Fan Mail Friday: "Did you lose weight when you came to Japan"

Today was Fan Mail Friday and that means that I take time to answer your questions and comment on some of the comments that you had made. There were a number of great comments that I received and I would encourage you to go over to the video link in the beginning of the post but in this post I would like to talk a little bit about one question that I received.

A person asked:

Did you lose weight when you came to Japan because of the change in diet?

The short answer to this is no.

Before I came to Okinawa I was a full time dancer and dance teacher. This meant that I was dancing at least 6 to 8 hours a day. During that time I was also eating a very healthy diet with limited processed foods. When I came here the type of diet that I had didn't change much therefore no I didn't lose weight when I first came to Japan.

My personal opinion of this is that I don't think that this is necessarily something that is going to happen unless you are actively trying to lose weight and change your diet. The facts are that Japan's diet is full of fresh foods and natural foods but this doesn't mean that there are not boxed and preserved foods. If you were to indulge in these foods you would find yourself gaining weight where as if you were to stick to the more fresh foods you might see yourself losing weight. There is also the matter of rice. . . . . No matter how hard you try if you are eating rice three times a day you are going to find yourself not only not losing weight but you are going to find yourself gaining weight. This is especially the case if you are eating rice into the night. I understand that this is something that Japanese people do from time to time or dare I say often but for some reason it does not affect them like it affects us. This is in my opinion one of the reasons that people gain weight (and there are numbers who do) when they come here.

Long story short I think that it all comes down to your will power. If you can't avoid McDonalds in the US you are not going to be ale to avoid it here. . . . . and yes we have it with a number of there places.