What are the key points of dietary guidance for weight management?

I have helped more than ten friends around me adjust their diet plans. My deepest feeling is that the core logic of weight management diet is never to starve yourself or completely quit certain types of food, but to establish a sustainable negative energy balance model that adapts to your living habits. All techniques serve this core.

I once met a girl who works in Internet operations. She initially followed the "Quick Weight Loss Recipe" on the Internet, boiled vegetables and 100g of chicken breast for every meal. After three weeks, she actually lost 6 pounds. However, on Friday, she had a Chongqing hotpot meal with her colleagues during a team building, and she immediately gained back 4 pounds. She lost her mentality and overate for less than half a month, but she was still 2 pounds heavier than before she lost weight. To put it bluntly, the eating pattern she chose did not match her pace of life at all - working overtime until nine every day was a waste of her brain, and she occasionally had to have dinner with colleagues and eat bland boiled vegetables. This was inherently anti-human, and it was strange that she could persevere.

There are a lot of controversies about diet structure on the Internet now. Some people say that low-carb ketogenic diet will lose weight quickly, while others say that high-carb and low-fat diet will not harm metabolism. In fact, there is nothing wrong with both of these opinions. The key is to see which one is suitable for you. If you eat meat every meal and don’t like to eat staple foods such as steamed buns and noodles, then the low-carb mode is not a hardship for you at all, and you won’t have any burden if you stick to it for two or three months. ； But if you have loved to eat rice and noodles since you were a child, and you don’t even touch a morsel of the staple food, you will be so greedy within a week, and it will be easier for you to lose your gong.

There is no need to stare at the calorie table of food. It is actually more important to pay more attention to the feeling of fullness. I used to have a friend who was a middle school teacher. At first she strictly counted the calories. She only ate 100g of white rice and a small piece of fried chicken breast in one meal. As a result, she was so hungry that she felt dizzy during the third period in the morning. The rice was replaced with half brown rice and half quinoa, and a small bowl of boiled vegetables was added. The total calories were actually less than 30 calories more, but she didn't feel hungry until she got off work. She just quietly adjusted for half a year, lost 12 pounds, and now eats normally and has not regained it.

There is also a fierce debate now about "should we completely stop adding sugar?" In fact, for ordinary people without blood sugar problems, according to the recommendations of the Dietary Guidelines, it is completely OK to control added sugar within 25g per day. There is no need to see sugary things like seeing a scourge. I myself drink a cup of iced milk tea with 30% sugar every week. As long as I eat less than half a bowl of staple food that day and free up these calories, it is better than holding it in for a month and then drinking three cups at once and stuffing two extra boxes of cakes.

In fact, to put it bluntly, diet for weight management is never a temporary task that requires gritting one's teeth and sticking to it. It is more like fine-tuning small daily eating habits. For example, when ordering takeout, make a note to add less oil, drink milk tea with less sugar instead of full sugar, and replace white rice with whole grains twice a week. These inconspicuous small changes are much more effective than if you insist on eating boiled vegetables for three months. After all, the method that can be persisted is the really useful method.