Losing weight in our understanding is firmly connected with diets. We all know: to lose weight – you have to go on a diet. Many people say: “I’ve tried every diet in the world. The word diet from the ancient Greek translates as “way of life” or “food system. It turns out that the diet can not be something temporary. But, you must agree that all popular diets are impossible to maintain for more than a day, a week, or a few months. Among them are some particularly harmful diets.
If only it were that simple: take a diet, lose weight, and stay slim forever. But fans of diets usually “sit on” them almost all year round. The fact is that dieting
Protein Diet by Dr. Atkins
This system of dieting was developed by the cardiologist Robert Atkins. His book “Dr. Atkins’s Dietary Revolution” with a detailed description of the diet was released in 1972.
The essence of the diet is to consume proteins and fats. Then no glucose enters the body, and fat begins to burn. The body uses more energy to burn fat than when it digests carbohydrates. This also promotes weight loss. Dr. Atkins’ diet implies that you can eat as much as you want. Of course, we are only talking about certain foods.
The diet is divided into several stages. To begin with the body has to get used to a certain food system. The basis of the diet is fish, meat, eggs, cheese, green salads and vegetable oils. Legumes, cabbage, tomatoes, zucchini, and pumpkin are allowed. But in smaller quantities than and instead of green vegetables.
Today, Dr. Atkins’ diet has fewer and fewer followers. It is dangerous because too many ketone bodies are formed in the body. Normally, the kidneys excrete them with the urine. But with this diet, the kidneys simply can’t cope. Also the Atkins diet causes constipation because many carbohydrate products, including those containing fiber, are forbidden.
The so-called Kremlin diet is much like the principles of the Dukan diet system. It has limited carbohydrates, but the rules are not so strict.
In any case, such a diet can not be considered balanced and healthy for the body. Because with a protein diet, many vitamins and fiber are not supplied to the body.
Mono diets
There can be different mono-diet, but they all share the same principle: you need to eat one product for a certain period of time. For a long time, the mono-diet of a week remained popular. For example, on Monday you should eat a kilo of apples, on Tuesday – half a roasted chicken, on Wednesday – a kilo of beets. And so on. You can lose 2 to 4 kilos in a week on such a diet. You should eat everything without sugar and salt.
The disadvantage of this diet is the monotony. It is boring and difficult to eat only zucchini or beets. Yes, in the first two days extra fluid will be expelled from your body and you will feel light. But you can achieve such a result in a more gentle way.
And if after a mono-diet you have a breakdown, which is not surprising after a week of eating unleavened food, it will be easy to get back everything you’ve lost. In addition, it is difficult to provide the body with all the necessary vitamins on a mono-diet.
There is another kind of mono-diet. They are recommended to be used as a discharge day. One day a month you can eat only kefir, rice, apples or juices. Such a discharge day will really help to lose weight by 1-2 kilograms. But in this case you will lose not weight, but extra fluid.
If you eat right, do not eat fast food, sweets, fatty meat, then there is no need to arrange yourself such an ordeal. With proper nutrition some days you will eat a little more, some days a little less, but the weight will steadily decrease (if you lose weight) or remain at the same level.
Starvation
Fasting is used to lose weight, it is also known as therapeutic fasting to improve well-being and start the process of rejuvenation. You should always starve yourself only under the supervision of a doctor. It is also necessary to prepare yourself for this process – for a few days before it is necessary to reduce the portions, their size and eat mostly light food.
There are clinics for weight loss, where under the supervision of doctors you can fast from a few days to a month. But only people without exacerbation of chronic diseases are allowed to fast. Children, adolescents, pregnant and lactating women, people with diabetes, tuberculosis and other diseases should not go on hunger strikes.
Starvation is a difficult process for the body, which can provoke exacerbation or the beginning of diseases. Also, the effect of starvation will not last long if you eat fast food and other unhealthy and fatty foods afterwards.
A diet with a large calorie deficit
Such diets are popular with young girls today. It is the number of calories important for such a diet system – 500-700 per day. And it does not matter how you will get them. You can eat one bar of milk chocolate or a pack of cookies. You can eat only vegetables and chicken breast. Undoubtedly, the second way is more preferable. But such a diet is dangerous for the metabolism.
The body gets used to the very small amount of energy it gets from food. That’s why any 100 calories over the “norm” are immediately deposited in fat depots.
It is impossible to eat like this all your life. Therefore, sooner or later, those who lose weight begin to eat a little more. A sharp increase in weight occurs. And in the most difficult cases even sport doesn’t help not to get fat. The consequences of such a diet have to be dealt with for a long time. At first it is necessary to increase the diet by 100 calories, to eat so until the body gets used to the new conditions and stops hoarding. Then you can increase the caloric content again. At the same time you should eat right, exercise, and move a lot, to speed up your metabolism.
Isn’t it easier to switch straight to a proper diet and exercise, yoga, walk a lot at a fast pace? In this case you won’t have to sit on a diet, because the extra weight just won’t appear.
It is worth understanding that a diet is not torture and hunger. A diet is your food system in which you feel good and your weight is not excessive. Even the most effective diet for weight loss is temporary. If you don’t change your eating habits, the excess weight will reappear. You can, of course, lose weight quickly by certain dates or vacations, but then your whole life will resemble a continuous struggle with excess weight.
To avoid falling into this trap, you need to understand how your lifestyle and thoughts affect your weight. A big misconception is to think that you can lose weight once and for all without changing your eating habits. It is also a fallacy to think that you can lose weight only by suffering a lot, by denying yourself delicious food. And, of course, it is wrong to think that every diet is healthy and that there is nothing worse than being overweight, and that hormonal disruption from poor nutrition is not so terrible.
Harmful diets
Often harmful diets masquerade as a proper diet. Protein does not affect the appearance of excess weight, and all carbohydrates are evil, the adherents of one diet convince us. Others believe that you can eat one chocolate bar all day and lose weight without harming your nervous system or skin. There are food systems that can permanently mess up your metabolism, then every 100 calories will be deposited on your flanks and no sport will help. Unhealthy diets rarely help you lose weight for the rest of your life, but it is impossible and very harmful to eat such diets for a long time.
Why do the lost kilos come back?
Many people “sit on a diet” for years. It is only necessary to lose 5-8-15 kilos, and then they come back, and it is good if not in the company of two or three more. Few people lose weight and begin to live at their new weight. Most struggle with extra pounds all their lives.
We are used to thinking that dieting is something temporary. But something temporary cannot be a lifelong solution. If you decide to lose weight, the first thing to understand is that you have to change your diet once and for all. Otherwise, the extra pounds will come back very quickly.
The wrong goal
The success of weight loss directly depends on your goal. It is often possible to hear such desires: “I want to lose weight for vacation/birthday”, “I want to lose weight to please the opposite sex”, “I want to lose weight to meet love and get married”.
To be slim and like yourself on vacation, to meet your love, to have success with the opposite sex, to get married or get married are good goals, but they can be achieved without the torment of hunger. Surely everyone can name at least one fat person he knows who is doing well with his personal life. And the goal to lose weight by a certain date can be achieved, but after that weight is likely to rapidly return to its favorite places – the stomach, hips, flanks, arms …
Answer yourself honestly – why do you need to lose weight? If you do it for your husband, mother or mocking girlfriends, and you think you’re beautiful, then stop wasting your energy. There are some people out there who are lashing out at us with THEIR expectations. If all of a sudden you don’t meet those expectations at the moment, such people demand that their expectations be met as soon as possible. But these are not our desires. If you don’t want to lose weight, you don’t see a problem with 10 extra pounds, you like your body and figure, you shouldn’t lose weight because of other people’s expectations of you.
If you and only you want to lose weight, you will succeed. Formulate your goal as precisely as possible without using the particle “not”. For example, I want to be slim, trim, wear clothes size S (M), I want to dance easily, climb stairs, enjoy my new state. Such a goal will work for you, even if the whole world tells you that you won’t make it.
Getting back to your old eating habits
Sitting on a diet is disciplining. We count calories, keep a food diary, exercise on a schedule, and take our food to visit. When the coveted goal is reached, many begin to eat as before. It doesn’t happen overnight, little by little we start to remember old eating habits. These are the ones that influence whether we will get fat soon or stay slim now.
Let’s break down this effect of eating habits on our weight with a simple example. If at any time in your life you began to gain weight, it means that at that point your eating habits changed. Perhaps you changed jobs and now eat a heavy dinner. Maybe you had a baby and started eating more because of boredom and staying at home. Maybe you got married or married and instead of long walks, meetings with friends, you spend evenings together, and there are so many temptations in the fridge. Often young moms gain weight because in addition to their dinner, they also finish their meal for the baby, trying food while cooking, thinking it’s not much at all.
Another example, If you have always been overweight, look at how everyone in your family looks. You often hear the version about “wide bones” and “heredity” from overweight people. But let’s look at the eating habits of such a family objectively. To do this, simply pay attention to the baskets of fat people in the supermarket. Most often there are sausage, sausages, dumplings, fatty pork, sweet yogurts and huge packs of cookies. You could say that being overweight in their case is really hereditary. It’s unhealthy eating habits passed down from generation to generation.
It’s always about our lifestyle. There is no such thing as being slim all your life and then gaining 15-20 extra pounds in a year. There’s no such thing as children who have loved dumplings, grilled chicken, and whipped cream since birth. Take apart each of your eating habits, remember where and when they came from and how they affect your life now. The same thing works in reverse. During the diet you were losing weight and developing new eating habits: eating chicken breast instead of sausage, bananas instead of ice cream, vegetable salad instead of potatoes. Agree, the extra weight will never come back if you have such food habits.
Obsolete motivation
Just like a goal, motivation should help you. If you have lost weight, then your goals and motivation were right. Perhaps now you just need new motivation. Think about how motivation doesn’t work anymore. Perhaps when you were 15 pounds heavier, you just dreamed of walking without shortness of breath. After losing weight, you probably forgot your agony, your old motivation stopped working for you, and the weight quietly returned.
If this has already happened, now your task is to find motivation again. Yes, it is difficult, to rise after another setback. But think about how much wiser you have become. You already know how to lose weight, what exactly once helped you. Now do the same thing. And once the goal is achieved, look for new motivation.
Perhaps slimness alone is not enough for you, think about how athletic you would like to become. Perhaps after losing weight you want to forget about cellulite or look like fitness models.
The body’s response which after starvation hoards
Our body works for us. The stomach has been digesting pounds of extra food for years, the skeleton has been carrying dozens of pounds of extra weight, the teeth have been chewing a lot of food.
When we begin to lose weight, our body comes to the rescue again. The human body has a program in place in case we get hungry. If food stops coming in the right or habitual amount, the metabolic rate decreases as well. The body only starts to stockpile every bite it eats. For example, you lose weight and finally start to eat a little more than the strict diet called for. Your body grasps tightly at these “extra calories” and the weight begins to arrive.
Many slim girls who have been eating at 800-1000 calories for years know that just increasing calories by 20% makes them gain extra pounds, even though eating 1,500-2,000 calories is normal. The fact is that their body has already got used to work all the time in deficit conditions, so it is set up only to store all the “extra” in case of hunger. In this case, sports can help speed up the metabolism. Power or HIIT-training can speed up the metabolism, gradually the body will understand that the food comes in the right amount and will stop storing it.
If you have lost a lot of weight, start eating a little more and notice that the pounds are slowly coming back, start moving more. Suitable workout in the gym, cardio, long walks. Give yourself and your body some time. Your metabolism will speed up, you will get used to moving a lot. But if you don’t change your eating habits during this time, you will still have to fight the weight.
