Can a balanced diet help you lose weight

A balanced diet cannot make you lose weight in a short time, but it is definitely the core foundation of all healthy weight loss without rebound. If you want to lose weight and look good, you can't avoid it at all.

Two years ago, when I accompanied a friend to the nutrition department for weight loss, I happened to meet a 19-year-old girl. She had lost 20 pounds by cutting off carbon dioxide for three months, and then gained 30 pounds back. She was also diagnosed with mild anemia, her face was sallow, and her hairline was much wider. The core of the plan the doctor gave her was a balanced diet, which did not make her hungry. Each meal included multi-grain rice, lean meat or fish and shrimp, plus two tablespoons of green leafy vegetables. She was even allowed to eat a small piece of mousse as a reward every Wednesday afternoon. She did not have to deliberately count calories and stopped eating until she was seven or eight full. She only lost 3 kilograms in the first month, and she was in a hurry at the time, but she steadily lost 4 kilograms in the second month. After a follow-up visit six months later, she not only lost 22 kilograms, her anemia problem disappeared, and most of the acne on her cheeks that broke out before had disappeared.

Of course, some people think that a balanced diet is useless, saying that they have gained weight even after eating all kinds of vegetables, meat and rice. In fact, most of them equate "full variety" with "balanced". A meal of 2 pounds of soybean bones, two large bowls of white rice, even with a plate of stir-fried lettuce, the total calories exceed the basal metabolism by a large amount, and of course it is impossible to lose weight. There are also some people who think that all they need to do to lose weight is to be hungry, and there is no need to put in the effort to match the diet. In the short term, there is nothing wrong with this. As long as the caloric gap is large enough, even if eating cucumbers every day can indeed make you lose weight quickly, you can't be hungry for a lifetime, right? If you are so hungry that your basal metabolism collapses, you will gain weight after eating a few more bites, which will make it harder to lose weight than before, and the gain outweighs the loss.

I usually control my weight and don’t bother to remember those complicated calorie tables. I just measure it with my hands as the doctor taught me at the time: one fistful of grains, one palm-sized high-protein food, two fistfuls of green leafy vegetables. I put my chopsticks away when I’m almost full. I don’t have any taboos when I go out to eat hot pot and barbecue with friends on weekends. At most, I just need to be a little lighter in the next two days. My weight has been stable at 95 pounds for almost two years, and I have never suffered from dizziness or hair loss due to dieting.

When it comes to the speed of losing weight in the short term, a balanced diet is indeed not as good as various extreme diets, but it is more like laying a foundation for your body. Once the foundation is stable, every pound you lose is real and will not rebound as soon as you return to normal eating. On the contrary, it can also improve your skin, complexion, and immunity. No matter how you calculate it, it is a good deal.