Sixty-one — Blog 5th anniversary / Bye, food delivery

Although the title says "Bye, food delivery", this piece is really about all the years I spent wrestling with my weight.

Before the Story Began

Before junior high school, I was an extremely picky eater. I ate a lot of meat and barely touched vegetables. Fortunately, I never ate candy, rarely drank carbonated drinks, and only had snacks once in a while. So judging from the photos from that time, I was probably the slightly chubby type, but not bulky. My parents were mostly concerned about my picky eating. As for my slightly "round" body shape, they mostly described it as "cute" — so I did not really care either.

Junior high school, then, was a leap from a kind of domestic enclosure into a boarding-school system. The most important difference was that school meals would not change according to my will the way my parents' cooking did. In other words, school meals could only "satisfy the minimum dietary needs of a person in modern life." To put it more concretely, they were like the kind of food batch-cooked in some inconspicuous street-corner restaurant specifically for budget tour groups: food my parents would find "tasteless," but that I could still eat normally. From this, you can probably get a rough sense of what kind of food I was "trained" to accept in junior high school. In short, one of my frequently used QQ signatures in junior high was a self-mocking line about weight fluctuation: "One summer vacation = 10 jin; going back to school = losing weight."

In any case, those four years of junior high school, including the preparatory year, brought me to a rather ideal state: under 60 kg, with a BMI of around 20. Of course, to my mother this was definitely too thin; she even blamed the school for the fact that I never grew past 170 cm. Around the time of the PE high-school entrance exam, I had no problem doing 7 pull-ups in one go — a level I still have not managed to reach again to this day.

After the high-school entrance exam, the gears of fate began turning once again. Whether it was the summer camp at my junior high school's senior high division or the summer camp at Chengdu No.7 High School, both used a relatively free meal-card system where students could choose their own dishes. The Gaokao did not test physical education either. This meant that I could finally "let myself go," and my elementary-school eating habits returned. During those summer camps, I did eat very happily, and my weight soon broke through the 60 kg mark — even the 70 kg mark. Of course, looking back, this may also have had something to do with the pressure of the selection process. But the slim figure of that youthful teenager was gone for good.

The competition-track years in high school were still stressful, but the school food also "seemed to get worse," so my weight fluctuated around the low 70s. Preparing for the Gaokao in my second year of high school was another pressure point. The highest weight recorded by the scale at the time was 76 kg — though of course I might have been even heavier, just too afraid to step on the scale. After the Gaokao, my mother told me that when I lay on the bed back then, my legs were "almost as thick as an elephant's," and that deep down she had actually been very worried. After the summer vacation following the Gaokao, my weight dropped back to around 70 kg.

University and Food Delivery

Of course, I did not start ordering food delivery the moment I entered university. After all, a university has so many canteens that it would obviously be hard to get tired of all of them in a short time.

More precisely, one of the most plausible scripts is that one day, while I was tuning some very difficult heap feng shui, I suddenly came back to myself and realized the canteens had already closed, so I opened a food delivery app to comfort my flattened stomach. Or maybe it was when I had just suffered n consecutive losses in Mahjong Soul / Tenhou, got tilted, and wanted to keep fighting immediately, so I ordered delivery to save the time it would take to go to the canteen. Another possibility is simply that it was raining that day, and I did not want to get my shoes dirty on the way to the canteen. For me, though, the real reason was probably that I only started getting tired of the canteens in my third year, while my roommate had already been ordering delivery for some time. So with a "let me try it too" mindset, I also stepped into the game. Of course, the latter two factors may also have helped push things along.

At that time, there was still the physical fitness test, and its score was also part of the graduation requirements, so it could not look too bad. Therefore, I would still insist on night runs: 2~3 km each time, three times a week. In this way, my delivery habit and my night-running habit reached a delicate but slightly negative balance.

But this balance broke after my graduation thesis defense. Several new variables appeared:

• The physical fitness test in the fourth year was before the thesis defense. After the defense succeeded, I no longer needed to care about the height-weight numbers, nor did I need to worry about suddenly fainting during the 1000 m run.
• Before actually receiving the graduation certificate and degree certificate, there was nearly a month of empty time. That period was basically complete freedom.
• In the first half of 2025, food delivery platforms were also engaged in a price war. Many meals were even cheaper than those in the school canteens.
• The weather gradually became hot, and my night-running habit could no longer be maintained.

As a result, during that period, the frequency with which I ordered delivery may have reached twice the previous level or even more. There was also one particular "malatang-style dry hotpot" that tasted especially good, came in huge portions that could fill me up every time, and cost less than 10 yuan. I estimate that nearly half of my delivery orders were from that one dish.

That said, the weight gain this time was not as exaggerated as the one in high school. I probably only reached around 73 kg. But looking back at photos from that time, my face had indeed become "bloated." That was not the same thing as being "cute" when I was little.

The Summer After Graduation

Of course, one year ago, I did not realize how serious things were. At most, I may have felt that during my fourth year, I had entered "a state of normalized fatigue." One of my roommates was in a similar state, because he was rushing a paper at the time, while I was also being driven half-mad by the formatting problems in my graduation thesis. So I still did not pay much attention.

The real red flag came during the summer, when I was staying at a homestay in a resort area on the outskirts of the city and noticed bleeding during a bowel movement. I knew the saying that "nine out of ten people have hemorrhoids," but I still asked GPT, "Why do hemorrhoids cause dripping blood during bowel movements?" The answer was that, apart from internal hemorrhoids, the factor most relevant to me was increased abdominal pressure, which is often associated with being overweight. That was when I realized that even the slightly overweight number of 73 kg did not seem to be just a number anymore.

But things were not over yet. So I told my parents that I probably needed to have my liver function checked, because several years earlier, during regular CT checkups, the diagnosis of "(mild) fatty liver" had kept appearing. But no one had paid attention at the time, so it had simply been ignored. After I brought up the idea of getting checked, they did not say much. The time was set for September, after I officially started graduate school, when I would have a formal blood test.

Then reality arrived: the September blood test and FibroScan results were not ideal. My weight was around 73 kg, my blood pressure was close to 140/90, ALT was over 100, and AST and GGT were also above the healthy thresholds. The FibroScan CAP was close to 320, already in the severe fatty liver range; liver stiffness was about 5.5 kPa. Meanwhile, my blood lipids were also not good. Lp(a) was at a very high level, about 2~3 times the upper limit of normal. Liver ultrasound also showed far-field echo attenuation, and the word "mild" in the conclusion "mild fatty liver" was gone. The doctor said directly that my physical condition was about the same as that of someone in their forties, and prescribed liver-protective medication and lipid-lowering medication, telling me to take them for a month.

That was when I realized I could not keep dragging things on like this.

The Actual Weight Loss

Starting from the beginning of graduate school, I resumed my previous running plan. The goal was 63 kg. I ran three times a week, 5 km each time. On the days I did not run, I still had to walk at least 10000 steps.

At the time, I suspected that the culprit behind my declining health was food delivery, because it made me eat more and walk less. So I immediately and completely quit ordering delivery. My father did not want me to take medication, but I still followed the doctor's instructions and took it every day.

One month later, my weight had dropped from 73 kg to 69.2 kg. Then I went back to the hospital for a follow-up: ALT had returned to the borderline of the normal range, AST and GGT were on the high side of normal, and total cholesterol had decreased somewhat but was still elevated. So this was far from over.

Then I simply continued. I kept running three times a week, 5 km each time. On non-running days, I still had to walk at least 10000 steps. The only difference was that from October onward, I stopped taking medication.

By the end of October, I was 67.6 kg; by the end of November, 67.2 kg; by the end of December, 66.6 kg; by the end of January, 65.9 kg; by the end of February, back to 67.2 kg; by the end of March, 64.0 kg; and by the end of April, 63.0 kg.

Looking back at my conversations with GPT at the time, I can also find many fragments like these:

Starting point: ≈73 kg; current: 68.2 kg. What weight might the next plateau happen at? — 2025-10-18

I've been stable at 66 kg for two months already. — 2026-01-20

My weight has gone from 73 kg to 65 kg. — 2026-02-04

Even if I deliberately eat less, I still get stuck at 65 for a while. — 2026-03-20

73 kg → 64.2 kg. — 2026-03-27

My weight has gone from 66 kg last November to 64 kg now, which means I've lost 9 kg compared with when graduate school started. — 2026-04-21

Even during the Spring Festival, although I tried to eat less under the pressure of social expectations, my weight still rebounded because there was no suitable place to run. But at that time, one relative said something to me:

"What you're doing now is right. Don't be like last year — you looked too greasy."

At the time, my mother thought that getting down to 66 kg was already enough. But fortunately, because of that relative's words, I felt greatly encouraged and was able to keep going.

Maintenance

By the end of April this year, I finally achieved my weight-loss goal: 63 kg. When I saw that the goal in my body-fat scale app had actually been checked off, I still felt quite emotional.

At that point, my blood pressure had fully recovered to around 120/80. The hospital blood test showed that ALT, AST, and GGT had all returned completely to normal, even to very good levels. Note that by then I had already been off medication for half a year. Total cholesterol continued to decline, but LDL-C had risen from 3.7 last September to 4.2. I think this may have been a temporary cholesterol increase caused by substantial weight loss, so it still needs continued observation.

As for FibroScan, CAP dropped from 320 to 289, but it was still a moderately high indicator, which disappointed me a little. Liver stiffness fell from 5.5 back to the normal level of 4.5, which was in line with my expectations. The doctor's evaluation was:

"Very good. Keep it up."

So I am still keeping it up. In terms of lifestyle, I still firmly refuse food delivery. My running volume has been reduced slightly: 2~3 times a week, with the distance adjusted from 5 km down to 4 km. I kept this up for another two months, and my weight has been fluctuating around the new equilibrium point of 63 kg — so it seems I have stabilized.

Of course, taking the city is easier than holding it. In the future, I may still need to keep persisting for a long time before I have a chance to pull CAP back to something close to normal. This also taught me another lesson:

Spilled water is hard to gather again.

The things that happened in the past cannot simply be allowed to drift away like the wind. That is also why I chose to write about this theme this year.