Being fat is harmful to everything! Is it reliable to lose weight by eating only meat and no staple food?

Author: Chen Wei, Chief Physician, Peking Union Medical College Hospital

Reviewer: Xing Xiaoyan, Chief Physician, China-Japan Friendship Hospital

Many people say that being a little fat just means that your figure is not good-looking, which is no big deal. But in fact, being fat can cause a variety of diseases, and obesity and health are closely related.

1. What diseases are related to obesity?

Some diseases we often mention, such as diabetes, hypertension, hyperlipidemia, coronary heart disease, stroke, etc., are all related to obesity. For obese people, the risk of these diseases will increase by 20%-50% compared to people with normal weight, so obesity is a problem that we need to pay close attention to.

In addition, there are a large number of chronic diseases related to obesity, such as gout, gallstones, fatty liver, including menstrual disorders in women, impotence in men, etc. These problems are all related to obesity.

There are some newly married men who suffer from impotence, that is, they suffer from impotence right after marriage, and most of them are fat. If they lose weight, many people will recover from impotence after losing weight.

Some literature data also show that obesity is an independent risk factor for 11 malignant tumors. In other words, obesity makes it easy to develop pancreatic cancer, colon cancer, breast cancer, cervical cancer, lung cancer, etc., all of which are related to obesity itself.

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Therefore, obesity has a great impact on the body.

2. How to determine whether you are obese?

The standard now used around the world is the body mass index, which is the weight (kg) divided by the square of the height (m). For us Chinese, if it is over 24, it is overweight, if it is over 28, it is obese, and if it is less than 18.5, it indicates that the weight is too low.

For example, if you are 1.6 meters tall and weigh 50 kg, your body mass index is 50÷1.62≈19.5, and your weight is within the normal range.

We also have another standard, which is waist circumference. Generally speaking, in clinical practice, we measure waist circumference at a position slightly below the navel. For us who measure abdominal circumference ourselves, we can also measure it at the navel. If it exceeds 80cm for females and 90cm for males, it is considered abdominal obesity.

3. Is it reliable to lose weight by eating only meat and not staple food?

After we have some understanding of obesity and its harm, many friends will start their own weight loss journey and search for various weight loss recipes. Among them, the weight loss method of "only eating meat and not eating staple food" attracts attention, but in fact, this way of weight loss has certain risks.

Because the common meats we eat, such as chicken, duck and fish, contain more fat in addition to protein. Especially in red meat, the content of saturated fatty acids is very high. Eating it for a short period of one or two months is generally not a big problem, but eating it for a long time will exceed the total energy limit and easily increase the burden on the cardiovascular system.

Moreover, staple food is vital to the human body. Humans should consume at least 100 grams of carbohydrates every day to meet the daily needs of the human body. Therefore, we recommend that you should not eat less than 200 grams of staple food a day, or eat some fruit and then some staple food. Otherwise, if you only eat meat, the nutrition is unbalanced and it is not conducive to long-term persistence.

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In addition, when choosing staple foods, you should match coarse and fine ones.

Because whole grains can make you feel fuller and not hungry easily, it is good to eat some whole grains. However, we do not recommend that all staple foods should be whole grains, because eating this way for a long time will affect the absorption of protein, calcium, and iron, and it is easy to cause malnutrition, so we generally recommend a combination of coarse and fine grains.

Of course, you should also choose refined grains. Because even though they are both refined grains, eating rice and eating steamed bread have different effects on body weight. Because noodles and rice absorb different amounts of water, the same weight of rice and noodles, after being cooked, provide different amounts of energy.

For example, 50 grams of rice is 130 grams when cooked, while 50 grams of flour is 75 grams when made into steamed buns. So you need to eat nearly two steamed buns to get the same amount of rice as 50 grams of rice. But in fact, the energy of two steamed buns is much higher than that of 50 grams of rice.

Therefore, weight loss must be scientific, and you cannot blindly choose unreliable weight loss recipes.