Asian Weight Loss
June 26, 2009 by Mohamed
Filed under Weight Loss
I’m not quite sure what to call myself. You see, I am African by birth (born in Fort Portal, Uganda) but raised in Canada. I’m not black, but brown. I’m not really Indian – my grandfather was from India – but I’ve never even set food on the Indian continent. So I call myself Asian and sort-of lump myself in with “that crowd”.
Weight loss for Indians or Asians can be difficult due to the traditional foods that are eaten - and today even more difficult due to the amount of fast food available out there whether you live in North America, Europe or in India. Globalization has taken off and while there are a great many benefits – our waistline isn’t one of them.
Problem with indian style cooking is the amount of rich ingredients that are added to the food AND the type of foods eaten!
Most families that eat rice, will eat basmati rice which is generally white. Few will eat brown rice or any other type of rice. Brown rice and curry don’t mix, at least not on my plate.
Have you tried dishes like butter chicken (also called makhani chicken)? It’s made from heavy cream — yummy, but oh so fattening! Like the name, it contains butter, and cream – the thicker the better. The recipe for butter chicken found here http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Makhani-Chicken-Indian-Butter-Chicken/Detail.aspx contains 492 calories, 28 grams of fat, plus 666mg of salt! That’s for a serving of 6 — I don’t know many people that can stop with one serving.
How about another dish that’s one of my favourites – biryani. Yummy!!! Another very (VERY) tasty dish but having watched how my wife and others prepare this, I’m surprised one serving doesn’t cause severe arterial blockage!!! Check out this recipe http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Chicken-Biryani/Detail.aspx (you get make a beef biryani as well) – calorie counts for a serving of 7 is 855 calories, 36g of fat, 1,547mg of sodium (salt).
If you’ve never had traditionally cooked biryani – find your nearest Indian friend and ask them to cook it for you! It is really very good.
Most indian foods are also prepared with oil – so you fry the onions or buy pre-fried onions and add other ingredients to it.
…anyway, trying to stop my mouth from salivating even more…
When I was younger it was also very common to have one or several fried foods on the side. Typically samosas – but they are difficult to make and are very time consuming but there are other great fried foods like pakora where the filling is usally potatoe or potatoe and jalapeno, others that come to mind are these patty-like foods that is potatoe on the outside with beef or chicken inside, another similar item is where meat and potatoe are mixed and made into oblong shaped treats — but all of these are fried.
There are plenty more – just can think of what they are called, one that is my favourite is a fried dish that is made by grinding dal and some other ingredients and then deep frying it – dal bhajiya or fried lentil balls. Very good. Trust me.
Now add to all the different types of foods, the deserts. All of them VERY sweet and loaded with sugar. Two classic deserts that come to mind are gulab-jamun. Fried dough smothered in a rich sugar syrup or jalebi – another fried dough that looks more like a pretzel but smothered in rich sugar syrup.
Even our snacks are fattening – like chevdo – again fried stuff.
Then we come to items like naan, roti or even parathas – all are heavy on the oil as most moms (and grandmas) will make these and bind with oil and smother with oil after they’re cooked.
With all this going on can you imagine why asians/indians have the weight and health problems that we do?
So how does one cut back? With great difficult and A LOT of experimentation. When it comes to indian cooking, you have to get the entire family on board otherwise it just won’t work. It’s already difficult to cook some foods – the last thing is to burden the primary chef in your home to do even more!
So when I started my lifestyle change, I had to drop eating all these types of foods and went to a more traditional North American diet. In the process, my stomach built a resistance to hot and oily or spicy foods.
During this time I ate a lot of soups, and salads. I loved sandwhiches as well and was doing the Jared-thing before Jared was doing it.
I lost most of my weight by changing the foods that I ate – ooooh, but how I longed for beef- or chicken-biryani, butter chicken, kuku paka (swahili or coconut chicken). The change here was simple – my wife cooked the same way I just ate a lot less! At my peak it wasn’t uncommon to go through a dozen rotis or even 4 or 5 naans (naans are a much heavier version of roti and are generally made with white flour) and several servings of a main dish.
I cut back where I was having 2-rotis, and no naans. I cut back on fried foods big time, and virtually eliminated sugary drinks in particular soda pop.
One of the side effects of cutting down on indian dishes was that I am not able to stomach the spicy food as much as I used to so am even more careful. My wife and I have mastered a few North American (for lack of a better word) style dishes that make use of pasta, broiled beef and chicken, brown rice, vegetables and other more common ingredients. While I miss the aromatic indian and East African dishes (my wife is from Tanzania) when I look at how much weight I’ve lost I don’t regret not being able to eat them or eating them in moderation.
In cities where there is a large concentration of particular ethnic groups, the health services generally will provide information to help those groups work through weight issues in a language more atune to that group. So when I attended pre-diabetic clinics when my weight peaked I did get a lot of information about changes that could be made to foods that I ate daily. The assumption was not made that everyone is the same – this helped a lot and made me more at ease at attending these sessions.
They also didn’t segregate groups – the Indians were with the Chinese, were with Poles and so on – we all learned from each other.
If you’re unsure about what services are offered in your community, contact your local health center – most have departments for diabetics or may have a dietician on staff with whome you can speak to. Also speak to your doctor as they may be able to provide additional resources to help you.
Losing weight needs to be a conscious decision you take and it’s something you have to follow through – but it is something that can be done by the average joe or jane.
Here is to your health!
Mohamed