REX healthy food brand expert, nutritionist, nutritionist with more than 15 years of experience
On New Year’s Eve you want to wear a beautiful dress and look trim. But you should not go to extremes and sharply sit down on a rigid diet, as the rollback will be inevitable: most often all the lost returns with a plus.
Nevertheless, even in a month you can achieve a good result, if you build a system of nutrition and adjust the regime. This approach will be an excellent motivation to continue the chosen path in the new year.
What you can do for yourself a month before the New Year
Food habits and sleep patterns
To begin with, you need to review your eating habits and establish a regimen. To achieve results, you need to remove junk food from your diet and get a good night’s sleep.
When we don’t get enough sleep, our body doesn’t have time to recover, which means it needs more energy, which we get from food. That’s why after sleepless nights and systematic sleep deprivation we crave sweets and fast carbohydrates.
If everything is fine with sleep and there are no chips and sweets in the diet, and the desired ideal is still far away, it is worth choosing a suitable food system for yourself. Counting calories without fanaticism, following the principles of good nutrition or interval fasting will help to achieve the desired in a short period of time and consolidate the result.
Calorie counting
For proper calorie counting, you need to know your basal level of metabolism, that is, the minimum number of calories needed by the body to ensure vital activity. To do this, you can use a formula, and for a more accurate value, you can undergo bioimpendasometry.
BM (basic metabolism) – 655 + [9.6 × weight (kg)]+ [1.8 × height (cm)] – [4.7 × age (in years) ].
The result obtained is the level below which you should not go below for a long time, otherwise you run the risk of fitting into a new dress, but also under-receive the necessary vitamins and micronutrients.
Proper nutrition
If counting calories seems too difficult, start following the principles of proper nutrition. Exclude from your diet all harmful and processed foods, as well as sugar and products made of high-grade flour.
Replace store sauces with vegetable oils, add whole-grain cereals, vegetables and herbs to your diet and a large amount of varied protein from meat, poultry or fish.
According to WHO recommendations, a person should eat about 500 g of fruits and vegetables every day. In the case of weight loss, it is better that it was mostly vegetables, as some fruits contain a lot of sugar and have a high glycemic index (the effect of different products on blood sugar levels). Completely abandon the latter is not worth it, but it is better to replace them with berries, for example, frozen.
Protein and healthy fats
The second important point is sufficient protein. The nutrient plays an important role in weight loss. It provides long-lasting satiety and avoids unnecessary snacking.
A portion of protein at each meal provides the body with the necessary building material and satisfies hunger for a long time.
It is also important not to give up fats. Unsaturated fats found in fish and vegetable oils affect the regulation of the hormonal system, skin and hair, so they must be present in the diet, unlike saturated fats, which we usually get with food.
Interval fasting
To reduce weight in a short period of time will help interval fasting, but this system is not suitable for everyone, as it has a number of contraindications. Starvation is prohibited in diabetes, peptic ulcer, bile flow problems and during pregnancy and lactation.
The main principle is to stick to long breaks between meals. There are several variants of interval fasting: 16/8, 14/10, 20/4 and 36 hours without eating.
The schemes assume that you abstain from eating for 16, 14 or 20 hours a day and eat several times during the remaining time.
Fasting gives good results in a short period of time, provided you strictly follow the intervals and eat healthy during the rest of the intervals. Also – interval fasting helps to reduce insulin spikes.
It takes time to get your figure in order. Remember that a month is a short period of time and any radical methods of weight loss can harm your body. Be gentle to yourself, do not scold and do not torment yourself with strict diets and grueling exercise.
It is better to adjust your diet, exclude harmful products, try to spend more time outdoors and add physical activity to your daily life. And then the first results, lightness in the body and fresh appearance will not wait.