Monday, 23 November 2009

• Portion Sizing for Chinese Meals: Possible or Impossible?

  Problem:
  Chinese meals (and a lot of other Asian meals in general) are eaten differently from western meals. With most western meals, you eat from one large plate and you don't share with others. You can use simple ratios (like filling your plate with 1/2 veggies, 1/4 meat, 1/4 grains) to balance your portion sizes.

  For Chinese meals however, each person eats rice out of a teeny weeny bowl! Dishes are shared and placed in the middle of the dinner table and you pick and take as you please. It's difficult to tell how much you have eaten because the food that disappears from the middle of the table is shared by everybody.

  

  The only thing that is easy to determine is how much rice you eat because you have to get up and go to the rice cooker for seconds. This is how some Chinese people determine how much you eat. But in reality, compared to other people, some just eat more rice in relation to meat/veggies.

  Solution: Portion sizing is POSSIBLE! If you use these:

  
  Measuring cups and spoons

  Get to know your country's food guide (USA | Canada | Australia |UK) and what a normal portion size is for each food group. According to Eat Well Canada's Food Guide, a person of my age and gender (22, female) needs 6 servings of grain products per day. So I try to spread this out by eating 2 servings max at each meal. This equates to 1 cup of pasta/rice or 2 slices of bread.

  However, if I try to measure out 1 cup of rice from the rice cooker, my mom asks "What are you doing???" and my dad looks at me like I'm a freak. Well I'm a healthy freak!

  So to avoid awkwardness, I usually don't rip out the measuring cups when I'm with my family. It's a good idea though to measure food out initially and over time, you may get a sense or ball-park of how much you should be eating. Or find a bowl that you already know is around 250mL (1 cup).

  Another way to get a sense of portion sizes would be to use what God gave you:

  

  Again, something to do subtley if you want to avoid strange and curious looks! In the case of my parents, they have lived so many decades a certain way so they sometimes have difficulty understanding new ways of thinking. Yes, food is a joy and part of our vibrant life and culture, but overeating has lead to an obesity epidemic and increase medical care costs.

  Try your best to portion size what you eat, otherwise Chinese meals kind of come out the same as an all-you-can-eat buffet. Perhaps you can try taking an extra empty bowl/plate and place separate portions for yourself in there, instead of constantly taking small pieces from the shared dishes. Before getting more food, assess your appetite and ask yourself: am I really still hungry? What is hunger and fullness anyway? There is a huge difference between satisfying your stomach and overstuffing it until you are uncomfortable.

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  Next Problem:
  The 10-course Chinese dinner. These are the more formal restaurants with large round tables that can fit 10-12 people. A large and grand dinner of about 10 (more or less) courses comes out slowly and it always ends with rice as the last dish so that you don't get too full in the middle! And then usually red bean soup for dessert, which I'm really not a big fan of.

  

  If you're like me, you may not have any say in what is ordered. You don't even know what is coming. You leave everything for the elders to decide because you cannot read the Chinese characters on the menu and even if it was in English, you wouldn't know what to order anyway because English names of Chinese meals don't make much sense. Ma po tofu?? Four treasures rice??

  With so many unknown courses coming and going, I find portion sizing at these kinds of restaurants IMPOSSIBLE. Again there are no individual plates for each person. You can't use the trick of just eating half your meal and taking home the rest like at western restaurants. Please DO NOT rip out the measuring cups here! You'll embarrass the family and/or strike-up concern that you have an eating disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, or you are just plain anal.

  My advice would be to just enjoy yourself. You don't eat at the restaurants every day do you? The best solution to balance your enjoyment with portion sizing would be just try a little bit or one sample of every dish. Trust me, more dishes will come. Lots more, so you can put your chopsticks down. And stock up as much as you can on the vegetables like broccoli or gai lan. (I'm sorry if this tip doesn't work for males, because I know that men require more calories and have way larger appetites than I do!) But you can't go wrong with stocking up on the veggies.

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  Next Problem:
  Chinese people just don't like brown rice. I cannot convince my traditional father to switch over from white rice. His thinking is that Chinese people have been eating white rice for thousands of years. That's just the way things have been and there have not been any problems. Rice is such a large staple in the Chinese diet. Brown rice also just tastes funny to him. It's not as smooth or sticky and it's difficult to pick up brown rice with chopsticks. I understand.

  

  However, brown rice contains much more vitamins and fiber than white rice. White rice is essentially brown rice, except the outer layer of bran (which contains all the vitamins and fiber) is stripped off to give you white rice. Fiber helps to lower your cholesterol and your risk for severe digestive conditions, type 2 diabetes, and much more.

  Whole grains and brown rice are very uncommon in Hong Kong. When I lived in HK in 2008, I could not find a single loaf of brown bread that listed whole grain wheat as its first ingredient. Those numerous and delicious bakeries contained breads very low in fiber. The Hong Kong diet, however, consists of a lot of fruits and vegetables and this may be where the population obtains most of its dietary fiber from. Tropical fruits are abundant year round and fruits are often eaten after dinner as a form of healthy dessert.

  I've never found a Chinese restaurant that serves brown rice as an option. I do eat brown rice at home and I will admit, it is not as delicious as white rice. But I swear that one can get used to the texture and it is definitely healthier anyway!

  A couple of tips to transition yourself into eating brown rice:

  • Start by mixing your rice and eating half white and half brown until you have transitioned yourself to 100% brown rice! Or you can stay with 50-50. It's better than nothing.
  • Not able to pick up brown rice with chopsticks? Spoon is a great invention too!

  I used to LOVE this food chain in Hong Kong called "QQ Rice":

  

  I believe it originated from Taiwan and has other locations all around Asia. I used to call this shop: "Asia's version of Subway sandwiches". You can choose from a variety of healthy rice grains like red rice, wheat germ rice, brown rice, etc. as your base to make a rice ball (onigiri) and then you can choose your fillings. The shop even laid out the number of calories and amount of vitamins and fiber in certain rice balls -- I found caloric information to not be as common/standardized in Hong Kong than in North America. If you look in the comments section of this post, you'll find that somebody suggested a book called "Why the Chinese Don't Count Calories". I haven't had the chance to check it out, but it sounds very interesting!

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  One last issue:
  Sometimes when you eat with Chinese people, they may take food from the shared dishes in the middle and put it on YOUR plate/bowl. Even if you say you're stuffed, they'll still do it! It's just part of their culture to want to share food with you since it is such a joy and necessity in life. It's their way of showing politeness as they are afraid that you are not eating as much as you want to because you don't want to seem like a rude pig. The only way to really politely stop a Chinese person from placing more food on your plate that you don't want to eat... is to literally use your hands to block and shield your plate! And just say nicely that you really are stuffed.

  If somebody is doing this for you, it's a good thing though! It means they care about you!

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