Fat Camp part 1The background part

In an effort to gain weight, my doctor told me to leave Hong Kong. So I did.

I lost more than a little weight after I had surgery and was in a hospital for a while about two and a half years ago. Everyone told me how lucky I was to lose weight while sleeping, but I was at a healthy size beforehand and in the best shape of my life. Ever so slowly, I got myself back in shape, though I never really gained any weight. I exercised like mad to get my strength up, but I have not had much of an appetite for the past two and a half years. Exercising is great. Exercising without eating is a pretty bad idea.

Eventually, my body told me to stop what I was doing. After a shorter stint in a different hospital, I was just as thin as ever and weaker than a scarecrow. I have been out of work since June 2019 and cannot go back until I get back in shape and gain weight. People who know me stopped telling me how lucky I was to be so effortlessly thin.

My doctor tried everything he could think of. He gave me pills that either did nothing or only offered temporary bloating. Steroids were not an option since they increase blood pressure, while most bodybuilding supplements and performance enhancers are dismissed as snake oil around here. There are all kinds of surgeries to lose weight, but none to gain weight. It is not as if they can simply shove fat into your body the way they can tear it out. My doctor referred me to a nutritionist who made out meal plans and suggested eating a wide variety of foods that did nothing for me. They put electric needles in my skin, had me drink root juice, gave me massages and examined my qi. I was told to always eat yang before yin. Of course. I'm not a wild animal.

Unfortunately, most nutritionists and dieticians, as well as doctors in general, have more training and experience with helping patients lose weight. Even in China, weight loss is a billion dollar industry. Anyone who wants to gain weight is simply told to eat more. But sometimes that is as useless as telling fat people to simply eat less.

Far longer than I think it should have taken, my doctor found a medical treatment facility that specializes in weight gain, rather than weight loss. If I wanted my insurance to pay for it, I had the choice of two hospitals, neither of which were in Hong Kong.

The options were either a spa-like facility at Poyang Lake in Jiangxi or a military style boot camp in Taipei. Obviously, I chose the spa. The lake looked nice, according to the pictures I saw, and is supposed to be a great place to see all kinds of migrating birds. The only real downside was that Poyang Lake is about 150 miles from Wuhan. They might be able to help me gain weight, but I would probably lose it all after catching their flu.

That left the boot camp in Taipei. I have been to Taipei a few times. I consider it a nice enough place to visit, but I have no interest in any military activities. I would need far more information before I ever agreed to go there.