The Great Canadian … Gut!

2 or 3 months after moving to Canada, my wife and I discovered a problem; our pants were getting too tight! We found a scale, weighed ourselves and discovered that we had each gained about 10-15 pounds!

 

While weight comes and goes depending on different factors in lifestyle, there was no question about it; we had both gained considerably more weight during 3 months in Canada than we had at any point during our 5 years together in Mexico!

 

We have a few theories, some of which can be discarded, and others more plausible. 

 

The discarded theories include:

• Relatively recent childbirth: It’s a fact that most women gain weight during and after birth.  But there are two problems; this doesn’t offer me any excuse, and my wife had actually lost all of this extra weight before we moved to Canada, and she was down to her normal weight!  So this one’s out the window.

 

• I started a second blog: More blogs means more sitting time. But this is no excuse for my wife.  Also, I cancelled this blog, and we found no difference for the two weeks when we were in Halifax, and I wrote no blogs whatsoever.

 

• Canadians eat more fat and more carbs: True, Canadians seem to know no limits to these two nutrients; even “healthy” Canadians seem to think that eating fried steak with fried eggs and mayonnaise is a good low-carb diet. But Mexicans are at least as bad.  In fact typical Mexican food is probably worse.  Mexicans eat lots of bread loaded with sugar every day, plus tacos and tortas and tamales with grease dripping of them. See ().

 

We came to these more acceptable conclusions:

 

• Canada is built for cars: In Mexico, if you don’t have a car, you end up walking a lot more and getting more exercise. I would say 3/4 of the country’s communities are designed to be walked in. In Canada, most people have a car; if you don’t have one, you simply don’t go anywhere.  Most communities are not designed to be walked in, and don’t have anywhere to walk to. (There are, of course, major exceptions.)  We live in a small village that takes 5 minutes to walk across, which hardly offers any exercise. We’ve been fortunate enough to have a car made available to us when we need it.  (We are really thankful for this!  But we’re also sure the guts are somehow related …) We started daily bike rides, but it’s one thing to have daily bike rides as an optional form of entertainment, and a completely different thing to have a couple of hours of biking or walking as a normal, non-optional part of your daily routine (= our life in Mexico.)

 

• It’s easier to eat healthily in Mexico: While the typical Mexican diet is at least as bad as the Canadian one, it’s easier to be healthy in Mexico if you want to.  Fresh fruit and vegetables are cheap, as is freshly caught fish.  Someone pointed out how much oatmeal we eat for breakfast; in Mexico, we ate twice much oatmeal for breakfast, but we also ate twice as many fruit and vegetables, and we almost never ate desert or sweet things, since it’s so easy by cheap and good alternatives (fresh fruit.)  Red meat was a once a week meal, rather than the 2 or 3 times a day many Canadians seem to like. 

 

The difficult thing is that it’s really hard to eat differently in Canada; fruit and vegetables are expensive, often imported from the other side of the world, and rarely of good quality.  The fall is an exception here, since there is a good deal of local fruit available; yet if you are eating the fresh blueberries with Canadians, they like to mix them into ice cream!  Fish is outrageously expensive (compared to Mexico.)

 

I guess the bottom line is, even though most people in Mexico aren’t interested, it’s much easier to be active and eat healthy on a low budget than in Canada.  We’re hoping the guts will disappear when we get back to Mexico, and for our next time around in Canada, I think we’ll have to do more careful planning for exercise and healthy eating.