Changing my health in Vietnam: 3 months in

Has it been 3 months? It's been something along those lines, perhaps a bit more, perhaps a bit less.

For a recap the reason why I even started doing any of this in the first place was because of two things: I accidentally lost s bit of weight while visiting Mexico even though we never exercised and ate basically all the time. The big difference was we weren't drinking booze constantly. That alone resulted in me losing weight.

The second thing that motivated me was running into a friend I have known for more than 20 years and when we were hanging out 20 years ago, we were the same size. The last time I saw him I reckon I was 20 kg heavier than he was. I was nearly 100 kg, he was less than 80. It was a bit of a shocker.

So when I returned I decided to make some sweeping changes to my life and they really haven't been that difficult.

Started at 99, now I am regularly under 87 kg

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It's been a bit of a wild ride because in the middle of all of this I ended up having some spinal issues that I have been ignoring for a while and it turns out that they are trauma-related to an incident that happened years ago. It's not like ignoring it made the situation worse, there's not a lot they can do for falling on your spine on stone steps other than wait a while.

Then they told me I might have cancer only to tell me "whoops, we were wrong about that!" 6 hours later.. phew!

But I digress.

Sticking with the program hasn't been that difficult actually since a great deal of my progress has been driven primarily by radical changes in my overall diet. I now prepare most of my food and eat a lot of steak and potatoes at home with my trusty air fryer.

The other meals consist of fruit and greek yogurt (the regular yogurt is not at all healthy and normally has as much sugars as candy bars) and for lunch I will have a wide variety of things but tend to stay away from anything fried.

I weigh everything that I eat at home and this is why my food scale, which was only like $5, is likely the most important purchase I made when preparing to do this change.

I never used to weigh things that weren't illegal drugs in my life, but this cheap piece of equipment has been wonderful. For example, while they do have health benefits and should be eaten, I was completely unaware how there is a crazy amount of calories in peanuts, cashews, almost, just any nuts. I would eat these things by the handfuls in the past thinking them to be healthy when they are probably one of the most loaded-with-calories foods that occurs in nature.

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That's a pretty sizeable portion but not beyond what I think many people would eat in one sitting...as a snack. 100 Grams of cashews has more than 550 calories and to me that is just insane. A double-cheesburger from McDonalds has significantly fewer calories than this.

I'm not saying to not eat nuts, you probably should eat some, but by weighing my food and checking the nutritional information of them has seriously opened my eyes to the dangers of most things that I just used to eat willy-nilly.

Another bad actor in the things that I just used to eat all the time is specialty coffees. This is something that I think is going to make Asia fat because they love their coffee and not the kind that actually tastes like coffee. Particularly among young women I see people ordering something that looks like ice cream and it probably is. Even something that seems innocent like "Vietnamese coffee" is loaded with condensed milk which is just a crazy made up word for "processed sugar," which is what it essentially is.

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There you go! There's your Vietnamese coffee. So you are essentially eating a cupcake with a caffeine kick here. I have been drinking these things like gangbusters since I arrived because WOW do they pep you up and I suppose they should since you are essentially eating 2 Snickers bar with caffeine in them. These small, 2-gulp, coffees have 250 calories in them on average. That's insane bro.

Tracking what I was eating and doing the best I can to be honest with myself has done wonders for me understanding what is good and what is bad and some of it was pretty revealing and kind of saddening when I discovered that essentially everything I was consuming is terrible for me.

I am meant to have around 2500 calories in an entire day. So let's say that for breakfast I had 2 vietnamese coffees (because they are so small) and a handful of cashews. Well that is nearly half the calories I am supposed to have in a day and I am not at all full... congratulations!

There is a reason why they don't make this information terribly public and I wonder how many people are out there gaining weight like crazy that don't understand why that is.

Any number of free calorie-tracking apps can really open you eyes to how dangerous a lot of common foods are. In fact, aside from Sodium, if you only drank water and black coffee you could eat McDonald's burgers for every meal and probably be consuming fewer calories than if you did what I had been doing before.

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I don't really even exercise very much folks. For a while there, about 25 days, when my spine hurt really bad, I couldn't exercise but I still kept to my diet. I NEVER starved myself. I would always have a calorie deficit every day of the week except on Thursdays and while I weigh myself several times a day out of curiosity, the only weight that really matters is the first weigh-in that takes place in the morning before I have eaten anything.

As of right now I am 86 kg. I have lost 13 kg in 3 months.

This isn't good enough to write a book about or anything, but that is pretty fantastic in my eyes. I really believe that other people can easily do this as well but too many people are focused on the wrong things. For me, and according to a lot of the literature that I have read, what you put into your body is so much more important than how much you exercise. I didn't exercise at all for nearly a month while recovering from the spinal stuff and STILL dropped about 5kg in that month.

Now for the bad news: My social life has suffered a bit because of this life change but that is my own fault for having built a "maze I can't get through" since all of my social interactions revolved around alcohol up to this point in my life. That is slowly changing though, but it takes time.

I also don't feel wonderfully better outside of the fact that I never have a hangover anymore because I don't drink alcohol outside of bowling days.

My goal now is to get to a stable weight below 85kg, I haven't weighed so little in at least the last 10 years, so that would be awesome if I could pull that off.

Now none of my shirts really fit me anymore either and that makes me happy.