What slowing metabolism?

I am hungry allllllll the time.

The bane of everyone growing old, that slowing metabolism which is supposed to make people fatter as we get older. The conventional wisdom of peak physical fitness etc. Except those researches were done for Caucasians. The trend lines between age and fitness is well known by everyone. Except, it doesn’t work on me, or to put it more generally; Asians.

For me, the slowing metabolism is a blessing not a curse. For the first time in my life, I am actually able to gain weight and build muscles, which is something that I wasn’t able to do as well before. If I were to make a guess, the energy burn rate was higher than normal for Asians compared to other races, which means that I was probably constantly malnourished in my twenties. Heck, I eat twice what I used to eat back in those days and I am still losing weight yet I am only doing runs every other day compared to exercises every day back then. It makes sense, if I look at Asian physiology.

Why do we age slower and why are most of us so skinny compared to our counter parts in other races? Just look at this Taiwanese soap opera actress:

Can you believe that she’s in her 40s? I couldn’t, yet it’s the norm. Of course, this is a glamor shot. You can search for her name 方馨 to look up her other pictures on Google. It is still amazing.

I get a culture shock of body sizes whenever I come back from traveling in Asia. Is it because our genetics hold off on physical maturity, which in turn stretches out the time zone of high metabolism? These are questions that I constantly ask myself. Have I been going at it the wrong way because I’ve been looking at data for Americans? If I were to look at the data that I have accumulated over my one lifetime and consider that data set only, I’d have to say that I need 4x the normal amount of food when I was younger in order to build any type of muscle mass at all.

There’s also the question of the diet. For one, we don’t drink milk in Asia, therefore removing the biggest source of artificial growth hormones from entering our diet. Nowadays, you might find it in other food, but I suspect that plasticides, which have been found to exist in many Asian food source in recent founding, is another big reason. Besides the known effect to shrink dicks, there might be more yet unknown side effect of shrinking other body parts. Because adding plasticides (to increase protein count under inspection) is so unthinkable, no one in the food industry bothered testing against them. The result? I found out that I’ve been ingesting them for the better part of my life in Asian food I enjoy. No bubble tea for me for a while.

Be well and beeee Asian.