Eat meal replacements and nutritional supplements to develop a physique that is easy to lose weight? Be careful of the reverse yo-yo effect, otherwise you will gain weight again.

At first, I wanted to be thin rather than cute.

I am a petite girl who is only 152 cm tall. I am not fat by nature, but my limbs are naturally strong and my face is round and chubby. To put it nicely, I have a baby face and baby fat. Although everyone says this is cute, the people, things, objects and environment around me keep telling me that this is called "fat".

Given my height, most clothes of normal size never fit me well. Clothes with sleeves always make my arms look bloated. No matter what style of jeans I wear, my legs look short and thick. Some male classmates even laughed at my arms, which are twice as long as those of other girls in the class. My family and relatives also often remind me, intentionally or unintentionally, that I have thick legs. These dressing difficulties, coupled with the teasing and reminders from others, made me feel very insecure and lacking confidence in my body shape since I was a child. I always wanted clothes to be as loose as possible, and preferably long enough to cover my thick thighs and big butt.

After junior high school, my weight started to start with 5 for the first time in my life. When I found that the female classmates around me all started with 4, I was deeply constrained and influenced by the social values ​​that always encourage girls to pursue "thinness is beauty", and thus began my journey of losing weight.

I've been exercising, but I still can't lose weight.

When I was a child, I was actually very active and loved sports. I would go to the swimming pool to swim almost every night and go to the park to skate on holidays. Sports were a happy and natural leisure activity for me. Later, in order to lose weight, I learned that swimming could burn the most calories, so I started swimming like crazy.

During the two months of summer vacation, I could swim at least 40 times every day. Exercise itself became not a pleasure, but a hard work to "make myself thinner." Although adolescence is the period when nutrition is most needed for growth, I ate very little deliberately for fear of getting fat. Looking back, although I became thinner at that time, my lower body and arms still looked fleshy. Therefore, I still felt that I was not thin enough and had no confidence in myself.

Later, perhaps because I reached puberty, my food intake, appetite and nutrient absorption all increased. I loved snacks and desserts, and gradually became less interested in exercise, so naturally I began to gain weight rapidly. That was my first time experiencing the feeling of gaining weight again: my high school uniform became super tight, and in the winter I looked like a small snowball that could roll up at any time; when I gave mooncakes to my teacher during the Mid-Autumn Festival, my teacher even joked that my face was as round as the mooncakes!

The "Zheng Duoyan Weight Loss Exercise" was very popular at that time. I also followed it for 30 to 40 minutes every day, fantasizing that I could also get a similar body shape. Now I know that to have a tight and nice figure like Zheng Duoyan, it actually requires strict diet control and weight training, and hard work and perseverance. It is impossible to get that kind of body shape in your lifetime just by doing slimming exercises for 30 minutes every day.

At that time, I didn’t know how to control my diet correctly or how to manage the portion sizes. In addition, I spent almost the entire day sitting and studying during my school years. Not only did I not lose any weight, I was even slowly gaining weight.

The terrible cycle of "overeating, exercise, dieting, and weight gain"

During the summer vacation before entering college, I first came into contact with a weight loss tool called "meal replacement shakes". Encouraged by my direct seller, I started using shakes to replace breakfast. After eating meal replacements for two months, I did lose weight, but because I was a college student with a limited budget, I didn't continue using them. After returning to a normal diet, I naturally gained weight again and even started to have a tendency to overeat.

When there was no one around in the dormitory, I could finish a family-sized portion of chocolate biscuits in one night. Even if I no longer found them tasty or enjoyable, I still couldn’t control myself and kept stuffing myself until my stomach felt very uncomfortable. After eating, I feel full of guilt. Because I am afraid of getting fat, I will go on a strict diet and run like crazy the next day, trying to balance the guilt and burn off the calories I ate.

But the formula of "out-of-control binge eating, followed by crazy exercise to burn off energy" did not make me better. Instead, it made me fall into a dark abyss of constant binge eating, dieting, and then even harder exercise. After losing weight, you return to bad habits and become fat again, and when you gain weight, you abuse yourself in radical ways to lose weight. No matter how hard you try to lose weight, people around you will often look at you with sympathy and say: Why are you trying so hard but still not losing weight?

I feel very painful and helpless. As long as someone touches this most vulnerable part, I will break down and cry in an instant. I don’t know why life has to be so tiring just because of my obsession with “becoming a little thinner”.

Because I was so eager to lose weight, I started using the direct seller's meal replacement shakes again, and this time I was more radical and only used one 88-calorie shake to replace my original breakfast and dinner. By drastically reducing my daily calorie intake, I naturally lost 2 kg in one month and reduced my body fat by 2%.

But this happiness did not last long. After losing a little weight, I thought, "Wow! I can finally relax and treat myself!" Then, I went to the bakery, bought a bunch of bread, and ate it all in one night! And it was completely out of control and I kept eating like this for several days in a row.

Yes, I started the vicious cycle of binge eating again, and when I was bingeing, I would think: "I can just drink milkshakes to lose weight." In fact, doing this is actually a disguised form of dieting again. Later, I suddenly realized that this mentality was neither healthy nor correct, so I made up my mind that in the future I would no longer rely on any slimming products, but instead control my diet and exercise well.

Can you become a lean body by taking nutritional supplements?

Even though I encountered setbacks in my weight loss efforts, I never gave up. I still believe that as long as I persist and keep trying, I will find the right method to lose weight and never gain weight again. After entering society and starting to work as an office worker, I signed up for a gym near my company in order to develop a habit of exercising. I exercised three days a week, mainly taking one-hour group aerobic classes, such as yoga, boxing aerobics, flywheel, and muscle sculpting classes. At the same time, I brought my own lunch and controlled my diet.

However, after a few months of continuous exercise, although my inbody data showed that my muscle mass increased, my body fat also increased! At that time, I didn’t know that “wrong diet” played a big role. Although I read a lot of information on the Internet to learn how to control my diet correctly, I still felt confused and helpless.

At the end of 2017, a friend invited me to join a "45-day health management plan" sold by an American direct sales company, which claimed that it could change physical condition and lose weight through healthy eating. My friends assured me that this would definitely be the last time I would lose weight! I also read a lot of their testimonies, so I, with my weak brain waves, invested a total of more than 25,000 yuan in nutritional products, and every day I ate the direct sales diet menu that was said to change my physique.

I remember that in the first two weeks of implementing the menu, I could only eat protein foods every day, and I had to drink large amounts of protein powder and various nutritional supplements from the direct seller on a regular basis. I couldn't touch any starch or even vegetables or fruits, so I started to suffer from severe constipation. They said I had to increase the amount of B complex to help with bowel movements, but the constipation condition still didn't improve.

It was not until the diet plan reached the stage where I could eat vegetables and fruits on the menu and my body was replenished with dietary fiber that my constipation problem was truly solved. I felt miserable throughout the entire plan because the food choices were too restrictive and I had to force myself to eat a lot of nutritious foods. Friends around me reminded me that this was not a long-term approach, and my family also advised me not to rely on nutritional supplements but to eat real food. But I was so naive at the time that I thought, "This is the last time I can lose weight. Anyway, as long as I can make it through 45 days and "change my body constitution", I will never gain weight again in my life!"

As a result, my body shape didn't change much after the plan ended. Looking at myself in the mirror, my belly was still big, and my legs and arms were still thick. In addition, I had been suppressed for too long during the implementation of the plan, so I started to binge eat and drink a lot. I ate all the forbidden foods in the previous diet plan, whether I liked it or not, I took out all the food and stuffed it into my stomach. I was bingeing every day, and I felt extremely disappointed and desperate with myself every day. I gained weight again and was even fatter than before I joined the plan.

This article is from the book "Delicious Fitness Bento Cooking Class: 54 Selected Recipes from the Popular IG Fitness Cooking Girl, Bento Regular Dishes x Hearty Brunch x Energy Snacks, No Dieting, No Starvation, No Pressure to Transform Your Body" by Happiness Culture