National Dietary Guidelines for Weight Management

The core dietary principle of weight management has never been extreme dieting or copying Internet celebrity recipes, but on the premise of meeting the nutritional requirements of the "Dietary Guidelines for Chinese Residents (2022)" and creating a reasonable calorie gap of 300-500 calories based on personal physical foundation, dietary preferences, and life rhythm. There is no universal plan that applies to everyone. All methods that require you to completely change your original diet structure and pursue quick weight loss are inherently unsustainable.

I have seen too many people quit all staple foods, eating boiled vegetables every day until they vomited, and losing five or six pounds in a week, they thought they had found the right method. As a result, their hair began to fall out in half a month, and their aunt was delayed. After eating a little rice, they immediately regained 3 pounds. Not only did they lose all their previous efforts, but they also destroyed their bodies. I met a junior girl for consultation before. She only ate 800 calories a day in order to wear a small-size skirt. She lost 12 pounds in two months. As a result, she stopped menstruating for 3 months. Later, she adjusted her diet and returned to 1,600 calories. When her aunt came back, she didn’t regain much weight, but she was more energetic than before.

Of course, there are definitely people who want to criticize me. So-and-so people around me don’t count calories at all. They gave up milk tea, cakes, and white rice, and just eat vegetables and meat, and they lost weight. It’s not surprising. This is the core logic of the current low-carb diet. For people who usually like to drink sweet drinks and eat cakes and have insulin resistance, the priority of controlling refined carbohydrates is indeed higher than the total calories. I have a friend who suffers from polycystic cystic cysts. He had lost weight for two years without making any progress. After replacing white rice and white noodles with multi-grain cereals and completely quitting added sugar, he lost 12 pounds in three months. He went to the hospital for a review and his insulin level returned to the normal range. But this method is really not suitable for people who run business every day, or who maintain strength training more than three times a week. If the proportion of carbohydrate energy supply is too low, they will easily feel dizzy and weak, and they will be out of breath even climbing the third floor, and their exercise performance will be a mess. Instead, these people are suitable for a low-fat and high-carbohydrate diet structure. As long as they control the intake of animal fats and fried foods, eat more whole grains to replenish carbohydrates, and the weight loss will be stable with exercise, and will not affect their daily energy at all.

There is also a more Buddhist school that is becoming more and more popular now, that is, mindful eating, which does not even involve calorie counting. It requires you not to check your mobile phone while eating, chew each mouthful 20 times, stop eating when you are seventy percent full, and don’t eat blindly because you are stressed or bored. This is especially suitable for those who have been dieting for a long time, feel guilty when eating high-calorie foods, and even have a tendency to overeat. I once had a colleague who induced vomiting for two years, followed by three months of mindful eating. Without deliberately controlling what to eat, he naturally lost 15 pounds, and his mood became much more stable. He no longer stayed at home on weekends and ate three or four takeaways at once.

In fact, the national guideline has long given ordinary people the most worry-free method. There is no need to buy a food scale to calculate the gram weight every day. The palm method is enough: a fistful of staple food for each meal, try to replace half of it with whole grains or potatoes, such as corn, sweet potatoes, and oats; Protein in the palm of your hand, choose eggs, milk, chicken, fish, shrimp, tofu, no need to eat boiled chicken breast every meal; try to account for half of the dark green vegetables in your two fists, add less sugar and less oil when cooking, don't exceed 5 grams of salt every day, it's that simple. If you catch the subway in the morning and don’t have time to cook, you can buy multi-grain pancakes without crisps and sauce and add an egg, or buy tea eggs from a convenience store with sugar-free soy milk and corn. These are all completely in line with the requirements. You don’t have to force yourself to get up half an hour early every day to make an exquisitely presented fat-reducing meal. No matter how good you are if you can’t stick to it, it’s useless.

Don't believe those "lose 10 pounds in a week" folk remedies on the Internet, such as the apple diet method and the cucumber and egg method. All you lose is water and muscle. When you return to eating normally, you will rebound faster than you lost. The national guidelines clearly state that a healthy weight loss rate is 0.5-1 kilogram per week, which is 2-4 kilograms per month. It sounds slow, but the weight lost is almost pure fat, which is not easy to rebound and will not harm the body. When I was losing weight before, I would regularly go out for a barbecue with my friends every Friday night. Occasionally I would drink a cup of full-sugar milk tea when I was greedy. I had never overeated. I lost 22 pounds in the past six months. Now, it has been 3 years and I have not gained back the weight.

To put it bluntly, weight management is a lifelong matter. It doesn’t mean that you can just eat all you want once you reduce to your target weight. Finding a way of eating that you can eat for a lifetime is better than anything else. The national guidelines do not ask you to eat according to the table every day. They make you know how to eat, eat correctly, eat comfortably and maintain a healthy weight. This is the ultimate goal.