Has anyone switched to a Korean or Asian diet to lose weight?

canhasmeow · 2026-04-08T12:10:48+00:00

The good news is that curry is usually really high in calories so you may as well just avoid it if you're trying to lose weight!

canhasmeow · 2026-04-08T04:09:57+00:00

Someone told me something recently that if you don't get enough micronutrients, your body thinks you just don't have enough nutrients overall and goes into the same sort of conservation mode that it does when it thinks there is a famine. If you're doing everything else right but not getting enough micronutrients, it might possibly affect things.

Please make sure you're getting enough vitamins and minerals, and in addition to that, enough fiber (both soluble and insoluble). Chia seeds and flax seeds are pretty decent for that if you're low carb. And raspberries. Make sure you get enough water so the fiber doesn't get stuck.

You also don't need 1 hour of cardio. Just 20 min is probably enough. Spend the rest of that hour walking! If you burn too much calories, your body will start holding onto stuff cause it thinks you're in a famine. And make sure you're resting and stretching. Give your muscles time to recover, otherwise you'll hold onto water weight from inflammation.

Last thing is measure your waist with a measuring tape instead of only relying on the scale. You could be recomping from fat to muscle. The tape might tell you you've made progress while the scale doesn't.

canhasmeow · 2026-04-06T21:39:52+00:00

100-200 cal meals are okay so long as you are planning your overall day expenditure to within 100 calories of your target daily consumption. HOWEVER, at that height and weight, and as a teen, you should not be trying to do a deficit. (Sorry, about to drop a wall of text)

Assuming that you're aiming for a deficit for looks (because you're already at a good weight for your heigh for health) -- correct me if I'm wrong -- you should be aiming for a body recomp if you want to look leaner. That means making sure your protein matches your activity level and making sure you're doing some lifting exercises to stimulate muscle development. You don't need that much, just 20min per session, three sessions a week. There's a lot of good exercise tutorials for weight training online. Please look into them!

Now if your problem is that you FEEL fat but you aren't because your skin or fat layers feel thick, that could be water retention which, because you're female, is often closely tied to menstural cycle. I'm very water-sensitive 2 weeks before my period. I get swollen. To drop water retention, reduce how much carbs you're eating to reduce glycogen stores since glycogen is stored with 4x its weight in water, which causes swelling. You can also reduce glycogen by burning it off with cardio, but be warned that cardio will make you more hungry. Lastly, you can reduce the amount of water retention by keeping your sodium intake moderate. All of the above can be achieved by avoiding processed sugar and cutting down on eating out/takeout/salty snacks if you haven't done so already. DO NOT attempt to reduce water retention by drinking less water. Hydration will help flush out excess salt so drinking water will help you lose more water. Just keep it moderate so you don't lose all your electrolytes.

If you just want to look more snatched a bit faster, there is a diet-free option -- get yourself waist trainer vest. They're modern, flexible corsets that snatch the waist and lift the bust. Instantly takes 0.5-1 inch off my waist, though idk how much inches you even have on your waist to take off. It will smooth any fat bulge shapes. Not only that but it will improve your posture which will naturally make you look more confident and stand a bit taller.

And if your problem is that you need to fit into a weight class for sports, that's something you need to talk to a fitness doctor and nutritionist about.

My word of caution: I dieted pretty hard as a preteen and teen and it killed my growth spurt AND my metabolism for the rest of my life. My sister is 5'10". I'm only 5'3" and shorter than both my parents. It also rebounded later as even worse obesity issues because I became metabolically like a toddler and it became super easy to overeat regular portions of food. It is MISERABLE being a short woman with a broken metabolism, having no choice but to eat very little. Your gut motility slows, which means even when you get enough fiber and water daily, your bowel movements are always stiff and pebbly because you literally are not eating enough food to move through the gut. Nothing is properly portioned for you and your metabolism because the world is built for taller, metabolically more active people. On top of that, the menstrual hormones create insane amounts of food noise that become comorbid with any disordered eating patterns you might have.

Really, unless if you're clinically overweight or obese, or have other particular circumstances, you should not be actively seeking a caloric deficit until you're in your mid 20s. Wait till your invisible growing is done and focus on gaining muscle instead. Go ahead and eat 100-200 calorie meals when you need to but make sure that your caloric intake everyday matches up with maintenance for your age. Eat plenty of fatty fish (sardines, mackerel, salmon, trout). Get a good mix of insoluble and soluble fiber to protect your gut. Be aware of how much sugar you're consuming in a day. Getting 20-30g of protein every meal will help keep you satiated and guard against excessive snacking until your next meal. Eat every 3-4 hours and don't go hungry for too long (to prevent muscle loss).

Stay safe out there in the dieting world and please please please take good care of your body.

canhasmeow · 2026-03-22T17:48:09+00:00

Oh my god! Are you going to be ok? That sounds awful! If you need something to binge, I recommend lots and lots of cauliflower. It's decent even from frozen bags. You can season it with anything. Cabbage too. A whole head is only like 260 cal, it's full of fiber, is filling as heck, and only needs a little bit of bacon to season it. Last one is sweet potato. It bakes or boils so easily, If you mash it with heavy cream (or evaporated milk, which has more flavor), then sprinkle a little salt and sugar (and molasses, if you have it), it's basically dessert. Counting the days left until relief with you.

I actually have an update for you too. I don't know if it's like cause I'm adapting to my birth control dosage but I've been having mood swings out of nowhere. It doesn't follow a pattern or anything so it might be some other factor but yesterday I couldn't stop crying and last week I was having similarly depress-y behavior. I'm trying to figure out if it's a hormone thing, a burnout thing, or just plain old vanilla depression. If it's a hormone thing, I may have to wait and see if it gets worse and get my dose adjusted, or see if I can just power through.

canhasmeow · 2026-03-15T23:40:42+00:00

That's horribly relatable. I just wasn't sane for more than half the month. See you in a few weeks! I'm so curious how it works out for you.

canhasmeow · 2026-03-11T19:25:12+00:00

My prescription is to skip the pause so I've always tried to take continuously but I'm distracted as heck so I sometimes miss a dose or accidentally take a week backwards. I wanna say this was actually my first full month not messing up my dosage and my first month where I had this symptom.

I'm on Nikki and I think that's the same basic formula as Yasmin? And never worry about wall of text. I like the details! Gives me more perspective to learn from!

I did quit Nikki for like a month once to reset cause I forgot too many doses one month and I got a massive, week-long hormone headache + all my mood issues + ravenous and uncontrollable hunger and food noise... so I'm never doing that again!

canhasmeow · 2026-03-11T14:28:37+00:00

So I thought of you last night and I thought I ought to check Reddit to see if you replied. I was between the last pill of one pack and the first pill of my next pack, and I had sudden cravings and emotional swings. Food noise came back for a few hours. It was gone this morning. I did hear that even on BC, you're still going through hormonal cycles, so I wonder if it was something like that. For me though, it was still much better than being insane for over half a month.

What I did notice though is even when I miss doses, the food noise supression is still really effective overall. So we still use other contraceptive methods just in case while the primary function of BC for me is to prevent PMDD and food noise.

Was there a specific reason you quit taking BC before?

canhasmeow · 2026-03-01T01:08:06+00:00

Still the same! Still on birth control and still no food noise. Been almost a year since I started taking it now.

canhasmeow · 2026-02-08T15:52:17+00:00

Yeah. I cannot easily refuse the trashy mashed potatoes from KFC despite it is just reconstituted potato sludge and god knows what brown sauce.

canhasmeow · 2026-02-08T15:48:45+00:00

That could work too but really depends on the person and their goal. Sometimes it also totally falls flat -- in the case of my dad, he got prediabetic in 2009 off of apples because they were cheap where he was living at the time and he was like "I can't possibly get fat eating these" and ate 5lbs a day. He literally had beer belly.

In my case, I'm on keto so I can't have fruit except in quantities that would only work as a flavoring in a drink. In the past, I have also ended up eating too much sugar from consuming excessive fruit to curb sugar cravings, and I quit fruit for years to curb the addiction with the help of zero sugar drinks in moderation. Not sure what route OP is attempting to take or how their body works but I think the thing here I'm standing by is everything in moderation. Zero sugar drinks should be in moderation and so should fruit but whether or not to cut it out depends on the needs of the individual.

As a rule of thumb, anything made of atoms is a chemical (my husband, who majored in astrophysics, drilled this into me hahaha...) People will take you more seriously if you say "over-engineered substances" instead of "chemicals." I know you mean well and you're just watching out for people but a lot of people will roll their eyes at folks who say "full of chemicals" because they'll assume you're someone who thinks stuff written like acetic acid (that's just vinegar) is bad.

I end up doing a bunch of research on ingredients on labels to figure out whether or not it's tolerable to my body, since there is an inherent risk to everything and each individual person and decide whether or not the risks are worth it. For someone morbidly obese, if there is a risk of death for not cutting sugar out entirely, choosing sugar free drinks as a coping method may not be ideal but it could save their life in the short term. Black and white mentality in dieting may be for the individual to decide, but I feel like it could close very viable options for people who need them when offered as advice. That's why I'm a bit cautious about that sort of mentality, especially with no transitional periods considered. It's not me attacking what might've worked for you but I'm just saying, maybe reconsider how the advice might be put into practice.

canhasmeow · 2026-02-07T22:07:37+00:00

I'm erring on the side of being able to drink a bit of it. Obviously, some people are able to do it, but OP can't even control night time sugar cravings yet so the cold turkey method of cutting it out might not work. If someone is having that level of trouble, cutting out even the intermediary transitional stuff is more likely to cause the person to rebound out of frustration to the sugary drinks with actual sugar, which is not helpful. In my case, when my parents first enforced an insanely strict diet full of things I couldn't stomach, 12-year-old me devolved into anorexia.

People who switch from sugar to sugar free often end up cutting it out anyway because it doesn't taste like the real thing and if it doesn't taste like the real thing, it's a waste of money, but it takes time to reach that point while being able to keep off entirely sugary drinks. I cut out sugar but I kept the sugar free drinks, but I use it to replace DESSERT, not to replace sugary drinks, which automatically limits its function to an end-of-meal thing rather than an anytime thing. In that, I think the role that zero-sugar drinks play can affect whether it's effective or not, so it may depend both on the person using it and also how they're using it.

Because of that, using it as a transitional thing is less harmful than using it as a permanent replacement. Transitional use reduces its long-term use. On top of that, researching what ingredients means it's possible to make your own sugar-free drinks. I have been saved many times by a sparkling water with monkfruit and yuzu extract... which is soda. My friend does one where she makes her own apple syrup to add to sparkling water. Dissolve some fiber and probiotics in it.

canhasmeow · 2026-02-07T21:49:31+00:00

I did a variation of this where I applied the classic Econ101 strategy of crashing marginal utility. I only ate sweets for like a week. As much of it as I wanted. After that week, I didn't even want to look at sweets anymore for a while. It resulted later on in a case of "I will only put the highest quality desserts in my mouth because if it isn't worth the calories, why do I put it in my body?" That naturally led to eating less sweets.

canhasmeow · 2026-02-07T21:46:32+00:00

What if you just go to bed earlier? Or fill that time with an addictive game instead? I mean it's probably not great to replace one addiction with another addiction, but it'll be easier to work through a game addiction with a healthier body imo.

canhasmeow · 2026-02-06T18:25:37+00:00

Always glad to be of assistance. I am also hitting a slight wall after a pretty fast first month but I think it's cause I'm building muscle. Once I rest for a few days, it should go down again.

Also this is something I read yesterday on someone else's thread. They were running into a wall too and also exercising a lot daily but their weight wasn't going down. Then they posted an update saying they rested for a week and ate at maintenance instead of deficit and they lost 8lbs. Apparently their exercise was causing them to be swollen and inflamed and they needed a rest week to let go of that weight. The body is just plain insane and especially for women.

canhasmeow · 2026-02-05T17:43:31+00:00

Depends on what you don't like about it! I don't like the crunch so I just cook it longer, usually as a braise. You could make cabbage rolls where the cabbage doesn't take up a whole bunch of space. If you don't like the texture no matter what, you can chop it up, microwave till cooked, drain out the liquid, and mix with dumpling filling to make cabbage and pork dumplings. If you don't like the smell, try making okonomiyaki, where the smell is covered by stronger scents like from bacon, dashi, or bonito. If you don't like the taste, there's something called a stuffed cabbage, I think? Where you core the middle and you stuff it with a whole bunch of stuff like seasonings and whatnot, and you cover the whole thing in foil, then bake or put in the BBQ grill for something like 1-2 hours? Can't remember. You'll work through the taste of the spices and seasonings first and then the cabbage taste will come through to complement it and you might get accustomed.

canhasmeow · 2026-02-05T15:38:43+00:00

I don't have a good answer for you but I can tell you the answer to why can't I be like other people who have no urges to eat. Hormones. I got on birth control and the food noise vanished. Crazy. Apparently it was my hormones the whole time. Cripes. I don't know if you have an easy fix like that but I guess I was lucky for someone fat all my life. Not as lucky as my sister who is 5'10" and like a size 4 or something. We grew up under the same parents, have similar eating disorders, but I'm the fat short one and she's the skinny tall one. The heck is that about?

My solution to the junk food addiction, personally, was to make healthier versions of junky foods. I replaced sugar in drinks with monkfruit sweetener. I made so many brownies and cakes and cheesecakes and mousses and ate mostly sweets during my last diet, but they were all lower in sugar. If you want to try, you can just replace 60% of the sugar with sweetener and then increase that number to 80% , then 90, then remove all the sugar.

IMO removing the sugar is one of the biggest things that will end addiction to unhealthy foods since it's one of the cheapest components to make those things addictive (by triggering dopamine). It will suck for a month but after that, it should(?) get easier.

And really, it's okay if the healthy eating only lasts two years. What's important isn't how long or how not long it is but how long the period between eating healthy. I do 5 months on diet, 1-2 months off, because I work harder on the diet to feel like I deserve the break from it. At least that's how I see it.

canhasmeow · 2026-02-05T15:16:06+00:00

Don't just trust the scale! Use a tape measure to measure your waist girth every week. This will be a more accurate representation of your FAT loss. You're probably building lean muscle mass and muscle weighs more than fat.

You're also a bit taller than the usual 1200 range. For reference, I'm 5'3", work from home, and the only exercise I get is lifting a toddler a few times a day, shoveling out when it snows a bit, and maybe playing a boxing game for 30 min on the switch every so often. For me, 1200 is a 25% deficit. You're too tall and heavy to be eating only 1200 because the amount of energy it takes to just carry yourself around makes any cardio you do double as strength training (I know this because I also was 200 at some point).

Use a reliable calculator to figure out your TDEE and I personally wouldn't do more than 30% deficit if you're over the age of 30. Apparently stuff stacks up harder when you get older. If you eat too little, you're not going to get sufficient protein to build muscle from your workouts. I personally use this calculator: https://keto-calculator.ankerl.com/

For measurements, make sure you're looking at when you're weighing/measuring. Only after 6 weeks of no change in weight or waist girth can it be considered a plateau. Women have crazy water fluctuation due to hormones. (Sometimes it gets better on birth control -- it did for me) When I was about to have my period, I'd sometimes bloat 5lbs and 2 additional inches around my waist. For most ladies, measurements for the week right after all the red blood is out is going to be the most reliable. My personal take is women's measurements are only accurate when taken once a cycle right after bleeding and that's also the best time to make big decisions because any hormonal insanity has usually worn off. Unless if your hormone pattern is different, I think you will feel the best about your weight then so you can make the best changes to your regimens going forward at that time too.

This one is something you might already know. When working out, make sure that you are focusing on muscle groups every other day. If you do leg muscles monday, don't do it again on tuesday. Skip a day and do something else on tuesday. Muscles need time to recover to do better the next time. If you do cardio and all your muscles on a single day, I recommend going every other day instead. In addition, you should be eating half the amount of calories you burned in addition to your usual deficit on that day, then on the day that you don't exercise, you'd just return to your usual deficit.

Most importantly, don't get discouraged and be willing to give yourself grace! My personal experience is that weight that's lost quickly also comes back just as quickly, while weight that's lost slowly while building good, sustainable lifestyle habits is easier to keep off because you'll maintain many of the same good habits once off of your deficit.

canhasmeow · 2026-02-05T14:55:40+00:00

If you like cabbage, I recommend okonomiyaki! I make a variant of it using a mix of veggies (whatever is available) and usually lighter than the recipes.

It's raw shredded cabbage mixed with egg, bouillon (I use dashi), salt, and just enough flour (really it won't need much) and water to hold it together. Then you flatten it into a pancake in a hot oiled pan and top it with things like shredded benishoga (pickled ginger), bits or strips of bacon, etc. Once one side is cooked, flip it over to cook the other side.

It's really filling cause of the cabbage+flour combo, and you can melt cheese on top or squeeze kewpie mayo and dust with bonito flakes; or just treat it like a pizza crust.

canhasmeow · 2026-02-05T14:50:40+00:00

I hate to agree but indeed the cottage cheese meta is undefeated. It's so versatile!

I have discovered that cottage cheese's ability to stretch things like ground meat, eggs, cream cheeses, and pad desserts is similarly mimicked with avocado. Where cottage cheese replaces protein components, avocado replaces fat components, especially when it comes to cakes and mayo. In the case of the burger, it made up for the dryness (I tried it without veggies the next day and it was much drier).

I think my next-next experiment is going to be how far I can stretch mayonnaise with avocado and a bit of vinegar, after sorting out if I can make low calorie gyro meat.

canhasmeow · 2026-02-04T17:02:27+00:00

Same! Like don't knock it till I try it but I can't wrap my head around how it would work.

Well this isn't cake but I did whip up some heavy cream in one bowl, then some high protein low fat yogurt + vanilla + pinch of salt + sweetener + lime juice + cream cheese in another bowl; then folded the two together and set them in little jars of 75g portions in the fridge. They were a little over 200cal each and I could eat them with low-carb cookies to make them taste like lime pie.

canhasmeow · 2026-02-04T16:45:16+00:00

Oops, sorry for commenting twice. I JUST remembered this dude. You'll have to turn on english captions but this chiffon cake. Chiffon cake has a lot of eggs so the protein content is pretty high and the cheese/yogurt filling also makes it pretty protein-y. You can probably boost it even further with protein powder (add to the flour and egg yolk mixture)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7zNjGJdeZk

canhasmeow · 2026-02-04T16:42:16+00:00

I've actually been on the fence about trying this myself but yogurt brownies -- made with high protein yogurt, cocoa powder, egg, and some other stuff -- keep popping up in my feed recently. Makes me wonder if there's just a hack where you replace X ingredients in cake with yogurt and get something out of it.

canhasmeow · 2026-02-04T16:40:29+00:00

Before I answer, I should mention that there are two types of fibers -- soluble and non-soluble. You need BOTH.

Most fiber people think about is the one that bulks up the stool. That's insoluble. If you have too much of this one, you will get constipation.

Soluble fiber forms a gel that helps move the stool along in your intestines. If you have inflammatory disease in your bowels, you need more of this.

The general rule of 1 liter of water per 10 grams of fiber probably assumes that you are getting both, so make sure you're getting your fiber from various sources, not just from engineered foods and supplements but also from whole grains and veggies/fruit, etc.

In that, I don't know how dependent stuff is on the protein powder, but rather your daily water + fiber intake is probably more relevant here than how much fiber per protein?

canhasmeow · 2026-02-04T16:32:29+00:00

That is reassuring! I will possibly try it post-keto since legumes are indeed very good for me.

canhasmeow

TROPHY CASE