Weight loss: By Trial and Error

I am a girl.
Oh man glad I got that off my chest. Surprise I know. But like many girls, I was forever concerned about my weight. I have tried a great good number of methods to slim down and keep it to a minimum while staying healthy.

Running for one. I have had a beautifully broken ankle in the past which to this day limits exercise options, largely due to the surgery it has since incurred. So I limited myself to gym exercise, primarily on the elliptical. I would go crazy with gym exercise for periods of time with mild success. Of course as a student it is difficult to keep a regular schedule with the onslaught of tests, papers, and projects all bombarding you for your space and time. Thus regularity with the schedule was difficult for time other than the summer. This clearly did not work out so well for me. I would only make progress for a short time and then regress. All in all I really only ever lost water weight doing this. I can say this however, I did lose a lot of fat during this time, but gained it back in muscle. So I was looking trimmer than before after I started doing this.

Another things I tried was weight loss pills. Oh I have tried many. And I was even met with success for one of them. However as the warnings say, you should not be doing them for a long time or it could cause some more serious health side effects. That aside, do you really know what you are ingesting when you take these? These have been no long term medical studies. How could there be? These have only cropped up in recent years. These puppies could very easily lead to organ failure or blood thinning. Therefore I cannot recommend this to anyone who wants to seriously permanently and healthily lose weight. I only took these for short periods of time during the bikini season, if you will. I additionally cannot recommend these because of the 4 or 5 variations I have tried, only one has worked. Perhaps you have to be very strict with the measures with which you take these ( the time of day and amount of exercise you get), but for the price they cost and the results I have had, it is just not worth it.

Dieting. Ohhh dieting. Everyone always telling you to eat right and eat less. Well they are right to a degree. Americans, which I am, eat a heaping lot more than they should. I think the best weight loss regime that I have had in my college years has been dieting. Granted it was also not so fun and a bit saddening. I mostly ate salads and ate very moderately to little. I probably lost a good 20 pounds doing this for perhaps 6 months. However then I regained a social life and the happiness that came with that, going out, eating nice meals, dessert parties... and much of it returned.

Now for what worked for me

Moving.

I moved to Korea a year and a half ago and then to Japan since then. Before I moved to Korea, I weighed in at 162 pounds ( HOLY CRAP)...ok not so much. I had a lot of muscle on me from my sporting days, of which I had many. I was a bit overweight but not terribly and I at this point I was comfortable with myself, as it was perhaps the largely the most consistent weight I have had since high school. Only I looked better and more trim since then, as I was eating better and had a bit more muscle on display than fat.
But FYI for Asian standards, this is very overweight. But they are also structurally very different with a lot less muscle ( I feel as though I could very easily take any Korean woman on).
Moving to Korea made a huge difference though. In both my dietary and exercise regimes. Of course I ate more rice, debunking any Atkins diet for me. I ate loads more vegetables and fish as well. In addition I was walking 4 kilometers a day. That is a little over 2 miles (for Americans). With this constant assuage of a constant healthy diet and physical exercise, as well as extremely active weekend activities I began to lose weight. I didn't notice at first. It wasn't until I was in a jimjilbang ( a Korean bathhouse) that I noticed my face was looking slimmer. After my year in Korea I weighed a grand total of 17 pounds less.
Feeling great I moved to Japan and gave up juices, ( do you have any idea how man sugars those have?!) and putting sugar in my coffee. As I was already accustomed to not drinking soda ( another American guilty pleasure), my sugar intake dived. Additionally my walk to work was farther, increasing my previous routine to about 8 kilometers a day. Thus, after living here for 5 months, I have lost another 5 pounds. Making my grand total thus far to be a loss of 22 pounds and I weigh in at 62 kilos (about 140ish pounds). I can definitely say that I look way better and because of that feel awesome.

Therefore my final advice on losing weight is to move to Asia.

And because everyone likes to see before and after pics (and bikini pics as well here is an after pic...now let me find a before one...)

The difference between Kimchi and Sushi

So most of you might know I have spent a year in Korea and well a bit of time in Japan so far. But even with my short time here I have noticed some extreme differences. Now there is abosulutely no way I can catagorize all the differences in just one post. Thus, since the place where I have spent the most time thus far in both the countries is at school, I will talk about some of the differences I see here at school in this post.

So first off, the place where I definitely spend most of my time at school, the office!
In Korea, I had my own office that I shared with my English teaching cohorts. In my case, there was one other native English teacher at my school, and a Korean teacher and then there was Kate. Kate was our very special...helper. She did not have a teaching certificate so was technically not allowed to teach, but she made sure our classes ran smoothly and no student got too out of hand. We probably drove her crazy. There is a reason there is not a Kate at every school.
Our office was a small little thing that really barely fit all of our desks. Additionally we had a full army of our very own machines in that room; including multiple heaters, an ac unit,  2 printers, 4 speedy slender desktop computers, a huge copy machine, fans, and craft supplies. Somehow it and us all fit. However it was OUR office. With no one else.
It was also very clean as we cleaned it ever Wednesday (or Friday depending on the semester).
While in the office there were practically no blocked sites and when desk warming in the winter in the absence of students facebook and megaupload movies were a constant feature on our computer screens. I once even caught more than one coworker playing Starcraft. No surprise there I suppose.
Now let me say a word on everyone else's office. Their offices were practically their classrooms. They had all their tech gear for teaching a class and their desk furnished with their computer in one corner of the classroom. This is much how I remember it being in America when I was little. There were a few admins who had their own office and then a few of the interning personnel who had a desk in the vice principals room which also served as a large meeting room. This room is where everyone would gather for coffee in the morning and where everyone would come at the end of the day for a bit of respite. It was a large room with a large circular table. In the winter and summer, what staff remained at the school would set up temporary offices here rather than in the solitude of their rooms. It was a super friendly environment.


My desk and office in Japan is no less friendly, possibly even more so as all the teachers share one room. Teachers who are home room teachers also have a desk in this room, but are more frequently absent from it. The head of the room is presided over by the school leader. A person who addresses the masses, er teachers, and deals with their concerns. Beside him sits the vice principal and an adjoining door connects the principals office to the teachers room.
The room itself is relatively free of large machinery,for its size, save for several printers strategically places about the room either for printing in color printing, and copying, or just a black and white printer. Every desk varies in size and shape and has drawers of varying degree as well. Every teacher is furnished with a desk and a laptop. Anyone know knows me has heard me talk about these laptops. They are approximately 6-8 centimeters thick, weigh like 6 kilos, are slower than frozen slugs in the dead of winter, frequently lose internet connection and are over all better used as boat anchors. If you are wondering exactly what make and model it is, its something like a model-T Fujitsu, which seems to be the sponsored brand for Japanese schools.
These computers were certainly less friendly to me than the Korean computers I was accustomed to, as they have a similar but slightly different keyboard than western computers. Sure you can type just fine, but whenever you want to add punctuation or think you know where that plus sign or at mark are, think again! Additionally it is fairly easy to change languages on these computers and a bit more difficult to change back. There are exactly 4 keys on my key board that will change my words from English to either romanji ( yes it is different), katakana, kanji or hiragana. AND THEN as if that wasn't enough, you can either keep the western keyboard orientation when you switch...or you can switch to the hiragana keyboard which requires me to hunt all over the keyboard for the right character. I have recently figured out the exact combination of two keys that I need to hit in order to return to my sort of normalcy (its alt and the key beside the 1), since it is impossible to revert back on the computer interface... though I suspect my computer being especially special in this case. Often these schools will have visiting teachers or teachers who only come in once a week for whom they will also have a desk and computer.
In a separate adjoining room in the back we have all of our machinery capable of printing more pages in a minute than the Occupy protesters present right now in New York. It also works to my advantage that is is the dead of night there as I write this. Next to that room and still attached to the main room is our admin office...I am not really certain what these people do...
The rooms themselves aren't really all that clean. In fact I have never seen anyone pick up a broom in my office. My desk is by default one of the cleanest for the simple reason that in comparison to the other desks, there is nothing on it. Today a guy two desks down from me had an avalanche of papers. His desk, or lack thereof, is definitely one of the most impressive I have ever seen. The office being dirty is a little on the strange side for me, as in Japanese schools there is a special time after lunch that is reserved for cleaning and all the students must take to broom and cloth to wipe the room clean.

A few of the other differences include the structure of the building itself. My Korean school was very small with only one class per grade; however this can be attributed to my living in a very small town. It was a one building school, with 3 floors and about 15 classrooms for various purposes. An addition of a cafeteria and an afterthought of building a fancy English center over head were a later attachment to the school adjoined to the main building with a sheltered wooden walkway.
Whereas in Japan my school is huge 4 stories and 3 separate buildings with around 50 classrooms. It has a swimming pool and a huge field ( this is a junior high school with a swimming pool but the junior high school in Korea did not have one). The fields at both my elementary and junior high schools are hands down bigger than that of my Korean school, but again this can be attributed to my living in the Korean boonies.
But with all its luxury it is no match for the technology of Korean classrooms. Sure my schools in Japan are furnished with lovely smartboard televisions and 4 meter long chalk boards.
But in my Korean school, I had a blue screen, a projector for physical objects, a projector, and a 60 inch touch screen television at my disposal. Not to even mention that in their regular classrooms, my students each had a tablet netbook that they would use for their lessons. The trade off for all of this electric magic was having itty bitty white boards that flanked the T.V. and could not do much for whiteboard teaching. Meaning, I had to always have an elaborate powerpoint at the ready. The other trade off was that our rooms had no windows. I am not really sure why that is since there was an obvious plan for windows from the outside, they were blocked off from the inside.

Photos!
In Korea:

Japan!

JHS

Elementary School

a new elementary school:

Winner Winner Chicken Dinner!

What do you do when you have money to burn and are too xenophobic to take a nice vacation somewhere?

Pachinko.
It is the common salary workers choice vice as he toils through the day to make something of his meaningless tasks. Pachinko is the pit of despair into which you throw your money. It is full of flashing lights, pretty girls serving drinks, loud noises and excitement; but still falls way way short of all the Las Vegas style. Pachinko is part slot machine and part pinball machine of which the user has very little control of the machine. Simply they control the speed at which the little metal balls are rocketed through the machine. They then clang their way through a forest of nails down to the little hole at the bottom. Like in pinball there is plenty of chance to lose the ball. Unlike pinball you do not have devices that can rerocket the balls back up; they simply make it in the correct hole or they fall to disuse, not to be reused again...unless you have another dollar...

the prize window next to the currently closed pachinko

The few balls that get past the blockade of pins and into the correct hole slide down to activate a type of slot machine, where if you get a triplet you will earn yourself on screen animations and more balls or other surprises.
These balls can then either be put to use again, rocketing through the game, or be used to exchange for prizes. Since gambling is technically illegal in Japan, you cannot exchange the balls directly for cash prizes; however, it is no well kept secret that in affiliation with the establishment and often located near if not inside it, that a certain type of prize can be exchanged for cash. Of course you can keep the the prize if you so desire. Prizes can encompass any nature of items such as electronics, bikes, household goods, grocery purchases...as I said.

Modeled after a child's game, Pachinko took to the country in open establishments for 'not-gambling' just after the second war. Since then, the systems has been upgraded again and again making it appealing to younger generations while still keeping the flavor of childhoods past. Now, they use electronic systems that will often have a screen display in the middle as well as more lights and colors and perhaps one of the bigger draws, themes. Machines now have a certain theme that is often sponsored by a well liked show, game, anime. For instance as I was walking around Kyoto I noticed on had very large Monster Hunter posters advertising their Monster Hunter themed slots. Now since I have never really been inside, let alone played, at one of these establishments, I can't tell you what exactly happens. It is possible that short cinematics will be displayed on the screen in the essence of the Monster Hunter games as you activate certain mechanical triggers when you play, or it is also easily feasible that Monster Hunter is just the brand name of a machine that is painted and produced in its likeness and blessing. In addition to the Monster Hunter brand name, I also noticed others like Evangelion and Blood+ (I think I saw this), but these are not the only ones available. There are probably hundreds of different machines, and I am just too unfamiliar with all the pop culture to recognize them.

Pachinko places are often looked upon with disdain by many people outside of the gambling circuit. They are seen as people who prefer to waste their fortunes on luck without a proper respect for savings. However, many T.V. programs have started hailing the pachinko systems calling them a way to bring the family together, because in addition to the ball and slot machine combination, many parlors will have a kid friendly level where kids can play the usual arcade games without the added stress level. In a sad testimonial from an old couple, they claimed they had nothing to talk about anymore and that instead of sitting around in a bored silence, they would go the machines and spend the day there.
Pachinko has become for popular and renowned in the Japan-verse and they have even made hit movies involving it. The movie is called Kaiji. The first one had less to do about the machines themselves and was more a gamble of life and debt. But since the first ones popularity and box office hit, a second one was developed which revolved around the pachinko parlors and their elusive winnings.

Sakura Season

Here in Japan we have four seasons!

I don't know how many times I have heard this said, but it must be approaching a flabjillion. For whatever reason Japanese people, and Koreans for that matter, don't believe like anywhere else in the world has 4 seasons. That they are the only ones with that exact latitude that is requires for the meteorologic system to grant them the all divining power of 4 seasons.
Well enough of that. Someone recently informed me (after hearing this little rant and telling them that in fact my home in America too has 4 seasons) that Japan has Sakura Season. Well I just had no response to that.

Sakura Season (note: not a real season) is a gorgeous time of year when trees turn white with flowers. Sakura trees do not leaf first; therefore the trees appear purely white with the flower. The appearance of sakura, also known as cherry blossoms, marks the beginning of spring for Japan. As you may have read in many of my other posts, this is also a new beginning for Japanese people. Sound familiar? It seems Japanese people have many chances 'new beginnings' in the first few months of the year. This one marks the start of a new school year, as well as a time for when most people will start a new job, or when the benefits of insurance/ vacation time for a job/ contract agreements typically renew. It has nothing to do with the sakura flowers, or mayhaps it does and was determines several hundred years ago, it mostly involves the coming of spring and new life.

In fact sakura were not so popular at one time. It was the pink blossoms of the plum trees that were the most significant tree-flower that people used to sit under and write their haikus. However people like Hideyoshi changed the favoritism and brought a must greater significance to the sakura flower after he himself declared his preference for it and had many installed for his personal viewing. Sakura then became preferred not only due to the favoritism of an important figure but also because the weather is much warmer when the sakura are blooming making it more desirable to sit under and have a picnic.
Today you can find many people sitting under them on a sunny Saturday when they are in bloom. Due to the nature of the season and the fact that a bunch of new employees just began their terms at their new companies, it is the new lackys' job to get up at 5 in the morning to reserve a good viewing spot for a company picnic. Many people do this in fact. With their blue picnic tarps in hand they get up quite early in the morning to find the best viewing location and set up camp. They might be there all day and well into the night too, as many places have lighting to display the cherry blossoms with a scenic night display.

Sakura Season is an important and well anticipated part of the Japanese culture. People from all over the world flock to Japan during this time. On the new channels they have announcements declaring the blooming percentage as if it was a rain forecast. 'Today there is a 30% chance of sakura' Just so that people know when the best time to set up their little camps is. Different areas of course have different blooming times; Kyoto would of course bloom before Tokyo due to the slightly warmer weather. And of course the placement and sunlight a tree receives also determines the blooming time and period. I saw one cherry blossom tree bloom and entire month before all the rest. But sadly the experience is fleeting. Sakura only last for approximately ten days or so before they begin their elegant little dance to the ground. Which is again beautiful. It is due to the nature of the sakura that haikus are made of their beautiful yet fleeting existence.

without you--

how vast

the cherry blossom grove

kimi nakute makoto ni tadai no kodachi kana (1817)

Omiyage

Omiyages are a gift that are generally given when one goes somewhere cool and everyone else stays behind.

Think of it like when your mom or dad went on a super cool business trip to Hong Kong when you were a kid and would bring you back a little toy panda. Yeah, it is kind of like that.
Japanese people frequently go on business trips or weekend trips throughout Japan. When on these weekend trips it is polite to consider your poor coworkers who may still be at the job or just bumming around the same ole town. As it goes, Japanese people will often get an omiyage, a small token gift, that often has some resemblance of the city, place, prefecture they were visiting. For example, Nagano is famous for apples, fresh farm grown vegetables, and chestnuts. A reasonable omiyage from there would be apple jam (if it was meant for one person), or a type of chestnut sweet that is individually packaged and can easily be handed out to a number of people, say your fellow co workers...
Omiyages are typically food based, as it is rather cheap to obtain many individual crackers or cookies and such, as opposed to many individual trinkets from the area. Additionally, in Japan cities often pride themselves for one thing or another that is considered a unique food culture specific to that area. Thus to try the local delicacy is considered a treat and to bring back these delicacies for others to enjoy is a treat for them as well. As an added bonus, it also promotes tourism for the originating town.

Say Cheese!

There is a remarkably popular invention called the "purikura". Otherwise known as the Print Club (puri meaning print and kura meaning club, thus print club).

In America, I always saw these as a charming little addition to any T.V. drama special. Don't know what I mean? Just look at a good lot of the girly dramas, particularly the older ones when the fad was more popular, but even new one such as Pretty Little Liars (no, I don't watch this) feature the overused cliches of photo booths. This fascination with photo booths is primarily focused in bigger cities such as New York and Los Angeles, as they are bigger cultural melting pots with a much more hip type of crowd. They are also of course found in Asia. All over it in fact. But mostly in the idol and photography obsessed areas of Korea and Japan.
Now being an actual living being that is not on a T.V. set, I never actually saw one of these things in America. I am going out on a limb assuming they can be found in popular city centers.
I was first introduced to it in Korea. Where they have little shops devoted to it. And I do mean little, I think my neighbor has a bigger walk-in closet than these shops. In it I found the stickers of happy smiling patrons all around, counters, ceilings, windows, booths. That's right. These pics are more than meets the eye, they can be stickers too. Being new to this whole experience, I don't actually recall much of my first experience. Just that I have the itty bitty smiling faces on photo film as proof of it. It was rather overwhelming. Smile! Pose! Snap! Next! Snap! Snap! Snap!
The boom of these purikura photos hit its peak about 10 years back. Wherein you would have to stand in line to take your pictures. For this reason the machine developers instated time limits when selecting features in order to meet their supply and demand and of course make money. In some areas you can still find a line outside these booths on a tipsy summer night with some girl friends in the city.  But for the most part the fad has faded a bit. This does not prevent my students from having their textbooks covered in the little stickers.

The booth exterior, the booth interior, and the outcome ( after fun-time in the editing room of course).

Japan: The Silicon Valley of the World.

For so seemingly technologically advanced a place, Japan has some of the worst tech.

In Korea, every teacher and classroom had a personal desktop computer. Ok desktops seem a bit behind the times, sure. But lets face it. You are at a desk. The towers were extremely slender with pleasing graphic designs on them. They had accompanying LCD monitors, and occasionally in multiple. These desktops were quite new, with techs always on call for when or if they malfunction. But best of all they were fast.

Here in Japan. I have a desk furnished with a laptop. You might think this is convenient and that I can take it to the classroom with ease. But rest assured the classrooms have their very own laptops. These laptops are not new in any feasible sense of the word. My laptop is a lovely 2004 model for a Fujitsu. Yeah my opinion as well. What the hell is Fujitsu doing with their fingers in the computer business. Stay outa that! It is a lovely beast of 8 pounds and change. It has a long life of thirty minutes to one hour unplugged. Trust me, these things never get unplugged...probably since 2004. The MacAir's girth simply pails in comparison with a two inch disadvantage. Please, if you don't believe me, have a look. Most days I am lucky if I can get to Chrome in the first 10 minutes of work. The boot up, log in, and loading of Chrome actually take that long. And don't even get my started on Internet Explorer.
Another technology deficient area in Japan is the train system. Oh I mean they have things like the Shinkansen, which can get you from Osaka to Tokyo in under two hours, but then they have the local train rails. Which sometimes don't even have doors that open automatically at each stop (Nagano). There will be nothing protecting you from jumping onto the tracks if desired (pretty much everywhere). In Korea, every subway station in Seoul and Incheon has glass barriers in place to prevent such 'accidents' from occurring. In Japan they might have them at a few of the popular station (possibly in Tokyo?) but have instead opted for the technological advance and expense of blue lighting. They have decided that this blue lighting will calm people and prevent them from ending up on the tracks. As such, the safety of the glass barriers is not needed.

On the flip side, they poke fun at America's attempts at robots and have elite facial recognition programs. They are even already in progress of building an even faster train that will run on magnets and break all records.

I suppose in a sense, it is not what Japan has, it is what they can have? As they have the technology for it, but feel not the need to splurge on the installment of these advancements.

School Culture Festival

This is actually what I meant to make my last post about before I got on a tangent and lost track!

Previously, I was not allowed to post this due to the paranoia of the school, as one of the students might be caught by a facial recognition and pinned to a misdemeanor and in addition tracked back to this school. But now these students have graduated and I have no idea as to where they have run off.

The school festival at my school happens early in the second semester, around the September time frame. This is a very big event for the school. They have the dance team involved, the art club making decorations, and everyone is singing. I have since been told that our school is very big into singing and that many other schools celebrate their culture day a bit differently than ours. I do not think that singing is really a big part of our school as so much as it is a tradition. If you look at our choral club, you will notice it has only 5 or so members(whom, I might mention, did not get any of the leading roles except for one of the Megs), but the music teachers seem to push their program very hard and have all the students under lock and key.
Thus, our culture festival was a Japanese rendition of select scenes and songs from Phantom of the Opera. Which is a personal favorite so I was quite happy. This is a performance put on by the 3rd years at the school. Earlier in the show, the first and second years did a choral concert singing 5 or so songs a piece, making the 3rd years performance much like a grand finale.
Since my first and second years are still students at this school, I will not put up the videos of their performance until, likely, years later. But here is the magnificent performance of Phantom of the Opera!