As seen in my last post, I officially ended my adventure with a cali burrito with guac last Friday night at the end of my 19 days. I knew this action alone was an invitation for Fat Yip to be unleashed in a 3 day food eating frenzy. Here’s my chronicle of his performance.
Saturday 12/24 – Christmas Eve
3 egg-whites and 1/2 re-con for breakfast as usual. Then went to the gym after some morning errands to try to not feel as guilty about what happened last night and what was going to happen the rest of the weekend.
For lunch I went to my FAVORITE Chinese restaurant in San Diego with my grandma. The place is called Dumpling Inn and it’s a tiny hole-in-the-wall mom and pop restaurant that has the BEST juicy pork dumplings in SD. There’s always a wait and a good mix of Chinese and white people (I’m convinced white people only started coming because of Yelp) I know I linked to it’s Yelp listing but I’ve been going to this place since I was 5-6 years old and it’s been bomb.com FOREVER. We also know the the workers quite well. The waitress is a family friend and told us our order when we sat down. The usual is 1 pot stickers, 1 juicy pork dumpling, and 1 noodle dish that I don’t know how to say in English. My grandma honestly enjoyed each of my bites as much as I did. She was so happy to see me so happy and also so happy that I was able to go to lunch with her again. I controlled myself as best as possible and ate probably 70% of what I typically eat so we brought home the leftovers.
Christmas Eve is the night my entire extended family gets together to celebrate. (We do immediate family stuff all on Christmas Day) This means 15-20 dishes of food for around 30-40 people. The line for this massive buffet of Chinese dishes and traditional American dishes literally starts forming 15-20 mins before we officially begin eating, which is only when EVERYONE arrives.
I stuffed myself stupid needless to say. Tried my best to avoid the high carb items like rice, mashed potatoes, bread, and noodles and ate up on lots of vegetables. Unfortunately, eating 3 plate full of food like the one below still made my stomach hurt all night from being so stuffed. It was that and also maybe because I ate 10 brownies and an apple turnover pie a la mode. HAHA.
It was really funny that everyone in my family had heard about Fat Yip and what I was doing. They didn’t all understand the reasoning and it was tough to constantly have to explain everything to each person but they did all comment on how good I looked since I lost a few pounds. After watching me smash plate after plate and brownie after brownie over the course of a 2 hours people did start to tell me I should stop eating. I think my face said it all. I was in pain from so much food but I couldn’t stop. It was scary. The sugary brownie was seriously my downfall. It was just too available sitting on this plate screaming to be eaten and enjoyed. I had to keep eating them and they were DELICIOUS.
So as you can tell I did not manage the amount of food I was going to eat for that meal very well. My guess would be that I ate at least 3000 calories in that long meal alone. Got home around midnight and weighed in to see the damage.
Day 20 (12/24) – 171.8lb/15.6%
That’s 5.2lb in less than 48 hours. Granted I still had all of this in my system but it was still a pretty crazy thing to see. Fat Yip was home for the holidays.
Sunday 12/25 – Christmas Day
Felt extra cheery about being at home for the holidays so I decided to wake up at 7am and go buy groceries to cook a surprise breakfast for my family. I’m pretty good at cooking egg scrambles but I wanted to do something special so I decided on this French Toast Recipe I found on the Food Network website. It ended up taking me a little over an hour to prepare everything from prep to full plate of food but it was worth it.
My family was REALLY happy and excited. You have to realize that I’ve NEVER COOKED A MEAL FOR MY FAMILY IN MY ENTIRE LIFE. It’s just something that never happened. It’s typically my mom or grandma who cook because they are just so much better at it (and probably because I have a pretty typical Chinese family hahahaha). And when it comes to breakfast food, we don’t really cook/eat breakfast together. Check it out…
Egg Scramble – Organic Eggs, Baby Spinach, Grilled Onions, and Honey Baked Ham from night before. (No cheese for my grandma and no tomatoes for my sister-in-law). Also added slices of fresh organic avocados on top and pork sausage link.
French Toast – From the recipe plus added cinnamon, whipped cream, and freshly cut organic strawberries. I felt like this added to the presentation of it all.
They all said it was EXCELLENT! I also bought a dozen freshly baked donuts at the store too. I ate 1 while cooking and 2 more after eating breakfast.
Got together with some of my cousins and my brother to play basketball in the afternoon. We had uneven numbers so I volunteered to sit out first so I could run a bit. I was feeling so fat already it was disgusting. After bball went over to my brother’s place to watch last quarter of Lakers/Bulls game (which sucked but is what I expected) and also play with my niece and nephew. My brother and I were STARVING already by 5pm since we didn’t eat any lunch because breakfast was pretty big and at 10am.
We headed over to my parent’s place for a big home cooked meal by my mom of each of our favorite dishes. My mom asked us at breakfast what we wanted for dinner. My brother ordered pork chops with onions, I ordered this beef and cabbage dish, and my dad ordered a bunch of vegetables (I know what all these dishes are in Chinese but not in English so these are just basic descriptions of what I ate and I didn’t manage to take any pictures of the dishes).
I did manage to refrain from eating my typical 3-4 bowls of rice. I made 1 bowl of rice last all dinner by eating heaps and heaps of vegetables! Still felt fat afterwords though. Didn’t even bother weighing myself at night.
Monday 12/26
Family golf tournament at Oaks North in the morning. We’ve made it a kind of tradition now that at big family holidays, like Thanksgiving and Christmas, we play a golf tournament with prizes. We had made 3 teams of 4 and evened out the teams as best as we could. We decided on Oaks North since it is an Executive Course, which means it is a lot shorter, and to make it more interesting we decided that each player could only use 4 clubs! We had prizes for the team with the lowest score (score was sum of best 3 scores on each hole for all 18), most pars, most birdies, and most off green chip-ins or putts.
It was so cold that there was a frost delay. Seriously, no joke. We tee-offed 30 minutes later and I was still laughing about the frost delay until I slipped onto my back while walking on the cart path on the 2nd hole. It was frozen over with at least 1 inch if ICE!!!
My team and I played awful on the front nine and a TON better on the back. We ended up killing the other teams! I also won most pars with 9 of them. Had a birdie but someone else had 3. I ended up shooting +9 (39) on the front and +1 (31) on the back for a 70. I could have broken my record on 9 holes with an even 30 but missed my birdie putt on the last hole.
Because of the delay lunch was pushed back also. We had a huge family dim sum lunch at Pearl in Rancho Bernardo. I haven’t eaten dim sum in a few months and it was DELICIOUS! I ate way more than I needed to again but was still so content afterwards I didn’t care how fat/guilty I felt.
Went shopping again with my grandma at North County Fair right after dim sum. Was extremely tired at this point since I woke up at 7am and also from all the MSG at lunch but was able to nap for about 30 minutes before we got Korean BBQ for dinner. Avoided all rice and just ate meat/fish with lots of romaine lettuce and this spicy salad that they gave us. It was REALLY good but also felt a bit sick because I haven’t eaten anything spicy in a while.
After dinner had a chance to meet up with some close high school friends. My friend Dan was bringing his fiancee that he just got engaged to and it was my first time meeting her. She is awesome and I’m so happy for the two of them and can’t wait for the wedding. We decided to meet at Bennigan’s in Mission Valley where we all met up exactly 2 years bef during Christmas time. Until this point I had already started eating like a pig but was still only drinking water. I thought this was a good time to break my ONLY WATER rule. I was a bit ambitious and ordered a water, a Guinness, and a Makers on the rocks.
My tolerance was just as low as I thought it was going to be after not drinking in 3 weeks. I was pretty buzzed after the Guinness and didn’t even both with the Makers. It was 11pm and I still had to go home, finish laundry, shower and pack for my 6:30AM flight the next morning. I did however stop at Santanas one last time on my way home!
BEFORE AND AFTER PICTURES
Before pictures were taken the night of Sunday 12/4. I weighed in at 175.6lb with 20.3% body fat.
After pictures were taken the morning of 12/24. Previous night 12/23 weigh in was 168.0lb with 14.5% body fat. (Lowest I got to was night of 12/22 at 166.6lb with 13.6% body fat)
I think the numbers and the pictures say that this adventure was a success. The real test now is to see how I take the things I’ve learned from these past few weeks and really implement and ingrain them into my daily lifestyle and eating habits. The things I’m going to focus on from here on out are:
1. EAT BREAKFAST – I used to not eat breakfast so anything will be better than nothing BUT I decided I’m going to continue eating 3-4 egg whites and drink 1/2 re-con every morning.
2. EAT LESS CARBS AND MORE VEGGIES – I used to thrive on eating more and more rice or pasta or bread. I’ve learned that veggies not only taste great but are also quite filling and easy to prepare.
3. AVOID 4th MEAL – I need to make sure to not eat a meal late at night after dinner and especially right before going to bed.
4. TRY TO STICK WITH WATER – I’m going to continue focusing only on water with the occasional alcoholic beverage here and there but definitely not drink as much beer as I used to.
I think that with these goals in mind and with my training for my upcoming triathlons I should be able to stay in great shape and remain healthy.
I truly hope you enjoyed Part 1 of my Fat Yip adventure. Part 2 of this blog will continue from here on out and will be of me writing over the next few months about new healthy low carb recipes I will be cooking a few times a week and also talking about training for my tris with an ultimate goal of competing in the Big Kahuna Half Ironman in September.
P.S. I’ll get an official weigh in later tonight to see how much I put on this weekend and I may continue throwing in weigh-ins over the next few weeks so you can watch me either balloon back up or maybe go back down some more. My guess is the former.
-Fat Yip
The Adventures of Fat Yip 