When you go on a diet, it seems that the most difficult part a priori, losing the extra kilos, ends up being the easiest. And what would be the ideal, that is, maintaining the weight achieved, becomes an almost impossible goal. The experience of many people who come to my office proves it to me, because most of them tell me that, although they manage to lose weight, they end up regaining it and sometimes even gain more weight. Why does it seem so difficult to stay at your ideal weight?
NOT FOLLOWING AN ADEQUATE DIET
This is usually the main problem. Many of my patients come to my office after years of occasional dieting. Many of them promise to lose many kilos in a very short time and, for this, they eliminate food groups, especially bread, pasta or legumes, for example.
Forget about "miracle" diets
In many of these diets that are made without medical control, muscle mass (lean mass) and water are lost, and not just fat tissue, with which the ability to burn energy by the muscles also decreases, in addition to causing a certain bad hydration at the cellular level. Result, weight loss stagnates after a short time, people get discouraged because they are diets that require a lot of effort and they abandon them.
TO LOSE WEIGHT (NO) YOU HAVE TO GO HUNGER
It happens to me many times that when I propose to new patients a food plan to lose weight they tell me that they are not going to lose weight with it, that it cannot be, that I propose to eat more than they eat. Some actually eat little; and others, pecking a lot, have a false perception of what they really eat. But leaving this aside, the problem is that it is very fixed in our minds that to lose weight you have to starve. And it is not like that.
If you go hungry, you will abandon the diet
In addition to hunger being one of the main reasons why people abandon a diet, we have another serious problem. The human body has the ability to metabolically adjust to the food available to it. If we "starve" it, it automatically reduces its energy expenditure and burns fewer calories thanks to various adaptive mechanisms that have helped us survive in times of famine. Therefore, this is not the solution.
YOU HAVE TO ACQUIRE GOOD HABITS
Therefore, if we lose weight and when we reach the goal we return to eating as before doing the diet, it is evident that we will recover what we lost and even something else. Conclusion, the diet should consist of reorganizing the way of eating of each person, so that they acquire good eating habits and lifestyle, because we must not forget that not everything is what we eat, but that sports and rest influence and a lot. In this way, once you have reached the weight you wanted to achieve, you can continue to maintain these habits by making small exceptions.
SLIMMING BY STAGES
Depending on how many kilos you have to lose, there will be more or fewer stages, but in principle there may be an initial phase with greater changes; a second phase in which some foods not recommended at the beginning are introduced and the quantity of others is increased; and a third, which would be what we call "maintenance", which is actually the way to eat "forever."
Better to eat well than "diet"
But you will not spend your life on a diet, but you will always eat following the same healthy habits and you will occasionally introduce foods that are not so recommended, such as cakes or chips, for example; or you will give yourself a "tribute" in a meal in which you will not control either ingredients or quantities. But … then you will make up for it with lighter meals in the following days. In this way, you will be able to lose weight and stay in it.
