Dietary Guidelines for Weight Management

The core of weight management diet is never to eat unpalatable boiled vegetables or to quit all your favorite foods. It is to create a small calorie gap that you can maintain for a long time while ensuring adequate nutrition. All diet plans that cannot be adhered to for more than 3 months are essentially ineffective.

I have helped more than 20 friends around me adjust their diet plans. I have seen people who were so hungry that their hair fell out, and their aunts were disordered and finally regained weight even more than before. I have also seen people who eat hot pot and barbecue every week and still lose weight steadily. There is really no "universal fat-reduction recipe around the world". Only the ones that suit your life rhythm and make you not feel wronged are useful.

Nowadays, the low-carb diet that is often referred to as a diet is loved by many fitness enthusiasts. The core is to cut out refined carbohydrates and replace white rice, white noodles, milk tea cakes with a small amount of whole grains or root vegetables. The advantage is that it will make you feel fuller, and you will lose weight quickly in the early stage, so you don’t have to deliberately starve yourself. But don’t follow the trend blindly. I once had a friend who couldn’t live without noodles. He didn’t touch noodles for 10 days and ate brown rice and boiled chicken breasts every day. On the tenth day, he couldn’t help but show off three bowls of noodles with soybean paste. He gained 4 pounds and broke his defense on the spot. Moreover, strict low-carb diet for a long time can easily lead to lack of energy. Many girls will suffer from the problem of aunt postponement. People who love eating carbohydrates really don’t need to suffer from this problem.

The Mediterranean diet, another one recommended by nutritionists around the world, sounds great, but in fact it is not that perfect. The core is to eat more whole grains, fresh vegetables, and high-quality protein, use olive oil instead of other fats, give priority to seafood, and eat less red meat. Long-term eating will not only stabilize your weight, but will also be good for blood lipids and skin. But the problem is that it is too unfriendly to ordinary people. To gather so many ingredients every day, you either have to spend an hour a day cooking, or you have to buy thirty or forty yuan of light meals every day. For migrant workers who eat takeout every day, persisting for two weeks is considered strong willpower, let alone long-term.

If you really find it troublesome and can't keep your mouth shut, the 80/20 diet that has been popular in the past two years may be more to your liking - that is, eat normal healthy food 80% of the time, and the remaining 20% ​​of the quota can eat whatever you like, whether it is milk tea, fried chicken or hot pot. I am now using this model. I lost 12 pounds in 3 months last year and have not regained it for almost a year. I showed off three pounds of spicy crayfish to my friends last week, but the next day I weighed myself and my weight did not increase at all. But this method also has pitfalls. Many people use 20% of the quota directly as "free to show off for two days on weekends" and make up for the week's gap in one meal. It is definitely useless.

Speaking of which, there is another pitfall that many people fall into, which is that they feel that they have to stick to various dead rules, such as "no eating after eight o'clock", "definitely not eating white rice and white noodles", "you can drink 0-calorie drinks as you like", there is really no need to be so dogmatic. If you stay up until one or two o'clock every day, you will finish your dinner at five or six o'clock, and you will be hungry at 10 o'clock. If you stay up until 10 o'clock, you will be more likely to eat breakfast in revenge the next day. It is better to eat a hard-boiled egg or half a box of sugar-free yogurt as a cushion, and it will not affect you at all. There are also 0-calorie drinks, which I also like to drink, but don’t show off two or three bottles a day. Sugar substitutes will disrupt your appetite regulation mechanism and make you want to eat more high-sugar foods, which is not worth the loss.

As for caloric calculation, there is really no need for ordinary people to be accurate to grams. It takes too much energy. The fist method is enough: for one meal, eat a fist-sized staple food, two fists of vegetables, and a palm-sized amount of protein. Fat or thin will be counted. It is almost enough. If you eat takeout, chop off a third of the rice, and rinse oily vegetables twice with warm water. It’s not that particular.

To put it bluntly, weight management is a lifelong matter, so don’t compete with your appetite. The less you allow yourself to eat, the better it will be in your mind. Why not incorporate it into your daily routine? If you like to drink milk tea, drink three-point sugar milk tea once a week. If you want to eat hot pot, ask a friend to have a meal on the weekend. As long as the overall amount is controlled, you will not gain weight at all. Those plans that make you suffer and endure every day, even if you fall off the scale in the short term, will rebound sooner or later. The best ones are the ones that you can stick to comfortably.