The title is of course a bit general to start with, I understand that 'Asians' is an incredibly wide term, and there are all different very distinctive nations and types of people with different weight and body types living in this region. In this post I used this term to describe people in South East Asia and an average size of people I have seen on the streets.
People I can see all around me are slim. I don't think I have seen an overweight adult (apart from few tourist) and I have only seen a couple of fat Asian boys and it was something so unique here, I even took the picture.
The famous small weight of Asians and their secrets behind it are a common topic of live and magazine or beauty blogs discussions in Western countries and I bet around the whole world. I know it, because since being in Australia and meeting a large Asian population in Melbourne I started making research and being very into Asian ways of taking care of their beauty, including cosmetics they use and things they do to be beautiful in their Asian way. I myself follow a very interesting blog of a Polish girl living in Singapore (Azjatycki Cukier) which for me is a gold mine of information about Asian beauty products written and explained in my own language and from the point of view of my own culture.
There are countless opinions and explanations of why and how Asians stay so slim and the most common I came across included the genetics and their diet (rich in seafood), but there are also ideas that they use some tricks to eat less (e.g. eating salad first so you are not going to eat as much of main meal because your stomach would already have something in it), or commonly using special foods that speed up metabolism e.g. ginger or even drinking hot water (sometimes with lemon) with their main meals to keep body warm and make fats easier to digest rather than in a more solid form which they supposedly take when in the contact with iced drink.
You cannot change the genetics, and I would say that genes make Asians to simply have smaller bones and generally fragile looking figure. If you take regular body weight women form UK street (I mean lets say size 10 - not skinny and not fat, just normal) and compare it to the normal body weight person in Asia, the overall proportions of body mass to height and size will probably be similar, but Asian woman because smaller, will look like she is skinnier than UK person. Therefore I wouldn't really say that genes make them skinny, but it make them look smaller than Westerners; optimal for their size.
When it comes to diet, I might not seen it all, but so far I have noticed that Asians don't really count the calories and are not too careful checking what is the nutritional content of their meals (apart from taxi driver in Chiang Mai, Thailand telling us that locals don't eat much of Khao soi as its made with coconut milk and it make a person fat if eaten too often). Yes, the diet include some seafood, but any additions to noodles (whether its vegetables or meat or seafood) only accounts for around 10-20% of the meal. Main content of the meal are noodles or rice, very often instant noodles and very often fried and the extra ingredients are often deep fried. I have hardly seen anybody eating a fresh salad and vegetables added to soups/noodles are not in a huge variety: usually a combination of cabbage, beansprouts, onions, spring onions, some basil like herbs and maybe some carrots, green beans and cucumber like thing if you're lucky (and some of the vegetables I have never seen before in my life). I have been told as well that they usually do not eat breakfasts (normally having 2 or 3 meals a day but starting around 12) and they like eating late, sometimes at 1 or 2 at night I see food stands full of locals having a meal. Therefore (at least in this part of Asia) I don't think that what and when they eat is particularly healthy and therefore I don't think the diet as such is a major contributor to their famously skinny bodies.
However in my opinion there are three things which could be major reasons behind their small body weight. I believe they are true because I experienced it myself; I have been in Asia for close to 3 weeks now and I can feel I lost some weight (although I didn't think I have much to loose). Since eating local Asian foods and falling into Asian style routine, I definitely feel lighter (but not necessarily better as my body is used to regular and mostly organic vegetable meals back home, which is not the case here). These three reasons are:
1) Portion size.
Pretty much every meal we order consists of one medium size bowl of noodle soup or one small to medium size plate of food. I think I could compare the size of the portions to ... the kids size meal in UK, maybe tiny bit bigger but not much. When ordering e.g. rice dish, at least 80% of the dish is rice and the rest meat or veges, and when ordering soup 80%-90% of the dish is water and noodles and remaining 20%-10% is fish/meat/veges. Therefore meals not only have relatively small sizes, they also are quite 'light' even if having fried meat with it. In the beginning we thought one dish wont be enough for us, and as soon as it was arriving to our table I was thinking that when I finish, I will order something extra, but I never needed to. My eyes were used to seeing bigger meal in front of me, but the Asian size meal really is all your stomach needs to be full. Once you finish eating, you feel like you can get up and go, not like you need a nap. And yes, a couple of times we thought we are soooo hungry that we ordered two main meals at once, each. I think by that time, our stomachs got so used to smaller sizes that we were not able to finish a two main course meals, regardless it being really a 2 kids meal portions.
Korean Style Kimchi (specially fermented cabbage) Noodles which I had for breakfast (!)
Rice wrapped in a thin egg omelette, that was quite a large portion, I couldn't finish it!
Khao soi
2) Asian food it quite 'regulating'.
I will try to explain the second reason aiding in keeping slim shape in as pleasant way as possible :).
It is known that regularly removing waste from your body helps maintaining healthy and slim figure. The very common addition to mostly rice and noodle dishes are various types of sauces, especially chilli based sauces. I find these additions to already easy passing through you noodles/rice to become an extra easy passing through you dishes. Moreover, the common thing to have between meals or for dessert are fresh fruits (usually types of melons) or fresh fruit smoothies (fruit+ice+sugar or milk if you want). Having this kind of smoothies on top of above described meals make me need to use the toilet on average 2 times a day. There is a possibility that my body is just not used to this type of foods on a regular basis and reacting in that way but I believe it definitely helps Asians keeping 'regulated' and slim too.
3) Asian cuisine do no use cheeses or cream.
As much as there are some desserts with a little bit of thing looking like cream in it - most of the times turning out to be a coconut milk rather than dairy cream, the cheeses practically do not exist in here. Apart from one odd pizza I got the other night, I have not came across any local dish that have cheese in it - not just a yellow cheese, any cheese at all. And I have seen a New Zealand cheese to buy in imported food stands or shops like 7/11 but it didn't look very popular and I know for fact that it is mostly imported for foreigners. I find it funny that I only realised this lack of cheeses in Asian society a couple of days ago while talking to one of the Vietnamese girls I met in here, in Ho Chi Minh City. She told me that she believes this is the reason why Westerners are often overweight and Asians keep slim.
As my travelling in the beautiful and surprising region of South East Asia is not over yet, I might come up with more conclusions about secrets behind widely understood Asian beauty and might have to update this post later on, in few weeks time :)
Do you think my three reasons for Asians being so small-weighted could be real? Or its more a combination of all ideas mentioned above?
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