Oh fuck off Japan, calling 52.6kg overweight for an adult woman. God I hope no one reads this as a serious weight-loss manga over there, they'll bloody kill themselves.
While I agree that it's probably be better to deal with a more average person, a weight in the lower 40s of kg isn't unusual for a serious, young, female, long distance runner. If they'd said she was a gymnast, if probably would have been more believable, but still not an average person for sure.
And yes, there is a disconnect between the kind of training that a long distance runner does to get there, and the kind of low calorie diet plus light exercise that this manga is using, but that doesn't mean that everything held within is bad advice.
The recipes themselves seem pretty normal for diet food.
She's not a long distance runner anymore though, and rapidly dropping to the weight-class of one without the physical exercise side of the regiment sounds superbly unhealthy, especially since it seems like they're dieting mostly through food management. (They're doing some physical exercise thankfully, but it's all pretty light weight.)
When I think about it more, the fact that she lost about 5kg in a month without seemingly doing any kind of "real" exercise slightly worries me that she may in fact be eating too little to compensate. It's of course possible that she lost the weight healthily, but I wouldn't recommend real people try to mimic her regiment expecting similar results.
(Especially since they were apparently aiming to get her down to below 49kg by now, which would definitely have been an unhealthy amount of weight loss.)
The fact that the average japanese woman's weight is 57kg really puts into perspective how misguided I think her goal of getting below 49kg is.
She doesn't seem to be smaller than anyone else in particular, and 8kg below the average person is definitely a level of difference that needs particular circumstances to be warranted, such as being a long-distance runner's or having an otherwise very active lifestyle.
She is perfectly healthy and not at all overweight at a mere 52kg, she even managed to compete with her wife gal pal in a race despite the wife gal pal being healthy and in-shape. If you're truly overweight then racing against someone who's not isn't a matter of "Oh I can still win I'll just ache in the morning," if you're carrying like 8 extra kilos on you, you would need to have proportionally stronger muscles to still be faster.
The more I analyze the details of this manga, the more I begin to question if the author of this even knows what being overweight means. Almost every part of it is screaming "tehe toxic japanese weight culture" to me, from perfectly healthy people being "overweight" to weight goals being cripplingly underweight to dramatic weight losses being considered "unsuccessful and below expectations."
last edited at Jun 26, 2022 10:22AM
