I've been gone from the US for 4 weeks on Monday and have been in India now for 3 and a half weeks.
I'm currently in Cochin, which is about 500 miles from Bangalore. I'm spending the weekend on a jetty (houseboat) to cruise the lakes and rivers of Alleppey ("God's Own Country"). Alleppey is about an hour from Cochin so flew in last night and had to spend the night in a Courtyard Marriott and I'm getting picked up in an hour to be driven down to Alleppey.
The 3-star hotels in India are magnificently nice. A Courtyard Marriott back home is seen as a budget hotel but this one is beautiful. Though there are some engineering flaws that come with the territory for a 3rd world country. IE, the gaps in the shower glass that allows water to flood my bathroom floor so I have to put towels down to soak it up. Other than that, it's very nice. One feature I've yet to find elsewhere in India is a bathroom scale.
After 4 weeks, I know I've lost weight. I'm not eating the amount of food I was back home (damn you LinkedIn cafeteria) and I walk to work. Plus, I've been sightseeing every weekend I've been here so have been doing a lot of walking (and climbing that fricking mountain in Sri Lanka). So I was excited to jump on the scale and see what I'd done to my increasingly expanding body.
The results?
4 weeks, 11.7 pounds.
I had guesstimated at least 10 so I was just about spot on. Why is this? A very simple explanation actually. I haven't been eating breakfast... or dinner for that matter.
Back in Mountain View, anyone who knows me knows that at 11:00:01am Tarun and I are off to the cafe to get lunch. Here, people don't eat lunch until 1:30-2:30pm. If you go to the cafeteria at 12:00, the food usually isn't even out yet. Food in India tends to be heavy in starch. Rices and naan, roti, dosa, etc. They serve rice and bread at lunch every day. So my tendency has been to eat a larger lunch around 2pm, and that keeps me satisfied throughout the rest of the evening. I think in 4 weeks, I've eaten dinner (not including Sri Lanka which I ate more since I was burning more calories) 5 times. I've also come to discover that while I like Indian food very much, I don't love it. For example, I LOVE pizza. If my relo assignment was Italy, I would be enormous by now.
It's also made me realize how much I ate back home. Huge lunch at work, snacks around 3pm (damn you again break room), then a full dinner.
At this rate, I'm destined to lose at least 20 pounds since I have another 5 weeks in India. Then I'll hopefully return to the US svelte and lean because I'm going to gorge myself on pizza.
I'm currently in Cochin, which is about 500 miles from Bangalore. I'm spending the weekend on a jetty (houseboat) to cruise the lakes and rivers of Alleppey ("God's Own Country"). Alleppey is about an hour from Cochin so flew in last night and had to spend the night in a Courtyard Marriott and I'm getting picked up in an hour to be driven down to Alleppey.
The 3-star hotels in India are magnificently nice. A Courtyard Marriott back home is seen as a budget hotel but this one is beautiful. Though there are some engineering flaws that come with the territory for a 3rd world country. IE, the gaps in the shower glass that allows water to flood my bathroom floor so I have to put towels down to soak it up. Other than that, it's very nice. One feature I've yet to find elsewhere in India is a bathroom scale.
After 4 weeks, I know I've lost weight. I'm not eating the amount of food I was back home (damn you LinkedIn cafeteria) and I walk to work. Plus, I've been sightseeing every weekend I've been here so have been doing a lot of walking (and climbing that fricking mountain in Sri Lanka). So I was excited to jump on the scale and see what I'd done to my increasingly expanding body.
The results?
4 weeks, 11.7 pounds.
I had guesstimated at least 10 so I was just about spot on. Why is this? A very simple explanation actually. I haven't been eating breakfast... or dinner for that matter.
Back in Mountain View, anyone who knows me knows that at 11:00:01am Tarun and I are off to the cafe to get lunch. Here, people don't eat lunch until 1:30-2:30pm. If you go to the cafeteria at 12:00, the food usually isn't even out yet. Food in India tends to be heavy in starch. Rices and naan, roti, dosa, etc. They serve rice and bread at lunch every day. So my tendency has been to eat a larger lunch around 2pm, and that keeps me satisfied throughout the rest of the evening. I think in 4 weeks, I've eaten dinner (not including Sri Lanka which I ate more since I was burning more calories) 5 times. I've also come to discover that while I like Indian food very much, I don't love it. For example, I LOVE pizza. If my relo assignment was Italy, I would be enormous by now.
It's also made me realize how much I ate back home. Huge lunch at work, snacks around 3pm (damn you again break room), then a full dinner.
At this rate, I'm destined to lose at least 20 pounds since I have another 5 weeks in India. Then I'll hopefully return to the US svelte and lean because I'm going to gorge myself on pizza.
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