How to deal with hunger when you are on a diet? How to start eating less?
When I sat down to write my first article that “I am doing everything right, I am on a diet, but not losing weight,” I hoped to limit myself to a 2-3-article text. But the further I tried to open the topic of losing weight, the more I realized that some of the information was left behind the scenes, and people still have questions on the topic. Today (and this is the 6th article from the cycle) I want to share life-loafing: how to reduce my appetite, how less to eat, what to do with a feeling of hunger on a diet. A diet, in this case, the case, we will consider simply a balanced diet for proteins, fats and carbohydrates and a decrease in calories. Nothing more!
Do you remember from the previous texts, in order to lose weight, we will have to reconsider nutrition and our eating habits? This is what we will do.
What is hunger? Why do we want to eat?
A modern person living in a large metropolis almost certainly did not experience a real feeling of hunger. We feel the urge to eat, appetite, but not hunger. Few people consciously conducted an experiment on themselves to find a scale of 1 to 10 in their desire to eat. I would not recommend experimenting with starvation for more than 3 days without the supervision of a doctor. But you will be very surprised when you learn from your own experience that the body can perfectly cope for a day or two without food, while maintaining workability, activity.
We are so used to consuming food many times every day that we have accustomed ourselves (our body) to regular replenishment of calories. We consume them in excess, so for most people the body stores calories in the form of adipose tissue.
If you have breakfast every morning, then over many years the body adjusts its processes to your meals, setting up the hormonal system in advance.
We have a mechanism that allows you to start the process of extracting a lack of energy from our fat stores - it is called lipolysis. It starts in situations when the body experiences a lack of energy for some time, and then “reluctantly” (because it is a costly process), it begins to convert our fat back into necessary energy. The lipolysis process starts during the recovery period (rest and sleep).
For some, this will be a break in their templates, but during jogging or exercising in the gym you do not burn fat, you spend calories from glycogen, which is stored in the liver and muscles. Having spent these energy reserves, the body has two ways: to restore glycogen from the consumed food, or from your internal fat.
An example for clarity.If we could spend fat in the process of exercise to make up for the lack of energy, then by running, we could not stop for several days until our fat reserves are completely exhausted. Imagine a picture: a fat man ran out of point A and would he have run thin already in point B? No, that doesn't work like that! We need a rest, during which we restore our energy reserves. The hormones that regulate this process are taken for work.
Will your body start to waste fat if it regularly receives calories with food? Not! He needs to create conditions when, on the one hand, we do not get calories, and on the other hand we spend more. Then the lipolysis process will normally go.
Why are athletes more resilient? Their body is adapted to the loads, their muscular and cardiovascular systems are prepared, glycogen reserves are higher. You drive a car with a volume of 1 liter, with a small gas tank, they drive cars of 2-3 liters with large tanks, boosted engines and reinforced suspension. You have runs (physical activity) of 10-20 km in the city, they travel a hundred kilometers off-road.
The trouble is that modern people, although they have this evolutionary mechanism for replenishing energy from fat depots, work for most people very badly. There was no need to make up for the deficit in this way. It is easier to get energy with food (it is abundant around) and safer.
Why is there so much negative information about carbohydrates? Why eat less carbohydrates from sweets?
I have already said that some products are demonized, while others are endowed with magical properties. It’s just fuel for the body, a necessary building material, which is used to maintain vital functions. Carbohydrates - good fuel, with high efficiency! If you regularly consume carbohydrates in large quantities, and physical activity remains low, this will cause your obesity.
People do not eat fat from fat, but from an excess of carbohydrates.
Over time, the body adapts to frequent and high-calorie foods. Your brain will regularly send you signals, activating your search activity, and reward you with positive emotions if you eat sweets. The brain is voracious, having a relatively small mass, it consumes up to 20% of the energy that it receives in the form of glucose. To eat sweets is to give the required glucose to the brain.
By good will, your body and your brain will not give up the desire to consume carbohydrates. The fact that you do not like your appearance is a purely personal drama. Want a result? You will have to reconfigure the body and monitor its nutrition.
Poyev so-called “Fast carbohydrates”, we instantly raise blood sugar. In response, the pancreas releases insulin to lower its sugar level and deliver energy to “hungry cells”. After a while, the blood sugar level drops quite low, and we perceive it as a “hungry” signal. There is an abundance of energy in the body, but we feel like eating again. It turns out a kind of swing: high sugar-insulin-low sugar.
You see now why my mother said in her childhood: if you don’t eat sweets, you’ll kill your appetite. Not in the sense that you do not want to eat, but in the sense that you will upset the balance. For this reason, desserts are served at the end of the meal. And in order to stimulate your appetite, in some restaurants, as a compliment, they serve muffin with butter (you will eat more). Think about it next time by taking a bun from a bread basket in a restaurant.
Relationship with food. Food as reward and pleasure.
Surely, many have heard the expression: "you need to eat in order to live, and not live in order to eat." Yes, we, like other animals, are able to enjoy food. Yes, now we don’t need to walk 10-20 kilometers a day to find food. Until recently, people were starving. 97% of our ancestors faced real hunger, and gourmet food was the destiny of 3% of the upper class. Is it a joke that once ice cream was a treat of kings, and now anyone can buy himself a box in a store. My mother, born in 1954, talked about how she first tried marshmallows at school, and how impressed she was. Peasant food is quite simple, rude. All so-called "haute cuisine" came from aristocratic houses of the old world. Slimness was a sign of poverty, and fullness a sign of wealth and status. In some regions, this tradition is still preserved.
But what are we observing now? Any citizen can afford haute cuisine, exquisite goodies at every step, culinary shows and recipes everywhere, food points open every day.
Do not we deserve it, is it worth denying ourselves the pleasure to try a new dish? What places do tourists rush to find in the first place, what memories do we hasten to share with friends?
Today, food has ceased to fulfill simply the function of satisfying hunger, the industry has turned it into a way to make money and give pleasure.I do not urge to give up pleasure, especially since I can’t do it, and I myself like to eat delicious food.
But start treating food, first of all, as a function, and, secondly, as a way to have fun. When choosing between “tasty and healthy”, stop choosing “healthy”, and then think about how “tasty” you can cook it.
A few words about the "healthy food" delivery service
It is a pity for a modern person to spend time to sort out cooking matters, he will prefer ready-made food, or semi-finished product. That is why “healthy food” delivery services become popular when calories are counted for you, a set of products with a simple recipe are prepared or put down. Such a service is not cheap, and people earn money on your laziness and lack of skills in counting calories and creating your own diet. And as the analysis of some domestic services shows, they can also cheat, mislead and not monitor the quality here.
Do not make a cult of food! Life Weight Loss.
Stop creating a cult from food! You will save yourself a lot of problems and negative consequences if you stop creating a cult from food and start looking at it simply as a necessary set of proteins, fats and carbohydrates. It’s better to be puzzled, and find a dozen recipes that will help you prepare a healthy and tasty dish for you. It is better to refuse semi-finished products and fast food, because you do not know how they were prepared. And in the restaurant, give preference to meat and vegetables.
Stop snacking all the time! Limit yourself to a few meals a day, in which you will begin to consume your daily intake of calories balanced by BZHU (proteins, fats and carbohydrates). Frequent snacks will not accelerate your metabolism, as some authors advise. Our metabolism is the speed and characteristics of chemical reactions in the body, and this is a genetically specified parameter. You will quickly kill your metabolism with frequent and uncontrolled snacks with a high content of carbohydrates. Earn metabolic syndrome and insulin resistance.
I admit that someone feels comfortable absorbing food in small portions throughout the day. To me, during the period of weight loss, it seems optimal 1 full meal, and 1 additional for well-being.
There is no need to take breakfast! Moreover, if you gradually (week after week) begin to shift your first meal by 1 hour, you will accustom your body to such a diet. You will get rid of regular jumps in insulin, and prolong the positive effects of growth hormone, which is produced during night sleep and its deep phase.The body normally tolerates several hours without food. Allow him to adapt, do it gradually.
And you can train on an empty stomach, and you don’t need to eat right after training (bodybuilders will object here, but they have other tasks, and many continue to live with myths of the mid-20th century, for example, about the “carbohydrate window”).
Get to know your hunger! Overweight people are accustomed to taking the slightest discomfort as a feeling of hunger. Due to its metabolic syndrome, any decrease in blood sugar provokes eating sweets. But in return they do not receive energy and a surge of strength, but receive drowsiness, a feeling of tiredness, a desire to lie down and sleep. These are signs of a metabolic syndrome, your hormonal system is ineffective. You just store fat. Pushing your first meals further in time and completely eliminating snacks, you will not only recognize the feeling of hunger, but will help the body tune in to the process of lipolysis. Week after week, the body will regain its ability to replenish energy reserves from internal fats.
Do not rush to extremes and do not put any experiments on yourself! You know yourself too poorly; you do not control your condition by regularly taking tests. Any sharp change in environmental factors will certainly lead to stress, and possibly a malfunction of the systems. Do not check yourself for endurance and begin to practice prolonged fasting (with liquid and even more so dry) without the supervision of a doctor. You will not change your habits that have been developed over the years in one week, and you can harm yourself.
Empirically determine a fairly comfortable daily intake of carbohydrates. This is the amount of carbohydrates at which you feel quite efficient, without fainting and without dizziness. Try to reduce this amount by 10 grams in a week, then try to further reduce by 10 grams. You will find the corridor in which you will be comfortable, and find out your individual consumption rate. As carbohydrates, give preference to the so-called. “Slow carbohydrates” (cereals, except for white rice, quick oatmeal and semolina, legumes, whole grain bread, fruits (except bananas, grapes). They are called “slow” because they provide us with energy longer and more uniformly, unlike “ fast "in the form of sweets.
Consider your calorie intake! There are general calorie standards, but they are like the average temperature in a hospital. You can focus on them, but over time you need to find out how many calories are enough for you to keep fit, and how much you need to cut back on your diet, or increase your activity to start the fat burning process.
In conclusion.
Again, while I was writing this article, I realized how much more information was left behind the scenes. Some of the questions that I set out in one paragraph deserve a separate article. At a minimum, I would also like to go over various kinds of myths that came from the sports field, and have been circulating for several generations in halls and various public places, others came from dietetics of the 70-80s of the 20th century (for example, about the dangers of cholesterol that changed the food industry , forcing to produce low-fat products). Myths about fractional nutrition, about the thermal effect of food, “acceleration of metabolism”, “muscle burning”, sports supplements, fat burners, “eat breakfast yourself, share lunch with a friend, and give dinner to the enemy” (try to find the author of this statement, everyone will deny ), the need to forcibly drink water, even food by blood type (God forgive me). Therefore, wait for the continuation, we will go through the myths of nutrition.
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