China, How it is - Being FAT in China

well hey there guys and welcome to another video now before I even begin this video I just want to put it on record that this is not a video bashing fat people and neither is it is it a video about fat pride this is basically just a video about the experience of being fat and what it's taught me so this is just one of those strange subjects that's cropped up basically because it's been on my mind you know I've got this trip coming up in a month and I want to lose some weight if you're sensitive about your weight and you're planning to come and live and work in China or even if you're just coming here for a holiday it's going to be quite challenging for you China's had a very politically correct place now before people jump down my throat and call me discriminatory for using words like fat and obese and overweight and all that please understand that in the West we're very politically correct China is not the culture here in China is to be very direct and it can be quite a shock to people when they first come here certainly was for me and I can actually speak from experience actually being the kind of person who gets fat quite easily or overweight chubby I also lose weight very easily but I kind of go up and down and I have my chubby periods and my slim periods and you know it's always been a part of my life in fact I know all about being fat here's a picture of me when I was 14 I was really really overweight and I was a fat kid at school which is why I'm very conscious about it and also why I can speak on the subject with a bit of authority here now in general most people in China are slim if you walk around on the streets here you'd see about I'd say a good eighty-five percent of people are what we in the West would consider slim and a lot of them are actually very skinny now this is a genetic trick this is not because they exercise because they don't Chinese people don't do regular exercise like we do in the West they don't go to gym it's not part of the culture some of them do play sports like basketball etc or badminton but I was actually quite shocked to find the lack of physical fitness in China most people haven't done a day of exercise in their life unless of course they're all it's kind of strange old people do exercise and what they'll do is they'll get up early in the morning and do Tai Chi and go work on the exercise machines but young people just don't exercise and what to be honest most of them don't need to because they are always in a good shape now you might wonder why they're so slim well it's definitely down to a very high metabolism most of the Chinese people I know who are very slim they they eat if they don't eat a meal say for instance they skip lunch or they skip dinner they will actually start to feel weak to even start to shake and a lot of them will complain that their stomachs hurts and they have no energy you know just because they haven't eaten lunch which for a Western like Westerner like myself is really weird because I can literally go for like three days without eating and I'll still have energy of course I will feel hungry but it's not the same so their metabolisms are burning really fast and in fact if you like for instance I got a Chinese Beyonce and if I touch her skin she's actually burning hotter than you know for instance I am most of the time let's just to to the very possible and it's happening there is however a bit of a change in the Chinese youth and that is because China has now suddenly gotten rich as most people know there's a lot of new money here and it's always been traditional for yeah well at least for boys in China if they're you know sort of a little bit fat it shows wealth and it shows that they come from a powerful family or at least you know prestigious family so what you get is you actually get a situation where you'll have rich parents basically just constantly feeding their little boys and treating them like little emperors we call them and so you actually do tend to see a lot of overweight young boys in China these days obviously not in the past but now and that's just because of the vast amount of foods that they they're just constantly eating this doesn't matter what time of day if you look around you'll always see people eating in China but they almost force-feed these little boys until they are you know bursting and so yeah that's a little different although generally when they hit their teens and they hit a growth where they just grow and they become skinny at least that's in my experience having lived here for ten years I've actually seen you know friends children who are ready chubby suddenly just become really tall so yeah it's basically down to genetics anyway I'm going on a bit too much about why Chinese people often and I should be talking about you as a foreigner like me being in China and being fat all right so the first thing you're going to have to learn to deal with being a fat or overweight foreigner here in China is the fact that you're going to be the only one you're going to be walking around and all you're going to see are skinny people the occasional chubby person but unlike the West you just don't see obese or morbidly obese people here and you very seldom actually see fat people so you do stick up that will bring me to the second point the second thing which I'm going to talk about which is probably the biggest thing is discrimination now in the West we're very politically correct to a fault actually to a point where if somebody's morbidly obese we don't point it out to them say hey you looking healthy or hey big man or you know all this nonsense I know I've been fat before in the West and people avoid the subject they don't tell you that you're fat and we grow accustomed to that because we have a very I suppose warped kind of picture what we look like in our minds come to China though and everybody is going to start calling you fat when I first got here I thought it's very rude as quite a shock to me because when I came to China was what I weighed about twenty kilograms more than I do now the climate here as you can see that's not only rain but I'm sweating it's really hot and humid here all the walking that you do here you know you don't drive as much it really it does actually help you lose weight but anyway I was quite a bit heavier when I got here and also the couple of times have put on a little bit of weight I'll see a friend or a customer that I haven't seen in a couple of months and the first thing they say to me is they'll say wow you're better than before and I kind of think well thank you very much and you're uglier than before but you know that's just Chinese culture they're very very direct when it comes to looks if you go get a Sun Tan the next time they see you they'll say wow you're blacker than before it's just the way they are so if you're short tall fat skinny they're going to comment either way they'll say wow you're too short or wow you're too tall or you're too fat or YouTube then and it's very normal there's no sort of social etiquette as far as this is concerned so if you're fat be prepared for people to tell you that you're fat all the time I mean all the time and this will bring me on to another point I want to do bring up so the next thing I want to talk about is the honeymoon period that most foreigners go through when they get to China it's an interesting place full of all these new wonders and cool things to see and do and very friendly people and yes Chinese people are very friendly but when you don't understand the language it's actually more friendly it's as soon as you pick up on the language you start hearing the comments around you and they're all very straightforward and very unflattering if your bet you're going to hear people saying wow look how fat he is in public out loud and I'll give you an example I took some subscribers of mine we've just come to China I took them out for dinner and both of them were really overweight and they were having the time of their lives they're really enjoying their meal and you know everyone is friendly to them and say hello waving and they thought everything was great but at the table next to us and people walking past we're constantly commenting and saying wow look how fat they are how can they be so fat and like really kind of derogatory comments but because they couldn't understand they were in Oblivion and they were happy and everything was cool so what happens to a lot of foreigners including myself is when you start to understand the language and you start to pick up on all the comments you know a lot of that honeymoon sort of stuff wears off and you start to actually change your mind about people being so friendly and nice now it's not that everybody it's just incredibly judgmental it's really just a different culture and you know the Chinese people just have no idea about our Western sensibilities and you know a lot of the times we don't have any ideas about there was I mean they're Chinese sensibilities so I'm just trying to prepare you all any of you guys who are fat out there who want to come to China for whatever reason just be prepared to be insulted and shocked and there's nothing that can be done about it it's basically just a cultural difference anyway I want to tell you guys my story about being fat and how it's changed my life and why I recommend that anybody should actually be fat at least one time in their life so let me find a quiet place to sit down and I'll tell you all about it okay this is a slightly more quiet place I should say so let's get started I'm just going to tell you about my own personal experience of being fat and how it changed my life you see when I was very young I was born and grew up in Cape Town which anyone who knows South Africa knows Cape Town's sort of the big touristy place it's it's still very beautiful over there you know beaches and mountains and it's a really nice place and it's a very sort of outdoorsy place especially since my my old man is a very outdoor sort of person pace to go hiking a lot go out swimming at the beaches when I was young so I was always very slim until when I was about 11 years old we moved up to Johannesburg because my old man was looking for business opportunities in Johannesburg is the financial capital of South Africa also the most dangerous places so long story short without boring you we moved from a place where I used to go out a lot and you know socialize with friends to a new city living out on a farm sort of far away from anyone and anything in a very dangerous city so it wasn't actually viable to go out so I basically ended up either being at home or at school and I lived a very sedentary lifestyle basically just stuck behind a computer and that's where my love of computers really developed I mean I'd always loved computers since I was the first time I used the computer and when I was six years old but yeah I basically just became you know quote-unquote a computer nerd and I sat at home all day went to school came back ate unhealthy and I became incredibly fat so by the time I was 13 you saw that pictures are splashed up here again that's when I was 14 I was like horrendously fat I weighed more than I do now I weighed I'm not sure but probably close to 100 kilograms which is a lot and you know that's the worst time of your life to be better SATs when you're in high school that's when you want the girls to be interested in you that's when you want to be popular and it taught me a lot of humility it told me how people judge other people and it told me how important image is in life you know you can have a million people sort of try to tell you that it's what's inside that counts and personality is what counts but in the real life in real life it doesn't really work that way image really counts and people are very superficial and you'll find this across the board it doesn't matter if it's to do with business relationships friendships everything the way you look really does impact you know your life and the way you live your life now of course I personally believe that a person the the personality of a person and who they really are and the skills and the things they're capable of you know that supercedes looks any day of the week but when you just out there in public trying to do general things like like I said work or making friends and you know starting relationships looks really are important and it's just the sad truth of the life a lot of people don't want to admit this but it's true so having gone through this whole period in my life where I was overweight and fat it taught me to you know judge people for who they are not by the new no not because of the way they look and so I'm actually very grateful for that period of my life it also put a lot of things into perspective for me and things that I never would have thought of in fact if I wasn't so fat when I was that age I probably would be a real asshole to be honest so I I can in a way suggest for everybody to go through a fad period of their life just to see what it's like to see how people treat you and you know it actually forces you to develop a very robust personality anyway that's enough of that nonsense it's time for me to say goodbye to all of you guys for this video anyway and once again I just want to say this video really is just about being fat in China and the way it will impact you as a foreigner I hope you found it interesting if you did you know please subscribe or like or comment and you know share it off to your friends it's the first time I've ever said that by the way I never like this whole like subscribe comment kind of thing that people do but I kind of would appreciate it if you guys got my videos out there a little more I'm trying to put more time into them I'm actually taking on less work these days so I can spend more time filming and hopefully I can get more interesting content up for you guys anyway that's it it's time for me to go until next time guys as always stay awesome

Channel: serpentza

Views: 1,090,966

Rating: 4.6738911 out of 5

Keywords: China, Adventure, Bikes, Beer, Fat, Overweight, Obese, Chubby, Porker, Fat boy, Descrimination, Political Correctness (Quotation Subject), Winston Sterzel

Id: aTKYfH4Ok2w

Length: 14min 54sec (894 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 26 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/LongWangDynasty]

He's handsurm, he's relatable (because he used to be a little bit fat). He protects Tims from teahouse scams. Is he the pengyou we always wanted?

Surely CCJ can't be so negative that we hate this paragon... or are we?

[u/huanghelou]

here's a few thoughts I assembled

He's the hero China deserves, but not the one it needs right now.

70% good 30% bad.

Not as hansurm as laofag86

[u/MaoZeNong]

It's not very scathing nor mocking. I'm surprised he became the new target of GlmboAL TIMES CN.