Its not unusual for people who move to NYC to lose a few pounds from the walking. The average New Yorker walks 4-5 miles a day (total steps) whereas the average American walks 2 miles a day (total steps).
We once went to France on a bicycling tour. Our guides were a couple of women from Canada, and one of them said that when she moved to France for this job, she promptly gained twenty pounds. The reason? She was a self-confessed cheese-a-holic, and the varieties and abundance of wonderful cheese over there were too much for her will power.
I can relate. The cheeses in France are not to be believed.
Dude, why else did you think we get so fat? We have so many good things to eat and it’s hard to fit them all into one meal!
The comments about portion size in the US are generally right, but I have to say the largest burger that I’ve ever seen was in a pub in London. I swear to og, the meat patty was well over an inch thick, and it was a very large burger in terms of diameter too. It also had a generous amount of bacon and cheese on top of that. I only managed to eat about half of it and I was already completely full.
But they really do stop being that good when you eat them in large portions. Good things taste so much better when you only have a little of them.
That’s why we then invented stuff to dip the first stuff in. Duh.
“How can anyone govern a nation that has two hundred and forty-six different kinds of cheese?” --Charles De Gaulle
My sister and her husband had two long stints in Nicaragua, becoming heartily sick of rice and beans, but they sure lost weight.
Not necessarily. A lot of chocolate gets old, but I love a big bowl of mashed potatoes and gravy.
My friends and I lost weight when we moved to Spain. I think it was a combination of the food and the lifestyle. Spanish meal portions are, of course, smaller than American portions. Spanish people tend not to snack as much, or snack in smaller portions. (You should see the small ice cream sizes- they are about three bites!) Also, with apologies to Nava, Americans tend to find the deep-fried, pork and shellfish-heavy Spanish cuisine pretty gross, so we ate less while we were there.
As for lifestyle, there was lots and lots of walking. I lived in Granada, the center of which can be walked end to end in twenty minutes. Why bother to get in a car when you can walk? With longer distances I might take a bus, or I might walk because I would stop at several destinations along the way.
Ahhhhh… what could be more filling and delicious than… MORE ANECDOTES!
I am an American who lived in Northern Europe for a while. I don’t tend to eat that well here and my food selection habits really didn’t change much when I lived there. But I lost a pretty good amount of weight and didn’t gain it back until I moved back to the USA.
Part of the weight loss could be attributed to doing more walking, but most of it was the food, I think, and that is interesting because I still went to McDonald’s, ate a lot of cheese and bread, etc., etc. But there is one notable thing that I noticed while living there and when traveling most places outside of the USA: My gut and digestion feel and work about a million times better–even though my diet choices are still just as bad.
I can only surmise that part of our food problem in the USA is that there are so many ersatz and crappy fillers and additives in our foods. HFC syrup, hydrogenated oils, growth hormones, artificial ingredients, added sodium with chemistry lab pedigrees in huge amounts, etc. I always got a chuckle out of reading the European ingredient labels compared to American ingredient labels of similar foods. Of course ours (USA) are 10 times as long as the European labels and mostly contain words of 7 syllables or more.
It is this more than portion sizes or menu selection that were the big difference in my case.
I’ve not seen anything to match that IRL, but I’ve seen a link from this board to a place in the States where their flagship product is a fifteen-pound burger or something of the sort. :eek:
More anecdotal evidence. Moved to Sweden in January and have lost almost 40 pounds since then. I attribute it to portion control (I cook dinner daily for the wife and kids), increased exercise, and not having a car. I think I might have lost weight even if I’d done nothing except cut down on serving sizes, but no idea how much.
The same thing happens to the military folks when they deploy overseas.
Stress, constant physical work, daily pt, running 4 miles per day, healthy food, free gym, peer pressure, not much else to do. The reservists really drop the extra weight.
My first deployment to Kuwait took twenty five pounds of fat off. I came home at 178lbs RIPPED and my wife said, wow, you’re kinda scrawny, but hey, that six pack is sexy lemme touch it again.
I have two months left on this deployment and I’m at 190lbs solid, for a twelve pound loss so far. Wife says, don’t come back too skinny. Been at the base gym daily since we arrived…
Oh, and I can bench press 110lb dumbbells now. I feel fantastic!
That’s OK, the feeling’s mutual so no offence taken 
The reference to deep-frying told me you were in the South before I’d gotten to “Granada.” I find American Southern deep-frying as gross as you find the Spanish version, and I miss the fish a lot.
I lose weight every time I travel because I don’t like a lot of their favorite foods and can’t find my favorites, so I just eat less. For example at home I eat a lot of sliced ham and the only country with good ham is Netherlands. Even there, they have a lot of smoked fish things that limit my other choices, so I end up even being tired of ham. In Sweden I lived on sausages. And lost weight. In China I only trusted the rice, as everything else smelled very strange and strong.
Not exactly what the OPer was after but there is a interesting story in In Defense of Food about Australian Aborigines. Aborigines living (as almost all of them do now) in Western culture (with western food) have incredibly high rates of “western” diseases such as diabetes, heart disease, etc… To test the correlation scientist actually took Aboriginal volunteers, almost all of whom of were suffering from “western diseases” or precursors to them (high blood pressure. lipids, cholesterol, etc.) back to the bush to live as hunter gathers in their traditional lifestyle (they were all old enough to remember how to live in the bush, as they hadn’t lived the “western” way their whole lives), and scientifically measured their bodies reaction.
Pretty every measurable symptom improved once they were no longer living the “western” lifestyle.
For me, it depends on the country. Living in Taiwan makes me gain weight because the food is so delicious and (relatively) inexpensive. Any notion of portion control goes out the door. Sure, I walk a lot more but not enough to compensate for the exponential increase in food intake.
I’m curious to see how I’ll fare in Japan, as I am moving there soon. I love Japanese food to death, but there’s the cost factor and social pressure factor.
And of course, even non-starving foreigners gain weight in the US. I met my Thai wife while we were students in Hawaii. During her years there, she really gained some weight, so much so that she was ragged about what a “porker” she had become by the folks back home, although she was still small compared with many Americans.
I didn’t gain weight in the US. But then, I do not own a sweet tooth (most American sweets are revolting to me, my mother on the other hand would love them) and I was used to portion control from fighting back my female relatives.
Many Spaniards who move to the US gain weight on the first few weeks but lose it again real fast once they realize that eating chips in between huge meals isn’t compulsory. This can lead to host families getting worried that the guest has “lost his appetite,” though.