Losing Weight and Body Fat While Eating Through the Spring Festival | Kouzi’s Foodie View
A foodie like me never speaks in empty boasts, and I have real evidence to back me up.
The evidence is my own elder brother, a man in his sixties. Not only did he discover that you can lose weight over the Spring Festival — he started two Chinese New Years ago and has carried it on ever since, shedding a full 15 kg, from 85 kg down to his current 70 kg. All credit to my Three Basic Moves diet. Blunt it may be, but it really works.
I. The Three Basic Moves Diet for Losing Fat and Weight
The first move is dead simple: add to the menu rather than subtract from it. Start with the ingredients themselves — make kelp, wood ear mushroom, snow fungus and fresh or dried mushrooms kitchen staples.
A lot of people keep dried goods in the cupboard but rarely use them. The trick to turning “staple” into “go-to” is this: always have at least a bowlful in rehydrated form, so whoever’s cooking can grab a handful without breaking stride.
The other key is quantity — enough to make up at least a quarter of the dish. When I cook starchy ingredients like potato, Chinese yam or lotus root, I use even more of these “additives,” sometimes as much as half the dish.
Don’t worry about the taste going awry. Dried ingredients, as long as they’re soaked in advance, rinsed thoroughly a few times, then blanched and soaked, won’t overpower the flavour. Besides, many mushrooms carry flavours that people already love.
The second move is to swap your staple grain: replace white-flour steamed buns with Shandong jianbing. In the north, steamed buns are the default starch, and the ones you pick up from the corner shop are white-flour, loaded with refined starch. In our parts, jianbing pancakes are just as readily available as a staple, and they go with almost anything. The most common kind is corn jianbing — no additives, pure wholegrain.
II. Medicine or Food? Knowing Is Hard, Doing Is Easy
Health is the eternal topic at family gatherings, and once you hit middle age, the word “dieting” crops up with increasing frequency.
There are five siblings in my family, and my brother is by far the fittest. Back in secondary school he could stride up Mount Tai at a casual pace and carry a load of firewood down on a pole on the way back — the very picture of robust health, our family’s standing health champion. I was his control group: frail and always under the weather as a child, finally enjoying what doctors call “a last blaze before the light goes out” — only in my case the blaze came well after the supposed sunset.
My life of dashing about has been a hard-graft sort of life. Exhausting. After enough of running around, I settled into my own little Valley of the Outlaws, where I spend each day working the earth — even more exhausting. “Take care of yourself,” “Eat something decent” — those are what everyone says to me every time we meet. But I was born with no luck in matters of the palate. The things I consider good eating are rather different from everyone else’s: no rich meats, no heavy oil, and my tastes run the gamut — if it isn’t light, it’s austere. After turning fifty I took up marathon running, which probably made me look like someone who’d escaped from the “Research Centre for Abnormal Humans” in a Stephen Chow film. Still, thanks to my peculiar palate and unorthodox passions, my health-check figures have always been in good order.
We’ve both crossed into our senior years in turn, and among the siblings the “three highs” — hypertension, high blood sugar and high blood lipids — are practically universal now. The country has good policies; you can get hospital treatment on the medical insurance, and modern science has a pill for every complaint. “Go on, eat, eat — don’t worry about it.” They aren’t worried, but I am. I’ve never bought into the logic of treating illness with pills: if your body is showing problems, it’s your lifestyle that’s the problem. The numbers on a health check are a reminder to change how you live and reclaim your health — not an invitation to pop a tablet and move on. On top of that, every drug comes with side effects. High blood lipids are more common than ever, and so are lipid-lowering medications, which carry a whole host of side effects including raising blood sugar. The three highs feed into each other, and taking pills treats the symptoms, not the cause — in many cases it’s really “making yourself ill with medicine.”
Every time we meet, I tell them to watch what they eat and get their legs moving — eat properly and skip the pills. The moment I open my mouth, a barrage of practical objections comes flying back: “Good advice, we all know it, but it’s easier said than done.” They all eat as a family — chicken, duck, fish, meat, fried, stir-fried, braised, deep-fried — and none of them can do what I do, cooking for one and not worrying about anyone else, throwing together whatever I please whenever I please.
And so my little mantra of “change, change, change” plays on and on, but everyone else’s change is as elusive as a reluctant guest despite all the coaxing. Say it enough and it becomes nagging, and then in one ear and out the other.
As our parents’ care escalated from “needs a bit of looking after” to “twenty-four-hour care” to “at least two carers at all times,” two Chinese New Years ago I teamed up with my brother for a two-month shift. He was head chef; I handled all the odds and ends. My brother is the undisputed number-one cook in our family — he loves to cook and he really knows how. In his kitchen, oil flows generously and flavour runs deep; everything he makes tastes wonderful.
Each week, when we sorted out my parents’ medications, my brother couldn’t help reflecting: at sixty, he was taking the same pills as his ninety-year-old dad. So many of his life changes — putting on weight in his thirties, a cerebral infarction in his forties, the three highs in his fifties — had all arrived thirty years ahead of his father’s. Muttering and marveling, he’d say: our generation’s health is far worse than our parents’ ever was.
And naturally I’d launch into my mantra of change again, and he into his mantra of “change isn’t easy,” and round and round we went.
If real change is too hard, then just a nudge in a new direction, surely? Which brings us to the practical adjustments I’ve already described.
III. First Victory
I and my brother shared a two-month shift, and from the very first day he took over the wok, cooking to my parents’ tastes, in his own familiar way.
The celebrity diet transformations and the weight-loss boot camps we see in the media take eating and exercise to the extreme — they demand laser focus and iron will, a thoroughly “unnormal” way of life. The advice I gave my brother that winter was a normal-life version, a compromise rather than an extreme makeover. Just a little more of the right things, a little less oil on the plate — same dishes on the table, no excessive exercise, no deliberate hunger, just a slight lean of the chopsticks.
The few items I add all share certain qualities: they are nutrient-rich, highly satiating, low in calories and resistant to absorbing oil. Wood ear mushroom, snow fungus, kelp and mushrooms might even be called “zero-calorie ingredients,” making them perfect companions for the big rich mains. Like vegetables, they are dietary fibre champions, and dietary fibre not only fills you up and keeps you satisfied, it helps keep post-meal blood sugar steady. It also blocks cholesterol enterohepatic circulation, rushing those uninvited fats out of the body before they can do their damage. So even when the Spring Festival feasting is in full swing, you needn’t worry about fatty liver disease, a pot belly or high blood lipids.
During the Spring Festival, the theme of every family gathering is always the food. Grand dishes come out, cooked exactly as before — just adding these extra ingredients, the flavour barely changes. But those struggling with the three highs and obesity now have a choice when they reach for their chopsticks, and giving each morsel a quick dip in that bowl of vinegar water in front of them makes it even better.
No special cooking for one, no dieting — just eating with the family, the way you always do, through the Spring Festival. In two months my brother shed two jin, one kilo.
Even more interesting: he no longer needs to wash his hair every day.
Normally I jog every morning and come home drenched in sweaty, smelly effort, while my brother washes his hair each day, always fragrant. He says he suffers from a notoriously oily scalp — go a single day without washing and his hair clings to his head, maddeningly uncomfortable. During our two-month shift together, I stuck to my daily morning run without variation, while my brother’s hair-washing routine quietly shifted. Before long it became every two days, then every three. Then, without consulting anyone, he stopped his own lipid-lowering medication: “If the oil on my head is less, surely the oil in my blood vessels is less too.”
With the first results in sight, my brother found his confidence. No need for my nagging — no whip required, he galloped on his own, shedding ten kilos in a single year. The following Spring Festival he bought new clothes, and this time the size went down rather than up — for the first time in decades, a smaller number on the label. His belly shrank, and he looked younger too.
With the weight down and no more worries about the strain on his feet and knees, he gradually ramped up his exercise. By the third Spring Festival he’d lost another five kilos. Now that his starting weight is lower, further losses are less dramatic, but he’s confident about keeping a slow, steady trim going, hoping to shed another five kilos in the next year or two.
IV. Two Bonus Tips
The refined starch in your staple grain is the chief culprit behind weight gain. Everyone knows wholegrains are the better choice, but they don’t exactly sing, and Shandong jianbing is the uniquely blessed alternative that the land itself provides the people of Shandong. For those with no access to Shandong jianbing — or who simply can’t stomach the taste — if you absolutely insist on white rice and white flour and can’t bear to see your portions noticeably shrink, there’s one more trick.
Don’t eat freshly cooked white rice or those big white-flour steamed buns you picked up from the shop while they’re still hot. Pop them in the freezer first for a full day. Some of that weight-gaining refined starch will convert into non-weight-gaining resistant starch — for the full science behind it, have a dig around online yourself. When it’s time to eat, take them straight out of the freezer — no need to thaw or bring them back to room temperature. The rice goes straight into the microwave; the buns, just plop them in a covered pan with a splash of water to steam through. The texture barely changes.
Tip Two: Lipid-Lowering Drinks.
At festivals and family gatherings, you always need something to drink. Everyone knows alcohol is hard on the liver, so many people switch to soft drinks — but the sugar in those drinks is just as damaging. Alcohol and sweetened beverages are alike in that respect: both tax the liver, pack on the pounds and send blood lipids climbing. My solution is to switch to roselle tea. Roselle is high in vitamin C and anthocyanins, and stevia is zero sugar, zero calories — the two together lower lipids, cut through richness and aid digestion. I add some of my own home-grown stevia, and the sweet-tart balance suits everyone from children to grandparents. And the roselle blossom has such a festive colour that it’s perfect for raising a cup of tea in place of liquor — “toasting with tea” — at the Spring Festival table.
So let me close with this cup of ruby-red roselle tea, wishing everyone a happy new year — and especially those of you with health concerns: may you, like my brother, find that the Three Basic Moves Diet helps you shed weight and body fat with ease, and that the new year brings a smaller size on the label!
Unless otherwise noted, all illustrations in this article are the author’s own.
Editor: Tianle