Tips for weight control

Losing weight is one of the most common purposes for starting a new year. However, this commitment is often abandoned in the first few months. Recommendations for achieving this goal.

Tips for weight control
Tips for weight control. Image: Pixabay

Losing weight is one of the most common purposes that Mexicans pursue at the beginning of a new year. However, this commitment is often abandoned in the first few months. This is why today we will give you recommendations to achieve this goal. The following advice is suggested by Humberto Astiazarán García, research professor of Nutrition at the Centro de Investigación en Alimentación y Desarrollo (CIAD) and clinical nutritionist Ana Teresa Limón Miró.

Go to a nutritionist

Restrictive diets usually lead to failure, as they subject people to extraordinary levels of anxiety by prohibiting consumption and rationing food portions in schemes that are eventually unsustainable due to lack of will or because they are outside the reality of daily life.

The best thing is to go to a nutritionist who designs a personalized diet according to the state of health of each individual and his or her possibilities of acquiring food and who seeks to control weight by promoting good eating and health habits, without stressing the patient or suggesting foods that are out of his or her reach or interest.

Nutritionists must be committed to each of their patients and start from their nutritional diagnosis and initial characteristics to establish with them feasible and healthy goals. They should avoid giving out copies of the same diet without adapting it to each person.

Do not look for "miracle products" or extreme strategies

The market is full of products that offer to help you lose weight without any other effort than ingesting a pill or capsule; many of these are even promoted as natural alternatives.

The reality is that only a health professional should indicate the consumption of a drug, and you should make sure that these are endorsed by the Federal Commission for Protection Against Health Risks and that they do not represent a health risk.

If you plan to follow an eating plan that provides for a very low kilocalorie intake because you see a higher result, it may be a mistake. Nowadays, this type of "diet" and recommendations are not only found in fashion magazines, but also in social networks, now with the so-called "challenges", in which people who are sometimes not nutrition professionals, give the same diet and prescription to all people who register online, without considering family and personal history of the person concerned.

In addition, when they drastically reduce the kilocalories that are usually consumed, or if they decide to fast for a day, the body's natural response is to protect itself and to do so it makes an effort to save energy. The body prepares itself for the food deficit that exists. Therefore, when you regain what you once restricted or stopped the medication you were taking to lose weight, you can regain the body weight you had lost and even have a higher weight than before, known as the "rebound effect".

The simplest, safest, and most permanent way to lose weight and body fat is to do so through a balanced, sufficient, varied, and safe eating plan. It is necessary to take into account that everyone needs to consume different amounts of food and nutrients, according to many characteristics, so the plan must be personalized.

It is not one, it is many habits

It is sometimes thought that achieving good health is just a matter of learning to eat or starting to exercise; however, although both are vitally important, many other habits also have an impact on weight control, such as sleeping seven to eight hours a day, reducing stress, staying well hydrated, eliminating excessive alcohol, tobacco, and caffeine intake, and so on.

So if being healthier to live better is one of your New Year's resolutions, don't hesitate to approach a health professional; there are many programs in the public health systems that can guide you free of charge to achieve your goals and that, above all, are based on medical science.