Of Time and Fat
By wchung | 22 Feb, 2025

The best way to lose all that fat is to learn a bit of patience.

Time was you hardly ever saw a fat Asian. Nowadays I see more, though still not as often as fat people in general. The assumption is that it’s the American diet that makes people fat. I know that isn’t true. I see fat people who eat nothing but Asian food and skinny people who eat nothing but “American” food.

What makes people fat is their attitude toward life, as I’ll explain in a moment.

What qualifies me to offer up insights on weight? I’m a middle-aged guy who has the kind of balanced physique guys in their twenties dream about. My biggest shopping problem is finding pants with a 30-inch waist and a 32-inch inseam and shirts that fit my shoulders and chest without bunching around my waist like a burlap sack. Despite a physique with enough muscle to intimidate men and impress women, I run 10 miles faster than most guys half my age. And I’m modest too.

And I eat more than most fat people would ever dream of eating, and more of the kinds of food they crave. I never touch the kind of cardboard junk they make for people hoping to lose weight. Non-fat yogurt? Low-fat pastries? Cottage cheese? Ugh!

So what’s my secret?

The best way to explain it is to go back to the reason there used to be so few fat Asians — or fat people of any race for that matter.

Once upon a time people lived in real time. If they wanted a hot meal, they would have to cook it themselves or wait for it to be cooked by someone. That took quite a while, maybe a couple of hours. If they wanted to exchange sentiments with distant loved ones, they had to wait a couple of weeks for letters to be exchanged. If they wanted to learn something they had to make their way down to the library or a bookstore to browse the shelves and find the right book.

The emotional effect of living in real (slow) time was to make people patient and emotionally self-sufficient. No one got distressed just because they couldn’t have something right away. I don’t have to spell out for you what kind of effect innovations like fast-food joints, the internet, cell phones and Facebook have had on the emotional timelines of the average American. In a nutshell, a typical American has a nervous breakdown if they can’t satisfy a craving within minutes. The concept of waiting patiently to eat a good hot meal has gone the way of the buffalo.

In reality though, in the old days no one just sat there waiting to eat a hot meal. Because everyone knew that it takes time to enjoy something good, there simply was no expectation of even trying to satisfy momentary urges. Impatience was regarded by most people, especially Asian people, as a sign of a serious lack of character and understanding. The well-conceived desire for something was usually enjoyment enough in itself, more so than most people today feel at the actual attainment of a momentary craving. In fact, many hours or days or even months were filled happily with the pleasure of anticipation.

It’s a fact of human nature that the easy attainment of an object of desire robs it of true satisfaction. You want something rich and oily. Buy a burger. You want something salty and oily. Tear open a bag of chips. You want a new dress. Go to the mall and buy it today. A lot of desires get rendered meaningless by their easy satisfaction. Nowaways you rarely enjoy the kind of satisfaction one only enjoys when it has been attained through meaningful effort or long anticipation.

The loss of the ability to feel true satisfaction creates an emotional vacuum in which one doesn’t feel much. That has instilled the dangerous reflex of filling that emptiness with the thing most readily at hand today — food. The wolfing down of unnecessary food to quell a perpetual sense of emptiness is really at the root of our fat epidemic.

So why don’t I get fat when I eat all those same fattening foods?

For one, I don’t eat out of boredom or a simple desire to fill an emptiness. When I feel bored I know to feed my mind, not my body. When I feel empty, I know that I need to feel challenged, not stuffed with food. I will go for a run or a hike instead, or learn new dance steps, or sit down and write this little essay in hopes of offering useful insights. When I’m good and hungry, I know it and relish the chance to satisfy that hunger with a truly great meal or snack — and none of it is of the non-fat variety!

So why is it that Asian Americans are still less likely to get fat? I believe it’s because we remain a bit closer to the ages-old cultural tradition of connecting the degree of satisfaction with the degree of effort or patience needed to attain it. That slight difference in our emotional timelines may serve as a protective mechanism against using empty calories to fill that empty space created by the absence of real satisfaction.