Weight loss secrets: Weight control tips as easy as brushing your teeth

Many people often ask me "what to eat", which is a very strange question. To paraphrase what my father often says, "I don't need to study nutrition, I still raised you so tall and so healthy." Yes, eating is an innate ability, but because modern diet is full of too many temptations, many problems arise, especially for people who want to control their weight, it is an infinite challenge. There is a beverage store on almost every street, and fried chicken, fried chicken, scallion pancakes can be found every few steps... Not to mention the convenience stores all over Taiwan. It really takes a lot of effort to resist these temptations.

Coming back to the knowledge level, do you really not know what to do when it comes to weight control? My consistent approach is just the four simple and well-known words "eat less and exercise more", but I just can't do it! Why can't it be done? Because of "uncomfortable", what we need to do is to transform the knowledge of "eat less and exercise more" that you already know into a habit of daily life, just like the habit of brushing your teeth every day. Then you will not feel that weight control is a painful thing.

The following are four conceptual techniques for you to choose from. You don't have to do all of them. Just pick the ones that suit you. As long as you make one or two of them become habits, I think it will help with weight control.

The first step: 70% full

Our living environment is full of food temptations, which makes it difficult for us to control our mouths. "Not feeling hungry" is a big problem. Think about it, have you ever felt "hungry" between meals? You don't feel hungry, but you keep stuffing food into your stomach because "it's time to eat." You don't need to learn physiology and biochemistry to know that this means that the food in the gastrointestinal tract has not been fully digested and absorbed, and you're stuffing more food into your stomach, which increases the burden on the gastrointestinal tract.

Japan conducted a 20-year study in which monkeys were divided into two groups. Monkeys in Group A were placed in an all-you-can-eat restaurant, where they could eat every meal; monkeys in Group B were only provided 70% of the food they needed at each meal. Twenty years later, the monkeys that had been fed all they could looked old, had poor skin, and dull hair. In fact, you don’t need to look at animal experiments. If you look at the before and after weight loss photos on the Internet, you will find that when you lose weight, your entire appearance exudes a younger feeling. So the way to stay young, reverse aging, and have eternal youth is to not eat too much!

The second trick: For tempting foods that are high in sugar, oil, salt, and calories, just taste them briefly.

Many Taiwanese snacks tempt our taste buds with their thickened, fried, and heavy flavors. The unique recipes of many snacks also make us linger. In terms of knowledge and rationality, we know very well that eating these is not good for weight control, but in terms of emotions and human nature, a large part of eating is for happiness. If you are worried that eating this will increase your blood lipids, gain weight, or cause your blood pressure to soar... then these pressures are also unhealthy.

So if you ask me whether you can eat Coke, potato chips, instant noodles, etc., I would say, of course you can, but when you really want to eat them, just go to the convenience store and buy a pack or a can to satisfy your mood. Don't go to a hypermarket and carry back a box of 24 cans, thinking that it's New Year's Day every day and you can eat and drink as much as you want.

Manufacturers invite celebrities to endorse these snacks. When the celebrities in the advertisements eat these snacks, they are happy and full of energy, making us mistakenly believe that if we eat the same things as the celebrities, we will become male gods or goddesses like them. But if we follow suit and eat too much, we will only become a pig head, not a male god or goddess. Why? The stars in the advertisements eat one bite after another, but in real life, they only take one or two bites, and the rest is shared with the staff next to them. So, just eat what you have and stop after a brief taste.

Tip 3: Make good friends and be a good friend to others

Confucius mentioned that the three beneficial friends are a friend who is upright, a friend who is understanding, and a friend who is knowledgeable. A good friend is one who is upright, honest, and knowledgeable. He or she will tell you directly that a certain piece of clothing "does not look good on you" instead of saying in a roundabout way that the clothing looks "very special" and then laughing at you. In other words, when you gain weight, he or she will directly tell you that you have gained weight instead of saying that you have become cuter recently.

So when you are trying to control your weight and have not reached your target weight, someone may say: "You have lost a lot of weight, that's enough, let's go out for a big meal to celebrate", then you have to judge in your heart whether this is a bad friend or a good friend.

The modern alternative version of the beneficiary has three things: quality, quantity, and smell. On FB, I often see many people sharing food, and the titles are nothing more than, this tastes great, the quantity is large, and the taste is good, making people want to rush to the scene to taste the delicacy. Similar scenes are pulled to the office. On a hot afternoon, someone said, I know a beverage store with delicious drinks and super large cups. Let's go to group buy and order drinks to cool down, okay? Yes, that's right, this is a bad friend for weight control.

But this does not mean that we should reject all social activities with colleagues and friends. We can be good friends. We can invite everyone to exercise together and buy healthy food together.

Tip 4: Food replacement, eat natural, low GI food

"Natural is better" This should need no further explanation. Pork can be cut into slices, made into meatballs, and made into cans of meat floss. It is still pork. The principle of food substitution is to replace processed ones with natural ones. Choose slices of meat that are closest to the original food, rather than meatballs and meat floss that only satisfy the taste buds and have a lot of additives.

"Low GI" foods are foods that slow down the rise in blood sugar in the body and do not cause the body to secrete too much insulin. If you eat high GI foods, your blood sugar will rise very high, and then the body will secrete a large amount of insulin to quickly lower blood sugar. If blood sugar is too low, you will feel hungry, and hunger will cause you to want to eat, which will continue into a vicious cycle. In addition, insulin is a hormone that promotes synthesis, and it will also promote the synthesis of fat. Therefore, choosing low GI foods can keep blood sugar fluctuations small, prevent insulin from being secreted in large quantities, stabilize blood sugar, and prevent hunger from quickly occurring. For example, a bowl of white rice and brown rice have similar calories and starch content, but their GI values ​​are very different. The GI values ​​of white rice and brown rice are 84 and 56 respectively, which means that you will not feel hungry after eating brown rice!

The principle of food substitution is to replace high GI with low GI. The characteristics of low GI food are high fiber (e.g. brown rice is better than white rice), low sugar (e.g. French bread is better than donuts), low processing (e.g. meat slices are better than meat floss), and low degree of gelatinization (e.g. dry noodles are better than noodle paste).

Having said so much, I want to end with a quote from Aristotle...

Excellence is not an act, but a habit

Excellence is a habit

Think about Jeremy Lin, who performs so well on the court. His excellence is accumulated by doing boring basic skills such as shooting and passing every day. Practicing basic skills every day has become a habit and he no longer feels it is hard. Weight control is painful because we have not turned correct eating behaviors into daily habits. If any of "eat until 70% full", "eat just a little", "be good friends with each other" and "food substitution" are internalized as daily habits like brushing teeth, which you would feel weird if you don't do them, I think you will control your weight unknowingly and inexplicably.

This article is from Nutrition

※For more information, please see "Nutrition Notes"