Anyone who has never experienced this certainly knows someone who has already faced the problem: uncomfortable with their appearance and concerned about their health, the person declares war against excess weight, begins to change their diet, practices physical activities, sleeps better, and After a few months, you see the extra pounds go away. But over time, all that lost weight is regained again.
But why does this happen? Do accommodation and relaxation occur with weight care? Or can this happen because of some problem in the body?
The problem may lie in the “weight set point,” the body’s weight. What happens is this: the body struggles to maintain its importance before the diet.
This “weight definition point” comprises several factors such as genetics, behavior, hormones, and environment. It works alongside metabolism, as metabolism burns energy at a rate that will maintain a person’s “setting point” even if it is higher than what is considered healthy.
Most of the time, weight gain gradually increases the “weight set point.” The good news is that some lifestyle changes can lessen this point.
Can Fast And Restrictive Diets Be A Solution?
If gradual weight gain raises the “weight set point” little by little, could adopting a restrictive diet to lose weight quickly serve as an instant solution to reversing that point?
But How Do You Achieve Lasting Weight Loss?
To achieve sustained weight loss over time, our advice is to focus on diet, exercise, stress, and sleep.
Diet
The strategy includes learning what’s healthy and what’s not when it comes to dieting. The ideal is to do this with the help of a nutrisense nutritionist and take all the questions you have about food with the professional.
It is also essential to learn to control the size of the portions of the food you consume – even when it comes to healthy foods, as anything in excess can cause calorie accumulation.
Another trick is to avoid empty calories—those full of calories but offer little or no nutritional value—while still allowing yourself to indulge in culinary pleasure once in a while.
And perhaps the best advice is to leave this concept of dieting aside and permanently adopt healthy eating habits through food reeducation. This refers to knowing how to have health, nutrition, moderation, and balance in the diet, much less depriving yourself of eating what you like and nothing like going hungry.
Exercises
The recommendation is to invest in aerobic exercise and resistance training, with a frequency of three to five times a week for the first and two to three times a week on non-consecutive days for the second. The guideline is to exercise for at least 25 minutes to 35 minutes daily.
Physical activity works better to prevent weight gain than to start weight loss. In addition, it is necessary to keep in mind that overdoing the exercises can also be damaging.
Exercise can make some people very hungry or make others tired or inactive, due to an injury, for example – which would negate the benefits of physical activity.
Stress
How many people don’t stress by eating calories, sugars, bad fats, and sodium? That’s if you’re not that person yourself…
The problem with stress about weight is that it raises levels of the hormone cortisol, so much so that the substance is known as the stress hormone. Cortisol is also related to the accumulation of body fat.
The more cortisol a person has, the higher their insulin level (a hormone responsible for helping to get sugar out of the blood and into the cells) and the lower their blood sugar levels, thus generating the cravings for food.
So, although it’s not easy, managing stress is also essential for lasting weight loss. Strategies like venting to a friend, meditation, and breathing exercises can help relieve stress. If it’s too difficult to deal with and reduce stress, it’s best to ask a psychologist for help.
Sleep
Poor sleep is another fact that raises cortisol hormone levels. But that’s not the only problem: a stormy night’s sleep also affects the ability to make decisions, translating into choosing foods of low nutritional quality and high calories for meals.
Ideally, try to get seven to nine hours of sleep a night. The information is from the American academic medical center Cleveland Clinic and MedlinePlus, the National Institutes of Health portal in the United States.