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Non-medical weight loss is not necessarily complicated: most of the diets found in magazines can more or less make you achieve it since they are based on fake short-term results which are only due to a loss of glycogen, muscle tissue and water. As a matter of fact, losing weight by following a limited but anarchical, disorganised and unbalanced diet will cause hunger and an unavoidable weight gain when the person starts eating a bit more. The ill-treated body will then have increasingly negative reactions and will spiral into a loss-gain vicious circle...
To lose weight permanently without putting your health at risk and without feeling hungry, you have to eat a healthier diet. It is definitely not about drastically reducing your food intake but about choosing better quality foods, making sure that their intake is well distributed over the day.
To diet successfully, you need to be psychologically prepared, not depressed and feeling guilty or obsessive over the smallest ounce of food (only weigh yourself once a week, more often is unnecessary and unreliable). Losing weight should not be a fast process and it should not be about deprivation. It should be about recovering or correcting your balance and keeping it...
LEARN TO BE PATIENTIt is necessary to lose weight progressively so as to give your body the time to adapt to the loss in fat tissue, particularly for the skin which can lose its firmness on the slimmed down parts of the body. It is not reasonable to try to lose urgently the couple of stones that you took months or even years to put on. A 500 grams per week loss (adding to 13 kgs in 6 months !) is the recommended theoretical weight loss, and that losing weight is never regular (to have good weeks and bad weeks is perfectly normal).
AVOID MEAL SUBSTITUTES
Meal substitutes can be an emergency solution to avoid missing a meal or to control the energy intake of the portion. They do not teach how to correct nutritional mistakes by choosing the right foods and therefore they are harmful in the long run. The energy provided by the meal is generally not sufficient to replace a real meal, even a light one. Furthermore, meal substitutes does not provide the satisfaction real foods provide: they are quickly eaten, small, easily digested and very poor in protective micronutrients. Finally, some people eat them on top of their daily intake, which can be a quite fattening habit !
AVOID DIET PRODUCTS
Diet products (in conventional shops) are often unbalanced, lacking in nutrients and very calorie-reduced: all they do is maintaining you in the loss-gain cycle and sapping your mental energy.
LEARN TO LISTEN TO YOUR BODY AGAIN
It is necessary to learn again how to listen to the body’s signals and how to see the difference between needs, cravings, social pressure and habits.
The desire for food can be present without real hunger: when we salivate on foods we particularly like, we only anticipate the pleasure we will get from eating these foods. This is not hunger that we are experiencing. Hunger is for all edible foods while appetite is selective.
1. Avoid non organic foods as much as you can because they are full of additives, toxic fertilisers or ? and they have been irradiated or given hormonal treatments which have removed their nutritional value and the necessary oligo-elements.
2. Eat wholesome little refined foods (sugar, salt, non refined flour, first cold pressed oil). - Doctor Béguin, a Swiss paediatrician, proved incontestably that non refined sugar (as opposed to little refined simple sugar), far from giving tooth decay, provides on the contrary a protection against it. 18 year old adolescents who only ate white sugar have suffered from tooth decay on average 7 times. Adolescents who only ate non refined sugar never suffered from tooth decay.
Note: Non refined flours must be organic; otherwise they can be even worse than anything as fertilisers tend to fix themselves between the grain and its envelope.
- Flour must be eaten not long after grinding (less than 8 days). Beyond this limit, it gets oxidised and is not healthy anymore. Cattle raised with old flours grow improperly and are weak..
- Margarines are made up of whale fat, copra or palm oil, hydrogenated and with added water. Other chemical treatments are done to modify their taste and flavour. These treatments modify the fatty acids and destroy the Vitamin E. Margarines are rightly suspected to promote the development of cancers and cardio-vascular diseases.
3. Drink a lowly mineralised water so as to flush out your body’s toxins. (Type Roucous-Rosée de la Reine) FR
4. Eat moderately animal fats, meats and dairy products.
5. Avoid to cook foods at a very high temperature and eat fried foods very sparsely; do not re-use the same oil.
6. Give the priority to organic raw and cooked vegetables not cooked at a high temperature. They are rich in the vitamins and oligo-elements that are necessary to a good health. Eat as much fresh foods as you can. Only rarely eat tinned and frozen foods and avoid frequent use of a microwave. A survey conducted in the region of Val-de-Marne in 1990 showed that 75 per cent of women suffer from a lack of zinc. We also note some people suffering from a lack of copper (particularly men), which is a cause of cardio-vascular diseases. The selenium intake (45 µg/jour) is far too low, the recommended daily intake being 50 and 200 µg. We note the same with magnesium and chromium. A proper diet could tackle these problems.
7. Limit your intake of stimulants such as wine, tea and coffee. These substances are dangerous not only because of their nature but also because of the way they are chemically treated. For example coffee is very often covered in oil to speed up toasting. This burnt oil is extremely unhealthy.
Our diet must provide us with the right quantities of all the elements needed for tissue renewal, as well all the substances needed for the body’s various functions and that the body itself cannot produce, namely :- protein and fats, basic elements with which tissues are built;
N.B. : Protein does not only refer to meat. You can also find it in some vegetables, sometimes even in higher proportion. A rice-lentils or a wheat-chick peas dish contains the perfect proportion of protein in terms of quantity and quality. (see vegetable protein) soon in eng.- carbohydrates, energy source (the fuel) without which the body cannot work properly.
- macro-elements such as iron, magnesium and calcium,
- and oligo-elements, bio-catalysts which work in very small quantities but without which the body’s normal reactions do not happen.- vitamins, substances necessary for many body functions. (see vitamin file in FR)
Our diet must be exposed to as little toxic elements as possible so as to preserve our flushing and elimination functions (liver).
THERE ARE NO “BAD FOODS”Food is not fattening, it is nutritious. Some foods are more nutritious than others and we eat too much of them, the extra energy intake will be stored as fat reserves.
A varied diet is a basic way to achieve nutritional balance and to avoid making mistakes. Within the same food group, some foods contain more protein, fat or carbohydrates than the average. By eating a varied diet, we will eventually have average intake of all nutrients. This is how we can for example eat a banana even on a weight-loss diet, even though bananas are sweeter than oranges. It would be a mistake to only eat bananas as this would prevent us from keeping a normal average sugar intake in our total fruit consumption. We can avoid making this mistake by eating a banana, then an apple, then an orange, then a kiwi, then a pear, then a couple of tangerines, and then a banana again, then half a grapefruit, etc.
COOKING DOES NOT HAVE TO BE BORINGDiet cuisine does not require a lot of money and a lot of time. The usual mistake we make when cooking is to think that only fat and salt can give taste to cooked dishes ! By using fat free cooking methods (steamed, boiled, roasted, grilled, wrapped in foil), the real taste of foods can be preserved and their digestion is easier. If well used, spices and herbs will enhance the taste without increasing the energy intake of these foods...
see "The diet dictatorship" (soon in eng.)
SLOW RELEASING SUGARS
They are made up of ramified glucose molecules: the amylase and the amyl pectin, the starch main components. Their digestion requires a lot of time, this is why they progressively release the energy they contain.
Starch can be found in complex carbohydrates: potatoes, grains, beans and derived foods (bread, pasta, biscuits...).
Some slow release sugars act as fast release sugars, i.e. they quickly and excessively increase blood sugar once ingested (we say that they have a high glycaemic index or G.I.): white bread, mashed potatoes, instant pasta, eaten alone.
Isolated “ose” molecules (glucose, fructose, galactose...) or assembled as small two-molecule chains (diholosides such as lactose= glucose+galactose or table sugar= glucose+fructose. When these molecules are in ingested alone (without added protein, fat or fibre) they are very quickly digested. Fast release sugars are therefore only useful as an immediate source of energy (good for intense exercise).
Constituent element of cellular membranes and intercellular sections in vegetables (hemi cellulose, cellulose, xylane, lignin, pectin...), we can find it in fruit, vegetable and grains. Fibre is very good for our health (for example, it protects us from colon and rectal cancers and hypercholesterolemia) and can help us slimming (satiety and enhanced bowel activity). The recommended daily amount of fibre for an adult is about 25 to 30g /day. Unfortunately few people eat such a daily amount: the average daily fibre consumption is only 17g a day in France.
BREAKFAST LIKE A KING, LUNCH LIKE A PRINCE, DINE LIKE A PAUPERIt is advisable to fraction your food intake in smaller although still balanced meals. This does not mean constant grazing. To plan snacks is on the contrary a good way to avoid grazing.
In a weight-loss diet, the energy intake of the snacks has to be taken of the total daily intake. This way, we do not add anything: we distribute our food intake differently and do not eat more.
NEVER MISS A MEALIt is indeed logical to provide your body more fuel when the energy expense is at its highest. Therefore, dinner must be lighter than lunch since we need less energy at night. However, no matter how light it is, you have to make sure your dinner is still balanced.
To deprive yourself of a meal will force your body, through the adaptation process of the hypothalamus (survival reflex), to the fabrication of energy reserves (fat) from the foods of the following meal, as a measure of prevention against possible famine. If food deprivation is too long, the hypothalamus increases its productivity, and therefore its capacity to survive while using much less energy. This process aims at making the body put on weight and/or save fat reserves to survive. Therefore, favouring this process is ill-advised if you already are a bit overweight ! So please avoid missing meals.
Besides, when you miss a meal, you will undoubtedly be hungrier than usual later and you will therefore be more tempted to give in to eating anything, generally high-energy foods such as sweets, cakes, cheese, sausages and pâté. Finally, numerous studies have proved that people missing breakfast eat more than average after midday and are more prone to eating high-energy foods (fat and sweet). If you want to lose weight, it is imperative that you avoid this kind of behaviour
You have to keep your nutritional balance whilst still progressively increasing your energy intake. You have to increase your daily food intake by 150 to 200 calories. If your daily food intake was 1400 calories during the weight-loss phase, then you will increase to 1550/1600 calories for a two-week period. At the end of this period, you will start a new two-week phase during which your daily food intake will be 1750/1800 calories. And so on until your daily intake is as norm energetic as possible, i.e. suitable for our gender, age and activity rate.This added 150 calories energy intake could be, for example, an extra 40 grams of bread and 5 grams of butter a day, on top of the usual intake, or 100 grams of cooked starchy food with 10 grams of butter.
If at one stage you start gaining weight again, then you have to go back to the previous stage and ask yourself on the effect of the foods you added on your overall nutritional balance.
Instead of adding some carbohydrates with a bit of fat each day, you can also not modify your usual daily intake but treat yourself to one or two previously “forbidden” foods (sauce, pastry, ice-cream, sausage, etc.). Obviously you will have to include them carefully and still rarely. As part of a normal diet, light and balanced all week, these treats will not do any harm. In the long run, to prevent weight gain you have to maintain the quality of the food items you eat as well as the nutritional balance of your meals and cooking methods. In terms of weight gain, you only have to react to a 3-pound gain over a fortnight.
Losing weight and keeping it down is about: a personal (and only personal) commitment, a change in eating habits, an understanding of nutrition theory and its application and the acquisition of reflexes so as to stop thinking about it.
Following a realistic and flexible diet, without depriving yourself of the pleasure provided by eating and sharing a meal, is the best way to discover the real quality and taste of foods, to escape fat-laden and unhealthy traditional cuisine, and re-discover the pleasures of a light, simple, spice-flavoured meal.
Famous cooks increasingly get into the use of spices and herbs and introduce organic products, without acknowledging it publicly.
A slightly hypo caloric and balanced diet is easy to follow and prevents you from eating too much fat or sugar, habits which are responsible for disease such as obesity, diabetes, arteriosclerosis, etc.
A healthy diet protects you, an unhealthy diet makes you sick, whether in the short or long term. This is why you have to give to your body what it needs, even when you do not have any weight problems !to contents
soon: Start your diet. Nutritional mistakes. The principles of a healthy and reasonable diet.
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