What Should You Eat To Lose Weight?

If you are struggling with weight and are looking for a solution, this might help you

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If you read some of my other articles, you saw how I went from 177 Kilos to 90 while building a completely different and healthier lifestyle for myself around it.

Last week, I was speaking with a gym friend about how most people just want quick fixes and solutions for their weight problems,

she ended up asked me a question:

“How do you lose weight fast? Or without dieting?”

For me, the mentality that you can lose weight fast and easily is so crazy, sometimes I even get mad because of it,

What surprises me even more is the amount of people who actually believe and fall for these “charlatans coaches” who sell miracle formulas and magic solutions for innocent people.

I told my friend if anyone only wants to lose weight fast, there are actually a few ways you can do it.

One way, per example, is to cut Liquids.

An average 60% of our body weight is liquid, if you sweat a lot and lower your liquid consumption, you will lose weight in a very short time frame.

The biggest example of this are fighters and competitors, which deprive themselves of liquids and food for 2 or 3 days before the weight-in day and as they get there they are 3/ 4 or in some more extreme cases 8 kilos lower than the next day for fighting.

This technique is called cutting, and it’s extremely dangerous if done incorrectly.

Needless to say that is not healthy and of course won’t work in the long term right?

I won’t go deeper about this “fast weight loss” because I don’t believe in it and I don’t even care about this.

For those who understand that about body and mind health there are no shortcuts, jump to the next part of this article.

For those who still believe there are, I suggest you to take a look at this.

What Should You Eat to Lose Weight?

Nowadays with the amount of information available if you search around there are a thousand different diets,

from 100% carnivorous to vegans, intermittent fasting to keto diets, you can find hundreds of different kinds which will suit you and some even work.

People have this weird ass wrong old idea that when you want to lose weight and get in shape, you can’t eat any delicious thing because then it won’t work,

Well, the thing is if your only objective is to lose weight, the only thing you need is calorie deficit,

Calorie deficit is when you burn more calories than you intake, there is no super secret magic formula, losing weight is primary school math.

You consume more calories than you burn, you get fat.

You burn more than you eat, you lose weight.

Simple and basic as that, nothing special;

There are even some cases of people who eat only junk food in calorie deficit and still lose weight, you can read more here if you don’t believe.

Of course, the outcome of this kind of diets is always an unhealthy and unsustainable weight loss,

the damage and increase in other factors like cholesterol and blood sugar are always an unworthy counterpoint.

The Healthy Diet

After This extreme weight loss and mentality change I’ve gone through, I realized one thing:

To get healthier and in shape, everything starts with nutrition, there is no amount of exercise that surpass decent nutrition.

When I started training for triathlon and long distance running, I realized I needed to be way more controlled with what I eat, not because I wanted to lose more weight or was unsatisfied with my body,

But because there is no amount of work, effort and exercise which would compensate for an unhealthy diet.

Think of your body as a car, if you want to make it last long and have a good performance, you can’t put shitty fuel in it, doesn’t matter if it’s a Formula 1 car, it just won’t work in the way it should.

That’s why the best thing you can do for your health is to have a balanced diet.

A Balanced Diet.

Those who are looking to get healthy and even lose some weight, must focus on balance,

Focus on getting everything they need from the best sources possible.

Without going too deep in the technical terms and function of each one of them, the so-called “macronutrients” our body need to function properly are basically three:

-Fats

Yeah, Fats.

Believe it or not, we need a certain amount of fat in our diets to stay healthy,

Fats provide energy in the form of calories, they stabilize hormone production, assist brain development, and also help our bodies absorb some important vitamins, such as A, D and E, which are fat-soluble vitamins.

What you need to pay attention here, is the kind of fat.

There are basically 3 main types of fats,

-Monounsaturated

-Polyunsaturated

-Saturated

I won’t enter the specific details of each one right now, but the first two are what you should add in your diet, they are considered the healthy fats,

They can be found in foods like, almonds, cashews, hazelnuts, peanuts, salmon, sunflower oil, corn oil, walnuts, pine nuts, sesame seeds and some other foods.

The third kind is the bad one, they are found in processed and fatty meats like sausages, ham, burgers and bacon, hard cheeses, whole milk, creams, Butter, and most of the “unhealthy oily food”,

try to avoid this as much as you can, a little bit of it’s ok, a lot of it and you die from heart attack with arteries clogged,

You can read more about the different kinds of fat Here

–Protein.

In a technical term, proteins are large biomolecules and macromolecules that comprise one or more long chains of amino acid residues needed for the body to function properly.

In an understandable way,

They are the base of every cell in your body, They help to develop and repair every muscle, and are essential to anyone’s diet.

Proteins can be found in most foods, very high quantities in meat, poultry, eggs, beans, peas, lentils, nuts, seeds, and soy products, for the vegetarian ones, seitan is probably the biggest protein ratio around.

Be careful with eating too much protein because they can cause gastric issues, and if you eat too little of them, you can get low immune system and even anemia.

–Carbohydrates.

And the third jewel of the crown, Carbs.

Over the past decades, carbs have been seen as the villain in the weight loss,

lots of nutritionist and fitness gurus tell people to take them out of their diets,

this happens because extra carbs which are not directly used as energy when consumed by the body are broken down in sugar and stored as fat for reserve, this is a natural defense mechanism of our body.

The problem of course lies in exaggerating, but as anything in the world, even too much water might kill you.

Carbs are the main source of energy for the body and brain, if you cut out them, your energy levels will drop tremendously, you might feel fatigued and tired all the time.

They are mainly found in whole grains, bread, pasta, oats, quinoa, also foods like vegetables such as green peas, broccoli, corn, and spinach, and even fruits have them, they are literally “energy”.

Balance

An ideal diet is based on one word only: Balance

A diet which contain a mix of all three macronutrients balanced with the right amount of calories which you take from them, it’s what will make you achieve your weight goals, be it gain or lose weight.

Nos magic formulas or super crazy diets people sell around.

The formula is basic, Stop trying to find easy solutions around, and do it the right way,

Aside from a healthy diet, exercises of course are always a helping hand, be it to burn more calories, to enjoy an activity or even compete,

Your body and mind for sure will thank you.

Remember:

Balance, Intake, Output,

These are the three things you should focus on to have a healthy lifestyle, lose weight and build the body you want.

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Yo Folks, Thanks for reading!

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–DGaspar.