep at least a bowl’s worth soaking and ready to go at all times. This guarantees that whoever is cooking can reach for them without a second thought.
Another key point is using a generous amount—enough to make up a quarter of the dish. When cooking high-starch ingredients such as potatoes, Chinese yam, or lotus root, I tend to bump up the proportion of these “additives”, sometimes letting them account for half the dish.
There’s no need to worry about it ruining the flavour. As long as dried ingredients are soaked beforehand, rinsed several times, and blanched, they won’t overpower the dish. Besides, many mushrooms boast a naturally rich and beloved flavour of their own.
The second move is to swap your staple carbohydrate: trade white flour steamed buns for Shandong-style pancakes. In the north, steamed buns are the go-to staple, and those bought from shops are invariably made from refined wheat flour. Here, pancakes are just as ubiquitous a staple, pairing wonderfully with almost any dish. The most common variety is the corn pancake, completely additive-free and made entirely from wholegrains.
II. Medicine or Meals? Knowing Is Hard, Doing Is Easy
Health is a perennial topic at family gatherings. Once you hit middle age, ‘weight loss’ crops up with increasing frequency.
We are a family of five siblings. My brother has always been the strongest; back in high school, he could hike up Mount Tai in a single stride and carry a load of firewood down the mountain. He has long been our family’s paragon of fitness. I serve as his control group: sickly as a child, only recently catching a second wind in my later years.
My years of constant travel were gruelling and exhausting. After I’d had enough of running around, I settled down in Evil Valley, where I now spend my days working the land—endeavours that are, if anything, even more tiring. ‘Look after yourself’ and ‘eat properly’ have been the standard well-wishes I receive from family whenever we meet. But I was never blessed with a palate for indulgence. My idea of ‘good eats’ differs from the norm; I have little appetite for heavy meats or rich oils. My tastes are rather eccentric, leaning towards dishes that are light, or frankly, bland. I took up marathon running after turning fifty, giving the impression that I’ve escaped straight from a Stephen Chow film’s ‘Centre for Unconventional Human Studies’. Fortunately, thanks to my quirky palate and unorthodox hobbies, my medical check-up results have consistently been excellent.
Each time I visit, I notice his clothes growing progressively more “stuffed,” a clear sign that his belly is packing on the pounds. Every couple of years he sizes up, and a few years after that, he sizes up again. The cycle repeats, and the once lean, handsome lad has, without question, developed a rather prominent paunch.
As we each step into our later years, the “three highs” (elevated blood pressure, blood sugar, and cholesterol) have become common among my siblings. Fortunately, the national healthcare system is robust now; medical insurance covers prescriptions and hospital stays. Modern medicine has a pill for every ailment, with the comforting refrain, “Just take it, there’s nothing to worry about.”
Yet while they feel no fear, I do. I have always harboured a deep scepticism towards the logic of simply medicating away illness: When the body starts to falter, it is a signal that our lifestyle has gone awry. Health check results are meant to prompt us to adjust our habits and reclaim our wellbeing, not to justify popping pills as a quick fix. After all, every medication comes with side effects. As high cholesterol becomes increasingly prevalent among modern people, the market floods with lipid-lowering drugs. These medications carry numerous side effects, including elevated blood sugar. Consequently, the “three highs” end up compounding one another. Relying on drugs merely masks the symptoms rather than addressing the root cause; in many cases, we are essentially “medicating ourselves into illness.”
Whenever we catch up, I urge them to watch their diet, get moving, and focus on eating well rather than relying on medication. But my advice is invariably met with a barrage of practical objections: “It’s easy to say, everyone understands the principle, but it’s terribly hard to put into practice.” They eat as a family unit, sharing meals laden with meats and dishes prepared in heavy oils. They simply cannot do what I do—eat separately while the rest of the household is still hungry, or spontaneously cook a light, personal meal tailored exactly to my preferences.
So no matter how diligently I preach my usual gospel of change, the actual transformation remains stubbornly out of reach for them. Eventually, my repeated advice just fades into nagging, brushing past their ears like background noise.
As our parents’ condition declined from “requiring some assistance” to “needing round-the-clock care” and finally to “requiring at least two carers,” my brother and I took shifts together during the Lunar New Year two years ago. He took the lead in the kitchen while I handled the miscellaneous chores. My brother is undeniably our family’s premier chef; he both loves cooking and is exceptionally skilled at it. His dishes are richly flavoured and generously oiled, making everything he prepares undeniably delicious.
Each week, as he sorts out the medications for our parents, my brother can’t help but sigh: At sixty, he is taking the exact same pills as his ninety-year-old father. Many of my brother’s health milestones—putting on weight in his thirties, suffering a stroke in his forties, and developing the “three highs” in his fifties—have all arrived thirty years sooner than they did for our father… He mutters and laments, “Our generation’s health is in far worse shape than that of the previous one.”
I naturally fall back into preaching my usual gospel of change, and he retorts with his own refrain about how difficult change truly is. We dance in circles like this.
If radical overhaul proves too difficult, then let’s simply aim for small adjustments. Hence the flexible workarounds mentioned earlier.
III. An Early Victory
I spent two months on duty with my brother, but he took charge of the cooking, tailoring the meals to our parents’ preferences and sticking to his own culinary habits.
The celebrity weight-loss transformations we see in the media, along with various commercial diet camps, often demand extremes in both diet and exercise. They require razor-sharp focus, iron willpower, and what amounts to living an ‘unnatural’ lifestyle.That winter, the adjustments I suggested to my brother were far more grounded—middle-ground tweaks for a normal lifestyle rather than radical overhauls. We simply introduced a few new ingredients and dialled back on the oil, keeping everything on the dinner table as usual. No gruelling workouts, no deliberate starvation—just a subtle shift in what you choose with your chopsticks.
I added those ingredients specifically because they share a common set of traits: they are nutrient-dense, highly satiating, low in calories, and they don’t soak up much oil when cooked. Wood ear mushrooms, snow fungus, kelp, and various fungi are practically ‘zero-calorie ingredients’, making them perfect partners for richer, heartier dishes. Just like vegetables, they are packed with dietary fibre. Fibre not only fills you up and promotes a feeling of fullness, but it also helps stabilise post-meal blood sugar levels. Furthermore, it can interrupt the enterohepatic circulation of cholesterol, flushing these unwanted compounds out of the body swiftly. This means you can still enjoy hearty holiday feasts without fretting over fatty liver, a bulging midriff, or elevated blood lipids.
During the Lunar New Year, family gatherings inevitably centre on food. The grand dishes and cooking methods stay much the same, but incorporating these adjustments barely alters the flavour. For those managing the ‘three highs’ and excess weight, picking up the chopsticks now comes with a choice: giving everything a quick dip in that bowl of vinegar and water at the table makes all the difference.
No special diets, no fasting. Celebrating the festival with the family just as we always do, my brother shed a kilogram over two months.
The real bonus, though, is that he no longer has to wash his hair every day.
Normally, I’d head out for a morning jog and come back drenched in sweat, while my brother would wash his hair daily, always smelling fresh. He’d say he suffers from a naturally oily scalp, and going a single day without washing meant his hair clumped together uncomfortably against his head. During our two months of shared duty, my morning runs remained a steadfast routine, while his hair-washing habit quietly began to shift. It gradually stretched to once every two days, then once every three. Eventually, he even decided on his own to stop taking his lipid-lowering medication, reasoning that, ‘Less oil on my scalp means there’s less in my blood vessels too.’
Seeing these initial results, my brother gained real confidence. There was no need for me to nag him; without needing any prodding to keep up the momentum, he dropped ten kilograms over the year. When he bought new clothes for the following Lunar New Year, the sizes finally stopped creeping up. For the first time in decades, he had to go down a size. With a slimmer waist and a more youthful appearance, the change was undeniable.
With the weight off, he no longer had to worry about the strain on his feet and knees, allowing him to gradually increase his physical activity. By the third Lunar New Year, he had lost another five kilograms. As his starting weight decreased, the scale didn’t move as dramatically, but my brother remained confident. He plans to maintain a steady, gradual loss, aiming to shed another five kilograms over the next year or two.
IV. Two Bonus Tips
Refined starch in staple foods is the main culprit behind weight gain. Everyone knows wholegrains are the healthier choice, but they don’t always taste great. Fortunately, Shandong residents are uniquely blessed with an alternative: the large Shandong pancake.
If you don’t have access to these pancakes, can’t get past the taste, or simply must stick to white rice and wheat flour without drastically cutting portions, there’s another workaround.
Instead of eating freshly cooked white rice or store-bought white steamed buns hot, pop them into the freezer for a day. This process converts a portion of the weight-gaining refined starch into non-weight-gaining resistant starch. (For the full scientific breakdown, feel free to look it up online.) When ready to eat, take them straight from the freezer—no need to defrost or bring to room temperature. Heat the rice directly in the microwave and steam the buns as usual; the texture remains almost unaffected.
Tip Two: Fat-Reducing Drinks.
Family gatherings during the holidays always call for a drink. We all know alcohol harms the liver, so many switch to soft drinks. However, the sugar in those drinks is just as hard on the liver. Both alcohol and sugary drinks damage the liver, promote weight gain, and raise blood lipids. My solution is to switch to roselle tea. Roselle is rich in vitamin C and anthocyanins. Paired with stevia, it contains zero sugar and zero calories, helping to reduce fat, cut through richness, and aid digestion. I add my own home-grown stevia for a perfectly balanced sweet-and-tart flavour that suits all ages. Moreover, roselle has a festive crimson hue, making it the perfect choice to swap wine for tea at the Spring Festival dinner table.
Finally, with this glass of crimson roselle tea, I wish everyone a joyful New Year. I particularly hope that readers facing health challenges can, like my brother, successfully shed weight and fat under the guidance of the three-step diet method, and ring in the new year in fresh clothes!
Unless otherwise stated, all illustrations in this article are by the author.
Editor: Tianle