You know you’ve been living abroad for too long when your own mother can no longer recognize you in pictures. My family sends out an annual letter (it used to be a Christmas letter, then it became a New Year’s letter, and now, well, it’s the end of January, so I guess it’s just a letter). I wrote the letter and emailed Mom the text, and she picked some pictures to go with the letter. When she emailed the final version that is being sent out to my parents’ several hundred friends and relatives, I noticed that one of the pictures that she had included of “me” was of a random woman on my boat in the Maldives. I had sent her pictures, but she decided she liked that one more. It’s a good picture, besides the fact that the woman in it isn’t part of our family.
People always say that the American lifestyle is what makes Americans so fat. American food, American laziness, it all adds up to widespread obesity. And if you look around, it seems to be true. In a contest for The Country Most Likely to Be Mistaken for a Manatee Preserve, America would almost certainly take the gold medal.
My personal experience, however, has been completely the opposite. Something about living in New York kept me ridiculously underweight. (The stress? The walk to work? The skipped meals? The hasty meal substitutes?) Since moving to Switzerland, however, my BMI has crept up into the lower end of the “normal” range for the first time that I can remember. After some reflection, I have a few ideas as to why I’ve gained weight since leaving Cheeto-land for Heidi-land.
Cheese. Fondue, raclette, cheese sandwiches, and so on. Butter on everything that doesn’t have cheese, and butter on some things that do have cheese. Cream and whole milk in anything that doesn’t have butter or cheese.
Meat and potatoes. Meat here is exceedingly expensive, and they only recently introduced ground turkey into the standard supermarket fare. Partly because of the high price of meat, and partly because of an apparently genetic national love of starch, potatoes come with everything, in every guise. This is not Atkins country. Plus it's all cooked with extra butter, cheese, and cream.
Door-to-door public transportation. Sure, I don’t drive everywhere like people do in suburban America, but the trams do a pretty good job of picking me up and dropping me off with a minimum of walking. The tram stops are so close that if a tram is going in relatively straight line, you can see the tram coming from several stops away while you wait for it to come to you .
Weather. If there’s no sun (which is sometimes the case for weeks in a row in the winter), I conserve energy by making no unnecessary movements, not even to go to the gym (which charges as much as an exclusive Manhattan gym, but without air conditioning, headphone jacks, and individual TVs). Even a trip to the bathroom becomes a carefully considered decision. When the weather is decent, on the other hand, who wants to go to the gym, just in case the sun disappears again for another two weeks?
I went to the gym twice last week, but I think that my best exercise was actually doing a hard day of cardio, I mean, shopping in sunnier Milan. Maybe I should cancel my gym membership and spend the money shopping, instead. Sounds like a good fitness plan to me - all the exercise without the agony, and you spend the money you would have spent at the gym (and then some) on a brand-new wardrobe for the brand-new you! (Of course, after that, your own mom won’t be able to pick you out of a lineup, but then again, that’s already happened to some of us).
People always say that the American lifestyle is what makes Americans so fat. American food, American laziness, it all adds up to widespread obesity. And if you look around, it seems to be true. In a contest for The Country Most Likely to Be Mistaken for a Manatee Preserve, America would almost certainly take the gold medal.
My personal experience, however, has been completely the opposite. Something about living in New York kept me ridiculously underweight. (The stress? The walk to work? The skipped meals? The hasty meal substitutes?) Since moving to Switzerland, however, my BMI has crept up into the lower end of the “normal” range for the first time that I can remember. After some reflection, I have a few ideas as to why I’ve gained weight since leaving Cheeto-land for Heidi-land.
Cheese. Fondue, raclette, cheese sandwiches, and so on. Butter on everything that doesn’t have cheese, and butter on some things that do have cheese. Cream and whole milk in anything that doesn’t have butter or cheese.
Meat and potatoes. Meat here is exceedingly expensive, and they only recently introduced ground turkey into the standard supermarket fare. Partly because of the high price of meat, and partly because of an apparently genetic national love of starch, potatoes come with everything, in every guise. This is not Atkins country. Plus it's all cooked with extra butter, cheese, and cream.
Door-to-door public transportation. Sure, I don’t drive everywhere like people do in suburban America, but the trams do a pretty good job of picking me up and dropping me off with a minimum of walking. The tram stops are so close that if a tram is going in relatively straight line, you can see the tram coming from several stops away while you wait for it to come to you .
Weather. If there’s no sun (which is sometimes the case for weeks in a row in the winter), I conserve energy by making no unnecessary movements, not even to go to the gym (which charges as much as an exclusive Manhattan gym, but without air conditioning, headphone jacks, and individual TVs). Even a trip to the bathroom becomes a carefully considered decision. When the weather is decent, on the other hand, who wants to go to the gym, just in case the sun disappears again for another two weeks?
I went to the gym twice last week, but I think that my best exercise was actually doing a hard day of cardio, I mean, shopping in sunnier Milan. Maybe I should cancel my gym membership and spend the money shopping, instead. Sounds like a good fitness plan to me - all the exercise without the agony, and you spend the money you would have spent at the gym (and then some) on a brand-new wardrobe for the brand-new you! (Of course, after that, your own mom won’t be able to pick you out of a lineup, but then again, that’s already happened to some of us).
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