Still can't lose weight? Sometimes you really can’t blame yourself for being fat

Nowadays, the word "weight loss" fills every corner of our work and life: when I get up and wash up, I receive a news notification "A certain star lost so many pounds in a month and returned to the peak of his appearance"; when I come to the office, I heard that a certain colleague used weight-loss internet celebrity pills and lost a lot of weight; when I went to the cafeteria to get food at noon, the new young intern said she didn’t want to eat rice for fear of gaining weight; on the way home from work, she watched a shopping live broadcast, and every store was She is a white, thin and beautiful model; in the evening, TV programs tell us that there is no such thing as a healthy fat person. So, we planned to lose weight. We skipped dinner, staple food, and exercised all we could. As a result, after a month, we didn’t lose much weight, but we caught a few colds and fevers... After thinking about it, we decided that losing weight was too difficult. One month passed. I am fatter than before. Then I made up my mind to lose weight again and tried another method, but failed and rebounded again... My whole body was not good, I was anxious and depressed about my figure.

At this time, it’s better for us to calm down and understand the body, why we can’t lose weight, let go of the body and let go of ourselves.

In fact, sometimes it’s really not your fault that you can’t lose weight! Obesity is not simply that energy consumption is greater than energy intake. Look at this intricate relationship. It involves much more content than you think. In general, it can be summarized into seven aspects: physiological factors and personal physical activity. , sports environment, individual psychology, social psychology, food consumption, food production.

Today, a nutritionist is here to talk to you in detail about how difficult it is for us to "get rid of meat". I hope that after reading this, you can let go of your obsession and lose weight rationally and scientifically. Respecting your own body and aiming to establish a healthy lifestyle will be more conducive to the stability of our hormones and metabolism. Gradually, we will gain not only a good figure, but also a healthy body.

Constant snacks? Falling victim to the "can't shut up gene"

In our daily life, it is not difficult to find that some people are prone to losing weight while others are prone to gaining weight. Friends who get fat easily say, should I be fat by nature? Indeed, some friends are born prone to obesity.

First of all, obese friends may have the "lack of control gene" - a hunger gene in their body. The gene makes you more likely to gain weight and makes it more difficult for you to lose weight.

The hunger gene, which we call the obesity gene, is a common susceptibility gene for obesity. It is present in everyone, but some people will mutate it. For people who do not have mutations in the obesity gene, they eat for physiological needs and to supplement the energy needed by the body. Therefore, they will only want to eat when they are hungry, and will stop when they are full. No matter how delicious the food is, the brain will not have a "craving" response.

For people with mutations in the obesity gene, they eat for psychological needs and derive pleasure from eating food. Their brain's desire for food, especially high-fat food, will become a powerful force, even surpassing the satiety signal from the gastrointestinal tract, causing them to eat more even if they are full, and eat more at any time between meals. Can I have some more snacks? Moreover, this gene may also make these people prefer foods high in sugar and fat, such as desserts. People who carry one or two risk alleles weigh, on average, 1.2 kilograms or 3 kilograms more than those without the variant.

Late stage of lazy cancer? Xi mentions "the gene of being unable to move one's legs"

Similarly, there may still be "unable to move legs" genes in our bodies - quiescent genes. A 2014 study on obesity and metabolic syndrome found that the lack of exercise in obese patients was not due to their subjective unwillingness to move. The D6S1009 locus located on the long arm of human chromosome 6 has always been considered to be closely related to obesity. The SLC35D3 gene is involved in the regulation of dopamine signaling on the central nervous system, and dopamine signaling is mainly responsible for neural activities such as movement control and emotional transmission.

Researchers found that mutated SLC35D3 will have functional abnormalities, eventually leading to the blockage of the dopamine signaling pathway, which will reduce exercise volume and energy consumption, and ultimately lead to obesity and metabolic syndrome.

Does drinking cold water make you gain weight? Or brought from the mother's womb

Another natural cause of obesity is nutritional problems early in life. Let’s first look at the impact of early life nutrition on obesity.

Early life refers to the fetal period, lactation period and the period after weaning (generally within 3 years of age, also known as the "window period"). At this time, the body is in a stage of vigorous cell division, proliferation, differentiation, and tissue and organ formation. It is very sensitive to various external stimuli and will generate memory (also known as metabolic programming). This memory will last into adulthood and has an important impact on the occurrence and development of obesity and related chronic diseases in adulthood.

Undesirable dietary factors in early life, including maternal nutritional deficiencies or excess during pregnancy, complete artificial feeding, premature weaning, premature addition of complementary foods, and excess nutrition of infants and young children, etc., can not only directly affect the weight and health of infants and young children, but also increase the risk of obesity in adulthood. risk of obesity and related chronic diseases.

To put it simply, if our mother’s nutrition cannot keep up when we are in her belly, we will desperately try to obtain energy, and this short-term adaptation may become a permanent response, making it easier for us to grow up. Store energy.

Have a lot of fat on your body? Exercise consumption is discounted by 50%

There are also many friends who are particularly wondering, why do they not lose weight despite exercising hard? Part of the reason is because fat is reduced and muscle is increased, so although the weight remains the same, the figure will get better; part of the reason is the problem of energy compensation mechanism.

The so-called energy compensation mechanism means that the body tries various methods to maintain energy balance and try to avoid negative energy balance. To put it simply, when you are on a diet, your body is very smart and will lower your basal metabolic rate to protect itself. This mechanism will also allow you to increase your activity energy consumption by reducing your basic energy consumption to maintain balance. As a result, even if you increase the amount of exercise, it does not mean that you increase your total energy consumption.

This kind of "adaptation" in the process of human evolution has caused the phenomenon of "if you eat less, it will use less" and "you will not lose weight if you don't eat". Especially obese people with relatively high fat content are prone to stronger energy compensation after dieting. Therefore, it becomes more difficult for them to lose weight.

Therefore, this mechanism causes you to overestimate your exercise intensity. For people of normal weight, the average energy compensation after exercise is 28% due to reduced basal energy expenditure. 28% of the calories burned through exercise are saved, and only 72% is additional consumption. Therefore, in the future we will give a 30% discount on our exercise energy consumption. However, studies have found that compared with thin people, obese people seem to have a greater energy compensation effect after exercise and a stronger energy saving. For obese people, 49% of the energy consumed by exercise is offset. The effect of hard work on calorie consumption is only nearly half! This is the so-called energy compensation mechanism at work. If you don't eat enough and have insufficient nutrition at this time, you will feel tired and weak, and your metabolic rate will drop even more. In other words, even when you sleep at night, you consume less energy than before.

In addition, daily energy consumption cannot be ignored during exercise. Energy consumption is used in three aspects, one is basic energy consumption; the other is the thermic effect of food, which is the calories we consume when eating. You heard that right! We are also burning calories while eating; another is the consumption of exercise. Exercise consumption is divided into two parts, one is the calories consumed by active exercise, and the other is the calories consumed by non-exercise activities, which is the consumption of daily activities. The exercises we do consciously such as running, dancing, swimming, etc. are active exercises, while the calories consumed by doing housework, office work, chatting, shaking legs, etc. are consumed by daily activities.

Sometimes, after we do active exercise, we may reduce the consumption of daily activities. For example, I went to a morning exercise class on Saturday, and when I came back, I didn’t want to move very much. I just wanted to rest and be lazy. And if I If I don’t go to class, I might do laundry, clean up at home, or go for a walk. At this time, if you measure the energy consumption for a day, you will find that although the energy consumption during morning classes is high, the daily energy consumption after exercise will be smaller than before. The energy consumption throughout the day is actually the same as before!

Compensation psychology makes you lose five pounds and gain three pounds

Psychology also plays an integral role in the weight loss process. Recently I saw a friend post on WeChat Moments saying, "Being fat makes me anxious, irritable, and irritable, but I collapse when I think about losing weight." I believe that many friends are facing this problem and are trapped in the curse of losing weight and cannot get out of it. First of all, we must understand that obesity does not mean unhealthy. What we are more concerned about is the "three highs" (hyperglycemia, hyperlipidemia, and hypertension) that accompany obesity, which make obese people more likely to suffer from cardiovascular and metabolic diseases. .

If obesity or overweight has caused health problems (diabetes, cardiovascular disease, etc.), or you just want to have a slim figure, then the purpose of losing weight is to be healthy, not to deny yourself.

I never recommend that you set how many pounds you want to lose as a goal. Think about how many times you have given up on losing weight because you didn’t reach your weight loss goal (I want to lose 10 pounds in 1 month or lose 10 pounds in 2 weeks like a certain celebrity). Or, have you ever rewarded yourself with a hot pot meal because you lost 5 pounds, only to gain back 3 pounds? There are similar situations, such as rewarding yourself with a piece of cake on the way out of the gym, refusing the potato chips offered by others and rewarding yourself with a cup of low-sugar milk tea. These virtually hinder us from losing weight and may also make us feel guilty later.

Total self-creation needs? It’s weird if you’re not fat

We live in an era of abundant material resources and are faced with the temptation of various delicacies and advertising slogans. We need to be careful about whether we really need this food. For example, new flavors are constantly being introduced, such as spicy crayfish-flavored candies, vine pepper chocolate, etc. We can’t help but try them even though we know that candy and chocolate hinder weight loss. Also, will we buy a certain food when we see the words low-fat or low-sugar? As everyone knows, some low-fat foods may have higher sugar content. Some low-sugar foods just have no added sugar and are still refined carbohydrates. Even if it is low-fat, low-sugar and low-calorie food, when we don’t need it, you just want to eat it, not because you are hungry, but it is also an extra calorie intake. How many of these so-called healthy foods like yogurt, salad, oatmeal, and foods labeled green, natural, organic... are eaten when there is no need? Or do you eat more of it because it is healthy, which leads to an increase in calories?

Here, let me tell you that a survey found that yogurt has become one of the main sources of our intake of refined sugar. Therefore, don’t focus on the slogans that the merchants want us to see, but focus on the objective nutritional content. on the table and ingredient list.

Still can't lose weight? May be lacking this vitamin

Regarding food production and consumption, there is another reason why we fail to lose weight, and that is the lack of B vitamins. Most of the B vitamin family function as coenzymes in the body and play an extremely important role in the energy metabolism process. Vitamin B1 is mainly related to the utilization of glucose and energy metabolism in the body. Vitamins B2 and B6 play an important role in the metabolism of fat in the body. In addition, a variety of B vitamins work synergistically, and the lack of any one of them may cause energy metabolism disorders. Energy metabolism disorders will make it more difficult to lose weight.

Therefore, friends who only eat refined carbohydrates or do not eat staple foods to lose weight may have difficulty losing weight due to a lack of B vitamins.