living abroad??

Hey hey,
Fun to hear that you enjoy the site and want your mother to join as well I'm from Finland myself so English isn't my native language. As far as the language is concerned, I haven't had any trouble with that. However, sometimes it's difficult to track what I eat since there aren't many Finnish products in the database (though I can see that there has been other Finnish members too - I'm not the only one to add foods in Finnish :happy: ). I try to find similar things since adding foods is slower than just searching them from the database. I also use a Finnish equivalent to MFP (you can see the calorie amounts of most Finnish products there, but you need to pay if you wish to see more info on them etc.) to find out the calories. Once I have the calories found out, I search something similar in MFP database, and add it to my diary. Then I go and see whether the calorie amounts match or not. If they don't match at all, I change the serving size. Yep, this messes up the fat, protein, carbs, sugar etc. amounts but at least I can keep track of my calories

I was wondering if there were any other expats around. I live in Taiwan, also a Mandarin speaking country, and I'm a teacher, too. I get lots of my meals at school. That's a common thing here and generally the meals are pretty tasty. As far as entering the foods into MFP, sometimes I can find them on the database and sometimes I have to make some guesses or just try to choose something that's roughly equivalent. For instance, there are so many different kinds of greens here that I have no idea of the English name for. Usually I just put them down as spinach. Another issue your mom might want to address is all the rice. I know, carbs aren't really the enemy, but when you're trying to lose weight, all that white rice sure does take up a lot of calories better used for more nutritious choices. What I do at my school is ask the cook to leave out the rice and noodles in my meals and double up on the vegis. They all think I'm crazy, but that's really nothing new. In fact, I've noticed some of the other teachers are doing it too, especially after seeing how quickly I'm losing weight. It may be awkward at first, but Chinese women are just as interested in losing weight as Americans. It might even be a way to help bridge the culture gap!