How to lose weight without damaging your health: Doctor's advice and top diet mistakes

Summer is still two months away, so it’s time to take care of yourself! But you need to stay in shape wisely. We'll join the experts to find out how many kilograms you can lose in a month, why extreme diets are harmful, and how to eliminate hunger pangs by changing your diet.We'll tell you some basic rules to help you get rid of those extra pounds.

Basic rules for safe weight loss

Everyone dreams of having a "beach body, " and it's very possible to get it even if you weigh dozens of pounds. But it's not a quick thing. Why is it impossible to lose more than 8 kilograms healthily in summer? What health problems can extreme diets cause? But how can we lose weight correctly? All these important questions are answered by nutritionist and gastroenterologist Svetlana Kovaleva.

"If we talk about proper weight loss, then you need to prepare for it immediately, it will not happen quickly, " our interlocutor points out. ——Because certain components have accumulated in the body for a long time, it takes enough time to reset them. The speed of human metabolic processes does not increase dramatically.

The main advice from doctors concerns the main components of any diet: calorie content and the proportions of protein, fat and carbohydrates.

Calories Matter

—The diet should not be too low in calories. Sometimes people not only start incorporating fasting days into their diet, but actually turn to fasting. This is not correct and the body will not see it as physiologically correct nutrition, it will just feel stressed and not know what to do in this situation. Therefore, the reduction in food volume should be smooth. "said the nutritionist.

The calorie content of each meal should be stated individually.

- If it turns out that you can't eat breakfast and you skipped lunch, then you should not lose all calories before going to bed. Because our bodies have a circadian rhythm, at night the body prepares to sleep instead of processing the calories it receives.

Protein, fat and carbohydrates

However, cutting calories without consideration, even within normal ranges, can be harmful to your health if you do not consider the amount of protein, fat, and carbohydrates in your diet. What should it look like?

Protein: Correct Count

Doctors point out that most people need to eat within the normal range or slightly higher amounts of protein when trying to lose weight. But how to calculate it? it's actually really easy:

— Usually starting out, depending on how overweight you are, protein is considered to be 1 to 1. 5 grams per kilogram. This means pure protein. That is, suppose a person weighs 90 kilograms.

This means that he should not eat 90 grams of chicken, but he should calculate how much poultry, fish and meat he needs so that they provide him with the required amount of protein. We have many calculators for this on the internet.

In this case, chicken is 450 grams. In addition, other products also contain protein, so here you can calculate it in detail based on what a person usually eats.

Fat: Healthy but not so good

"There is no doubt that excess fat should not be included in the diet, " nutritionists point out. - They are only available in large quantities in certain dietary options. When we talk about fats, their quality characteristics are important. You can use vegetable oil, or you can have hearty beef, where we get protein but also eat a lot of fat. Beef isn't the worst choice though. There's often pork.

Or you could use cold-pressed vegetable oil and pair it with cake and bitters. All the good stuff is kept there, and the oils are exchanged in a completely different way, unlike butter and some dairy products, like cheese, which contain more fat or oil.

Carbohydrates: from simple to complex

— Most often, the diet is based on reducing the amount of carbohydrates. But it would be more correct to simply change their structure qualitatively.

First of all, it is necessary to reduce as much as possible simple sugars or so-called added sugars: sugar itself, cakes, ice cream and other confectionery products that we love, Svetlana Kovaleva points out. Anything made from flour, soft wheat pasta, refined rice, and other simple carbohydrates should be eliminated from your diet. What to replace them with?

— These are more complete grains and require longer cooking times. Even oatmeal can be cooked in five minutes or can be cooked longer. Also, in a carbohydrate-based side dish, we can also add protein - we're talking about beans.

simplicity and regularity

Correct calculation of the caloric content and proportions of protein, fat and carbohydrates in dietary nutrition will not be difficult at all if you adhere to another basic principle of correct nutrition - to compose your diet from the most simple and understandable products. Long text on packaging is not an option for us.

"It's just cereal, just chicken, not meatballs, meatballs, sausage or sausage, " Svetlana Kovaleva stressed.

In addition, the frequency and regularity of meals are also very important.

——There are many different views on this issue. But practice shows that diversity is necessary. Especially as a gastroenterologist, I cannot ignore this topic. You need to eat at least three meals a day, otherwise many of us like to eat once or twice - it just doesn't work.

drinking habits

"You can't ignore your drinking habits either, " the nutritionist points out. — More and more people are drinking three drinks a day. It would also be nice if it was water instead of tea or coffee. All metabolic processes occur in the aquatic environment.

Additionally, feelings of hunger are often misinterpreted. In other words, you may be thirsty, so you need to adjust the way you drink water.

How much water should you drink every day? Those infamous eight-cup glasses? No. As with other nutrients, the amount of water required is calculated individually.

— There are many calculation formulas, but at the beginning I recommend this formula: 25 ml per kilogram of body weight. Daily standards appear for water, with other beverages conditionally calculated for simplicity at half the amount consumed.

If a person consumes much less and has related problems, such as high blood pressure, then there is no need to suddenly reach this amount. You can add 200 ml every 2-3 days to assess your condition, pulse, blood pressure and analyze whether the salt content in your food has increased as this is the easiest option to help retain water and increase blood pressure. Water itself doesn't usually cause this.

Don't forget to train

Experts point out that changing eating habits is the basis for weight loss, but we must not forget physical exercise.

— In rare cases, it is possible to achieve the desired rate of weight loss without physical activity, as it is one thing to reduce calories but another to maintain muscle mass that we still need. We still want a beautiful body, and the more muscle we have, the more intense the metabolic processes in the body become.

The choice of training program is also individual, not to mention the need to gradually and carefully increase physical activity. But that's a topic for another discussion.

Extreme weight loss and its dangers

Do you dream of losing a few dozen kilograms before summer arrives? Consider whether you are ready to sacrifice your health for such a dubious achievement. How much weight can you lose per month without damaging your health?

"Under healthy conditions, the medically accepted weight standard is 4 kilograms, " the nutritionist replied. — About one kilogram per week. Of course, there may be individual differences: a little more, a little less, but fatty liver usually occurs when you are overweight.

Additionally, if you repeatedly try to lose weight, you may develop bile stagnation or have stones forming in your gallbladder. Therefore, it is important to provide the necessary support and ensure that weight loss is not too rapid.

What would happen if you went all out, went on an extreme diet, or even starved yourself?

— First, the muscles "melt" and water leaves the body. As a result, you won't feel good—at least, not in a good mood. In addition, questions arise about the function of the gastrointestinal tract: it is still a complex of organs that must work properly on a regular basis, otherwise problems may arise.

Problems can also occur with the biliary system, and disruption of its function can have many consequences: from gastritis to impaired gastrointestinal motility, constipation, bloating due to poorly functioning intestinal flora, and more.

If you decide to drink only mineral water or eat very few calories for a few weeks in order to put on an evening dress for the holidays, remember: after such a diet you cannot avoid feeling discomfort, headaches and other ailments, and in this context, even hunger itself is not that terrible. Therefore, doctors suggest that you should still prepare for important events in advance - or just buy a piece of clothing that is suitable for you.

Minimum Calories in the Diet

We have all heard that the average person needs about 2, 000 calories a day. But, of course, this amount is very average: for some people it is too much, while others will starve from such a caloric intake.

"This is all calculated individually, because people have different initial parameters, different types of activities, different ages, different choices of exercise, " Svetlana Kovaleva emphasizes. - So I can't say definitively what the upper limit is.

Nutritionists point out that the kilocalories needed for maintenance and weight loss vary and depend on how many people actually eat "in the first place. "But if you drastically "cut" 500 calories from your "starting" caloric intake, a person will experience terrible hunger - such a diet will not lead to healthy weight loss.

— We now have many calculator apps that can efficiently calculate the number of kilocalories needed using certain formulas; this will be the easiest to use.

As for the lower limit of calories, doctors emphasize that you should not adopt a diet of 1, 000-1, 200 calories a day, as this will not bring any benefits.

How to deal with hunger during weight loss?

Giving up big meals and switching to healthy eating is not an easy task. Often, along this path, you might not only develop an aversion to oatmeal and broccoli, but also experience extreme hunger. Even if the diet itself is balanced, a stomach accustomed to large amounts of food can send desperate signals to the brain that it needs to eat another half a can. How to become? Nutritionist shares life tips:

- First of all, you need to try to gradually move away from large amounts of calories so that the body does not feel too much hunger pangs.

The second point is that the meals are distributed evenly. That is, if we use some app to calculate a certain amount of calories and eat three times, and in the middle we feel very hungry, then we try to spread the same amount of food into four meals. Because, if before one could have a snack on a piece of bread or a sandwich, now we are trying to take a more systematic approach to meals.

Hunger doesn't just happen on an empty stomach: sometimes we've eaten but feel as if we haven't. Then you just have to wait a certain amount of time. You can walk your dog, go for a walk, do something to distract yourself.

In fact, the gastrointestinal tract needs time for the stomach to contract. If a person eats a lot, the size of his stomach will increase. Here we have to wait longer to see this effect.

However, in general, I recommend spreading meals evenly throughout the day, or offering some kind of healthy snack that doesn't disrupt our entire diet and cause the calorie count to increase more than planned.