At work in China, I sat next to a woman who was pregnant and seemingly always eating fruit. She liked to “teach” me her understanding of nutrition since I apparently needed the help. One of the first things she told me was to avoid eating rice. Rice is a staple in China and almost always served during meals. I learned, however, that it was not common for people to eat all, if any, rice out of their bowls.

Food was served family style and each person would pick a few pieces of food (like chicken or vegetables) out of the communal bowls and place them on their bowls of rice. They would then eat the food with maybe a few grains of rice with it. At the end of the meal many rice bowls would still be full and individuals would pour the uneaten rice into a food container to save for the next meal. My co-worker also told me to avoid bread and sweets and to try and make the majority of my diet fruits and vegetables.

I enthusiastically tried to cut down my starch intake according to my coworker’s advice and thought it would be easy for me since I had already followed a diet avoiding grains and sweets back in the United States. I soon found that for some reason it was different, harder, for me to try and reduce my intake of starches in China. After a few meals of eating mostly fruits and vegetables I would get seemingly uncontrollable food cravings and end up eating large quantities of food later on. It seemed like the more I tried to eat healthy foods the stronger my food cravings. This was very confusing for me because I followed a similar diet before and didn’t have the same experience, what was different for me in Shanghai compared to the U.S.?

I remember an astonishingly bright morning sky leaving the subway terminal in Pudong, China. As opposed to Nanpu by the Bund, here I could see the sun and even a semi-blue sky. In this part of Shanghai the streets were wider and the buildings shorter but it still took about ten minutes to walk past one aggressively wide building equivalent in length to a whole city block in San Francisco. I had another 30-minute walk to my work building even though it was only a few streets away.

Shanghai is FULL of bright lights, STUFF, food, noise, pollution, and people. For a year I traversed the city streets and tried to manage the barrage of information thrown at me from every angle. It wasn’t until years later that I could finally make sense of the changes I underwent mentally and physically and understood the impact that stress and pollutants had on my body. For example, just undergoing a change of any kind can be a stressor and put a strain on your adrenal gland and your adrenal gland uses vitamin C like how a car uses gasoline. I wish I knew then to take vitamin C to help balance out my adrenal gland and calm down my senses, but instead I continued to run on a near empty gas tank.