How to lose weight scientifically?

It is the season of spring again. Friends who just had a good time during the Spring Festival, I wonder if your body fat is still good? Have you, who love beauty, also started the difficult journey of losing weight? It is easy to gain weight but difficult to lose it. . . . . . . Speaking of losing weight, I have to talk about the detours I have taken.

At that time, I was studying the healthy and long-lived population in China, so I paid special attention to health indicators. Obesity was an important factor of concern, so I paid attention to a lot of obesity-related content. I learned that obesity is related to a series of diseases such as cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases, diabetes, and cancer, so I was very worried about obesity. In addition, I gained weight due to sitting for a long time during my doctoral studies, so I started looking for ways to lose weight.

During that period, I read a lot of books, looked at many weight loss methods, read a lot of weight loss theories, and even tried many weight loss strategies myself, but in the end, the results were lackluster.

After learning from the painful experience, I started to think about how to lose weight scientifically. After I calmed down and got to the bottom of it, I realized that I might have gone astray because I had not found the fundamental principle of weight loss.

What is the fundamental principle of weight loss?

Or, to ask the other way around, why does the human body become obese?

Some people may propose a series of factors, such as carbohydrates, genes, etc. However, these are just superficial phenomena.

The root cause of obesity is that the body's intake is greater than its consumption.

Energy can neither be created nor destroyed.

For the human body, we are also the result of energy input and consumption.

The input of energy is relatively easy to understand. As a living being and unable to photosynthesize, our food is the source of energy.

Energy consumption is our basal metabolism and daily activities, especially basal metabolism, which refers to the minimum energy required by all organs of the human body to maintain life. Even if you lie down and calm down and don't move, basal metabolism is still going on, because this is a daily consumption. Of course, on this basis, exercise and the like can also increase energy consumption.

Losing weight is a simple process of addition and subtraction: reducing energy input and increasing energy expenditure.

No matter what weight loss strategy you use, the essence remains the same. So what we need to do is "control our mouths and move our legs"

1. Keeping your mouth shut is to stop the source

Controlling your diet is the first priority for losing weight. Don’t listen to the sayings like “eat as much as you want”. No matter what method of weight loss you use, you won’t be able to keep eating as much as you want.

Generally, reducing energy intake is basically this strategy

Common dietary substitution strategies

Different foods have different calorie contents. Therefore, for the same total amount of food, replacing high-calorie foods with low-calorie foods will significantly reduce calorie intake.

This is also the most common way for many people to lose weight, which is to replace high-fat and high-oil foods with low-calorie foods, such as vegetables and fruits, so that many people who lose weight become vegetable eaters. This is the case with dietary advice such as meal replacement.

However, the biggest obstacle to this weight loss method is our appetite. Human food is diverse, and we strive to consume high calories. After all, most of human history was in a stage of insufficient energy or even food shortage, which led to our genes preferring high-calorie foods. Many people who lose weight believe that they have this experience. After a period of time, they find it unbearable and even depressed. In the end, they can't help but start to resume their previous diet, or even increase their intake in retaliation. The result is that after working hard for several days, they are back to the days before liberation.

So are there other strategies? Of course there are!

The process of regulating feeding

The human body's eating behavior is a neurophysiological process. When the stomach and intestines are empty, the stomach and intestines will secrete hunger signals such as ghrelin to stimulate the hypothalamus, and then the hypothalamus transmits the hunger signal to the central nervous system, so we feel hungry and need to eat.

So another strategy is to increase satiety and not let the stomach be empty. For example, many dietary recommendations will also ask you to eat some resistant foods to increase the feeling of fullness in the stomach.

Of course, there are other strategies for reducing energy intake.

That is to reduce the intestinal intake of nutrients and directly act on the intestines to affect energy absorption. However, due to the direct effect on the intestines, it may have a lasting negative impact on the body, so much so that some people joked that after taking this drug, never believe that any fart is kind, and it is very likely to cause oily diarrhea. As for other weight loss drugs, everyone should be careful. Although many weight loss drugs are in principle effective in reducing appetite, they are not like the above-mentioned strategy of increasing satiety. Instead, they act directly on the nervous system. Therefore, these drugs are often prescription drugs and must be used under the guidance of a doctor. Because they directly act on the nervous system, they can cause low mood and even depression, so they are very strictly controlled weight loss drugs.

2. Increase energy consumption

The above is about reducing energy intake, but in addition to this, increasing energy expenditure is also a good idea.

Nowadays, people generally have less physical activity and sit more, so most of the energy consumption is basal metabolism. Therefore, increasing exercise can increase energy consumption, that is, moving your legs.

For example, the table above shows the energy consumption of some common sports. You can do it according to your own conditions. However, it should be noted that you should not exercise excessively, and you should do it step by step to avoid excessive exercise that affects the health of joints.

In general, the core principle of weight loss is to reduce intake and increase consumption, and the essence remains the same.

Come on, in order to have a healthy body!