Losing Weight Without Dieting - The Chongqing Way

It is interesting that the essential nutrients, fats, have become a symbol of the western industrial world. There may be thousands of researchers with medical or scientific training but no one has "discovered" how we westerners can prevent obesity.

Many in the western world think there will be pills to solve our excess body fat, whether there are pills for almost anything else, weight loss is one of the few exceptions.

Obesity is a complex problem and can affect your health to varying degrees. Are we motivated to lose weight so that we look more attractive to potential partners or are we concerned about excess fat affecting our health? We all know that heart disease, stroke, diabetes and some types of cancer are directly related to excess body fat.

Currently, there are many diets that claim to solve the "overweight" problem but each one works only for some people and not others. Many diets require what most of us don't have. Overall, however, no particular diet has worked for the majority of people as overweight and obese people in North America are so common that it can only be accepted as part of the human condition.

To quote Albert Einstein ... "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." Instead of beating our heads against the competitive dietary wall, we should look to a society that has no problems and never has.

Chongqing Chinese Municipality, 34 million inhabitants, is known for its many titles ... Beautiful city ... Beautiful mountain city ... Bicycle city ... Foggy city. The interesting thing is that people who are overweight are extremely rare and you can go six months without seeing someone fat. Even more interesting is the research by Dr. Colin Campbell of Cornell University, in his famous "China Study," revealed that he ate more calories daily than Americans. That's right ... the thinnest people in the world eat more calories every day than the healthiest people in the world.

Westernization of China has resulted in overweight and obese people in Beijing and Shanghai, the two westernmost cities. Based on the number of American fast food chains and bakeries that have appeared in Chongqing in recent years, they will not be far behind other cities. However, traditional diets and lifestyles produce a slim and healthy population that would not understand our inability to maintain weight.

I do not understand why Chongqing's traditional diet produces a slim body without excess fat because their diet seems so intuitive. Although they eat a variety of vegetables and fruits in larger quantities than we in the west, they also eat carbohydrates, especially rice and noodles. Furthermore they do not avoid saturated fat and eat meat and / or chicken at almost every meal. Almost every western diet advises us to avoid carbohydrates or saturated fats, but looking at people in Chongqing, this advice is suspect. It seems that the "overweight problem" we have in the west must be re-examined as we seem to be on the wrong track.

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