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“42 kilos lost and counting”

  • 31 posts
  • started 2 years ago by tentsuyu
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  1. tentsuyu My profile page
    • Aggie
    • 3 posts
    • joined March 29, 2009

    note to everyone: since i've discovered maangchi's recipe videos on youtube, i've changed my diet almost completely to korean food. it's so easy to make, healthy and great tasting, i've quit eating that fat-oozing western fast food stuff once and for all.
    after one and a half years, i've lost 42 kilos so far and i've never felt deprived of anything (the ultimate secret to successful weight-loss).

    maangchi, you know me already since i've contacted you on youtube, but i feel it's about time to thank you publicly on your forum for your wonderful, wonderful videos. you helped me change my life.

    your friend from berlin
    chris

    • Posted 2 years ago
  2. hopish My profile page I'm a fan!!
    • Yorizzang
    • 18 posts
    • joined October 14, 2008

    Wow, that's great!
    Actually, I am always hungry and love eating Korean food. I rarely go out to eat because the food I make at home is so delicious. I eat a lot, but I don't gain any weight. I'm not super skinny either, I'm about average weight. Anyways that's awesome! Korean food forever and ever <3

    • Posted 2 years ago
  3. Reinier Rotterdam, The Netherlands My profile page I'm a fan!!
    • Holland Food Artist
    • 73 posts
    • Holland Food Artist
    • joined February 3, 2009

    Wow chris, that's great.
    I agree, very little oil/fat, little sugar and lots of vegetables.

    • Posted 2 years ago
  4. Maangchi New York City My profile page
    • Dumok
    • 766 posts
    • joined August 6, 2008

    Chris,

    I'm so happy to read it! Congratulations! You are eventually sharing your good news with the world! I'm very proud of you!

    I think it would be wonderful if you shared with us how you lost the weight: menus, what you cut out, how you overcome hunger, etc. If it's too much of a hassle for you, never mind. : ) Post it here or email it to me and I will direct readers to it who would find it helpful.

    • Posted 2 years ago
  5. ylre My profile page
    • Yorisa
    • 5 posts
    • joined April 2, 2009

    Hmm..Korean food for losing weight? I might have to take a step back then if it's for losing weight since I am already skinny. :)

    I do think that Korean food deserves more push and recognition. It is indeed quite healthy if you will stick with the vegie rich dishes.

    Good thing that we have Maangchi, our gateway to Korean cooking in English. ;)

    • Posted 2 years ago
  6. tentsuyu My profile page
    • Aggie
    • 3 posts
    • joined March 29, 2009

    has been some time now (i'm not too active on the internet these days), but i'm happy to tell you more about my weight loss of course. :)

    if you do what i did before, a) eat unhealthy food, b) too much of it, you will get fat in no time.

    i've never really felt that hungry during the whole process of losing weight. i think the most important thing to begin with is:
    get used to normal sized meals! i found this is easier to do with rice-based meals, don't know why. a burger will fill your stomach for two hours, then you'll want to eat again. not the case with rice. it somehow lasts longer.

    so now that i started eating the right food and not as much as before, things went pretty easy from that moment on:

    - i started seeing results in about a month, thus i got motivated to do some cycling on a regular basis, which of course helped lose more weight.

    - i began to like soups. admit it, we western people don't appreciate soups as much as koreans do. in fact, i always wanted grilled meat, fries, chicken etcetera before, everything but soups. now what's the difference between a grilled half chicken with french fries and a bowl of doenjang jjigae in calories...?

    - another very important thing: i've stopped buying anything that you could easily take out of the fridge and just eat without the need of having to do some sort of preparation work. in other words: in most cases, my laziness is even stronger than my appetite.

    - only fat allowed: sesame seed oil and if necessary, a teaspoon of vegetable oil.

    - fresh ingredients, lots of seafood, sometimes chicken, very little beef, almost no pork.

    - try to make meals even smaller, if you still feel peckish after dinner, just have some kimchi. i'm lucky to have a korean store nearby where you can buy it freshly made.

    all the compliments i received from my friends were also such a boost to my spirit.
    i have to admit: i could not have consequently followed all these rules of thumb for such a long time without my fascination for korean food.
    i like everything about it: the spicyness (i always loved chili), the garlic, the sesame, the seafood and the seaweed..
    and in weak moments, whenever i was in danger of losing this fascination, maangchi had posted some new video that made me go "oh, i want to try this!". except the crispy chicken wings, thank god.

    i don't know what else to tell you and i don't want to make this post even longer. any questions, feel free to ask! :)

    잘 먹겠습니다

    chris

    • Posted 2 years ago
  7. Maangchi New York City My profile page
    • Dumok
    • 766 posts
    • joined August 6, 2008

    Chris,
    I'm very proud of you to leave your know-how here! Where did you learn the korean words? "잘 먹겠습니다" :) It means "I will eat it well." Yes, I think you'll eat good food well.

    Anybody reading your post will agree that the reason you have lost your weight is not only changing diet but you have strong will! It's not easy!

    "...a burger will fill your stomach for two hours, then you'll want to eat again. not the case with rice. it somehow lasts longer.."

    This reminds me of what my mother says. We went to a shopping mall together and had hamburger for lunch there and came home. Right after coming home, she brought lunch again and said, "I'm still hungry, hamburger is just like snack. We should eat rice and kimchi!"

    I should think about creating another discussion section "how do you control your weight" : ) In my case, I simply cut down on the amount of food that I eat.

    Soups are good for a diet. I should post some more good recipes for soup. My kongnamul guk recipe (soybean sprouts soup) is a good example of low-calorie well-balanced diet food. When you eat it with a bowl of rice and add fermented radish kimchi to the soup, it's very tasty and also you won't have to worry about calories even though you eat it a lot! :)

    For those of you who have never seen my kongnamulguk recipe and radish kimchi, here are the links: soybean sprout soup, kaktugi.

    • Posted 2 years ago
  8. aksa My profile page
    • Aggie
    • 2 posts
    • joined May 17, 2009

    Hello Chris, I am so impressed, I had to comment!

    I wish my German boyfriend would think the same way you do. I have tried to introduce him to different types of Asian food including a lot of Korean dishes, and he enjoys it, but afterwards feels the need to eat a lot of bread and cheese or sausages (not to mention chocolate). In fact I think he eats double, because if I didn't cook the dishes, he would just eat the bread and cheese.

    Congratulations on your healthier weight and on your open-minded attitude towards food. I find that some people are curious about other foods but in the end, prefer to go back to their usual thing. Which is natural of course, but too bad if it happens to be unhealthy.

    Where is the Korean store where you buy kimchi? I live in Berlin too and I would love to go there!

    A.

    • Posted 2 years ago
  9. rv65 My profile page
    • Yorizzang
    • 30 posts
    • joined May 9, 2009

    Congrats on losing 42 kilos.

    • Posted 2 years ago
  10. Bernie My profile page
    • Yorisa
    • 6 posts
    • joined May 23, 2009

    I think the key to eating healthy is increasing variety. If you have variety and diversity, you body doesn't get dowsed by any one type of food that it has to figure out what to do with in excess--usually turn into fat.

    Korean food is the ultimate in variety. The heavy commitment to variety shines through in all the soups and bibimbap style dishes.
    But there's a lot of fried fatty dishes in Korean cuisine, but a Korean will never just eat a plateful of that stuff, day after day, like Westerners do. It's usually a once in a while special occasion thing, or it's eaten in small side-dish-like amounts in combination with a lot of healthy banchan and rice that you fill up on.

    Also Western cuisine has such contempt for vegetables. Very little attention and effort is given to vegetables. It's usually garnish or just ruffage, or uninspired salads. But in Korean food, the love for vegetables shows in all the ban chan dishes.

    The biggest thing I hate about food at American restaurants (sitdown and fast food) is the lack of variety. You get a main dish and choice of just 1 or 2 side dishes, or sometimes, no side dishes at all. It frustrates me. I want like 4 or 5 side dishes to go with my meal. Give me less of the main meat item, and give me more side dishes! It's my biggest rant. It's why you'll often find me driving out of the way to eat at a Korean restaurant.

    • Posted 2 years ago
  11. tentsuyu My profile page
    • Aggie
    • 3 posts
    • joined March 29, 2009

    aksa,
    the store i'm getting my kimchi from is located near leopoldplatz, luxemburger straße 31.
    altho it doesn't look korean from the outside and it's a rather small shop, they have about every cooking ingredient you could wish for - and fresh kimchi of very high quality.
    and while you're in the area, there's a great korean restaurant called arirang in walking distance, seestraße 106. it's usually packed with koreans at evening times and does very authentic korean cuisine. you always get five banchan with every meal. most meals are between 6 and 10 euros. they're closed on tuesdays.

    bernie,
    you're absolutely right! i just love the korean side dishes. sometimes i just skip the main course altogether and just have some spicy myulchi bokkeum (maangchi's recipe, it's lovely stuff!), kongnamul and other veggies that go well prepared with sesame seed oil, soy sauce and garlic.
    i also agree with everything else you said - typical western food is all about meat, french fries and stuff like that. no wonder americans and germans are the fattest people on earth.

    maangchi,
    i'm actually trying to learn the korean language. :)
    altho i can read hangeul now, i'm pretty much stuck with the pronunciation rules and grammar, as it's hard to find good resources for that on the net. you usually just find collections of sentences, like a travel dictionary, but no proper language course.

    see you everybody!

    • Posted 2 years ago
  12. Bernie My profile page
    • Yorisa
    • 6 posts
    • joined May 23, 2009

    Yes, simple Banchan meals are awesome. Small bowl of rice. Some seaweed paper, some myulchi, some cucumber kimchi, some odeng stirfry, and ojingeochae bokkeum, some kong jorim, and kimchi.
    Most of the stuff I buy at the H-mart Korean grocery near my house, freshly made and packaged in plastic containers that keep for over a week. I make Maangchi's soups as a center piece when I have time to cook.

    You might find these videos helpful for learning:

    http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=xd3qu1n0x&view=videos&sort=v

    These videos are pretty decent for Korean pronunciation, and real world phrases. It's a bit slow-moving and filled with fluff and it's child-like with it's production design and delivery. The show seems to be unsure about the age of it's target audience. I wish it were faster paced, with more repetition, and less useless banter.

    • Posted 2 years ago
  13. aksa My profile page
    • Aggie
    • 2 posts
    • joined May 17, 2009

    thanks Chris for the addresses, I will definitely try them out!

    • Posted 2 years ago
  14. roskandy Boston, IL My profile page
    • Yorisa
    • 5 posts
    • joined May 31, 2009

    tentsuyu:
    So right about Korean food. If only I could get myself to cook more my weight probably would go straight down :( As it is, whenever I'm in Korea for longer than a month, I tend to lose almost 10 lbs without even thinking about it too much. Now if people would drop the 'low carb' crap. :O. I think actually eating the five-grain rice (or 10-grain or whatever there is) might help in addition instead of eating white rice. Brown rice has too strong of a flavor I think to be a good substitute for white, but the mixed rices I think help increase your fiber & whole grain without interfering with the flavor of the korean dishes.

    Oh and teenkorean.com has some nice files... but the site is organized somewhat badly--some of the things are in Korean even though the site is geared towards Korean Americans who either barely speak or want to increase their vocab/grammar formally. In any case, I think if you've already learned the alphabet, this might help. http://www.teenkorean.com/member/registeration.jsp?pact=insert This is the direct link to the registration page (which is linked from the first page in Korean, it's 회원가입 for future reference)

    • Posted 2 years ago
  15. julieRN Metro Manila, Philippines My profile page
    • Aggie
    • 1 posts
    • joined June 5, 2009

    hmmm... i should try this! Me and my korean boyfriend have been so into korean cooking that we ALWAYS cook our meals at home. Aside from it being cheaper and fresher than always eating at korean restaurants, we get to bond more and have a lot of fun! yay! ^^ And! Now that I found out it could help you lose weight then I should switch to this diet to be sexier! k.k Chris, you're such a great inspiration! Keep up the good work! And of course, I would never forget, thank you so much ms. maangchi for providing us easy and best ways to cook our own korean food! ^^

    • Posted 2 years ago

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