To maintain a weight, humans need to eat according to their body mass and their activity level.
Ethnic Asians are no different.
this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2026
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Right but do they or is it common for them to actually "indulge"
If they eat more calories than they metabolize they gain weight.
Partner of a small asian woman. She eats small portions and generally has a very healthy diet. Gets full very quickly/easily.
She never "pigs" out?
She ate alot at a bbq recently but what she considers alot and I do are different things. I don't think she could eat an entire pizza without being sick, where of I were to really pig out, I could manage 1 and a half to 2 pizzas.
Though I have seen some small Asian women online who are competitive eaters and they can inhale tons of food.
Isnt it true that theres a hard limit to how much weight a person can gain in a single day/max amount of calories that can be integrated?
No.
Seriously, you can gain 10 lbs in a day?? 35,000 calories goes in and stays in?
3500 cals/lb
There must be a hard physical limit or Ld50 of calories
Yes, most of a shock caloric increase leaves as poop and NEAT. There’s no hard limit because it varies widely between people. Biology is messy.
Only so much of those 35,000 calories will be converted to fat. The bulk of it will pass though before that happens. Most people wouldn't even be able to consume that many calories without the body reacting negatively.
All mammals become overweight by consistently eating more calories then they burn. The occasional pigout is pretty much lost in the average if it's a rare event and the person maintains a healthy diet otherwise. Once a month, no worries. Once every other day, you'll need new pants.
Am petite Asian woman who is a healthy weight. I do see overweight Asian women (Asians in general) though. It’s becoming more common IMO as people’s diet’s are getting worse/more indulgent. More delicious options eating out, less home-cooking. But I was raised a certain way, with lots of home-cooking lol. -> Eat a balanced meal. My table spread must look balanced! So even if I order pork belly, I have to order a side of dark greens, or maybe a light veg soup. I also don’t eat too much rice. And my best compliment for dessert? “Ah! Not too sweet” 🤣 (this one’s funny, it’s kind of an older Asian insider running joke. I sound like my mom lmao)
ALSO! There’s something about eating “family style” (shared plates). You actually don’t eat as much bc you don’t want to take everything. It’s not like eating let’s say American style, where you get a huge plate in front of you. It pushes you to want to finish the plate. With family style, you naturally eat a bit slower, you only take what you can finish.
I find plate/serving vessel size/depth is a huge little-discussed elephant in the room basically every time these kinds of discussions happen, I agree! Like in basically any discussion of metabolism or vanilla dietary practices or etc
Also, very refreshing to get an actual representative person chiming in non-judgmentally, theres already been whiffs of people claiming degrees of racism (playing race card to out it bluntly) when I'm clearly more interested in exploring a hypothesis and open to reasonable discussion and of course any contradictions they are aware of :)
I swear, disaffected folks are addicted to spinning up relevance for themself out of whole cloth at a systemic scale, its a real epi- and sys-stemic problem
Of course you need to have a healhty diet to look good.
Tap for spoiler
Dunno which asian cuisine is healthier (and compared to what), most aren't all that healthy. Also Asia is like 1/3 of entire world population and like half of them isn't even 'asian' in looks.
Right but in relation to the itty bitty asian woman physical form archetype
I get it, you are talking about chinese/japanese/korean people. They need to control their diet as much as any other people. It's not particularly healthy, unless you are rich.
I mean, first of all, not all asian women eat asian food. See: all the asian women living not in asia, who are 2nd+ generation immigrants. They are just as likely to be trashing their bodies at McDs as anyone else.
In general, a smaller body requires fewer calories to sustain than a larger body. And the human body typically accounts for this via hunger signals. Smaller people tend to stop feeling hungry before larger people.
However, it is a fairly well understood phenomenon that, yes, for people who want to meet the sort of "lithe" female beauty standard, it is often more difficult to maintain for shorter people since any additional weight they gain will be less distributed across their bodies than the same weight on a larger body.
Also, as you (kinda?) pointed out before (in a very almost racist way) - diet plays a huge role here, as a traditional asian diet will impact the body in ways that cause it to signal less hunger and burn off excess calories, while a modern western diet will do the opposite. But this isn't really a point for traditional asian diets, so much as it is a ding on modern diets. Basically any traditional diet that we can find around the world will help you maintain a thinner figure than a modern diet. There is no such thing as a traditional diet with twinkies and root beer.
And also, I lied before - asian women actually arent as likely to eat at McDs as anyone else. Due to historical and cultural factors, immigrants of asian descent in western nations are significantly more likely to inhabit higher socioeconomic classes than the average person in the same country. This status imparts on them cultural habits like not eating junk food (which is low class) and the economic ability to maintain these habits (eg, living near a Whole Foods and eating at a trendy restaurant, vs shopping at the gas station and grabbing some McDs). But probably more importantly, being in a higher socioeconomic class gives people a greater sense of security and general well-being, which reduces stress, which reduces hunger signaling and results in the body not feeling the need to store extra calories to protect against times of future hardship.
So the answer to your question is "well, it depends on the person, but broad trends indicate that asian women are not generally starving themselves to stay thin (any more than women of other races).
There is no "traditional asian diet", like there is no traditional african, or traditional european diet. There are dozens of different nations and hundreds of different people.
I mean.... sure. Whatever. My point is that no one's traditional diet contains twinkies.
True, *traditional* diets are all about maximum calories and maximum food preservation everywhere tbh.
Sure... what's your point? Because my point is that traditional diets don't contain highly processed foods, which are the driver of overweight and obesity around the world.
Especially sugar. So much sugar in much of Western food these days.
I'm not so much inplying the starving themself so much as is there a prescient level of restraint (could be cultural, could be genetic, or could be whatever) independant of their desire or physical need that has a larger degree of discretion over those more inherent drives or instincts
Its not racist to ask in good faith and air out these ideas to get to the truth, please. Its the opposite, I'm open to hearing completely different takes or reality checks here as long as people dont try to limit the discussion artificially by playing on race
I feel like you are trying too say too much with too few words here. Please elaborate.
Can they eat what they want (throwing discipline to the wind) and maintain their physical form?
I guess my thesis is that there are cultural and other factors besides hunger/satiety at play but I'm not married to this thesis, just my uninformed theory
I mean, my guess is that it largely depends on the individual. How easily someone gains or loses weight is highly individual, and can be influenced by both environment and genetics.
To explain broader population trends, I provided some examples above of reasons why small asian women may have an easier (or harder) time staying thin. I would also add on in addition to these points that there may be a broader trend in asian culture to eat more reasonable portion sizes, or to identify junk food as treats only for special occasions - and these cultural standards may be passed on either explicitly (via instructions to children or pressure among peers) or implicitly (observing what others around you do).
There is no such thing as a traditional diet with twinkies and root beer.
Not with that attitude
Not an expert, but small bodies require less fuel to function, so they would naturally need less food and as such would get hungry less quickly, I'd assume.
Adding to this, women generally need a bit less than men due to lower muscle mass on average.
I can't speak about all Asians, but I know that in Japan anorexia is considered a virtue. There is a lot of social pressure not to get fat, especially for women. I think the pressure has decreased, but not disappeared.
And the Japanese government actually fines companies if two large a proportion of their workers is overweight, so I would imagine that being overweight makes it harder to get a job as well.
Wow now that's a question. I'm a bit curious but man...
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