Body Set Point - Weight Management 101
What are the challenges in the common diet method ?
Many diet method and programme promoting the weight loss. However after the participants achieve their weight goals and stop the programme, the body starts to fight back.
Craving for the food that have been abstains for a period of time is common feedback.
Metabolism is even slower, in the end it's easy to gain weight every time they eat a little bit more than usual.
They are wondering what's wrong with their body, they become afraid of eat anything and feel guilty after eating something.
What is the Body Set Point ?
This is the concept of a genetic preset weight that everyone has.
The body has a regulatory system that keeps us at a steady-state level / set point. This set point suggests that our weight may go up or down temporarily when we give external changes but ultimately will return to its normal set point.
How do we know our Healthy Body Set Point ?
The easiest way to find out is using BMI chart.
When our BMI is on the healthy range, we are at our body set point.
The challenge is when our BMI is above average, since body set point keeps adjusting upward.
How to change Body Set Point ?
There's a hope to change body set point down. A gradual step down weight loss approach with persistence maintenance at each stage can help prepare body set point to accept new lower set point.
1. Change the composition of our diet
Cutting out processed food, refined Carbohydrates are the first step to change the way we eat.
Eat more whole food like complex carbohydrates from fruits, vegetables, whole grain, good fats from plant, protein.
This can lower our insulin levels, reduce our appetite and tendency to store fat.
Insulin hormone has characteristic to store fats. We don't have to go on extreme low carb diet.
2. Change the composition of our gut
There's connection between gut in our stomach and our brain. Gut in our stomach gives signal to the brain whether our body has enough or lack of nutrients.
To help this gut functions well, the best way is feeding this gut with fiber-rich food from complex carb and fermented or cultured food and stop using artificial or refined sugar.
3. Change our environment
Hunger is not what drives most of our consumption. There's emotional and physical hunger.
We are influenced by other factors including external environment, advertisement, people surround us. If we want to permanently lower our body weight, we need to permanently change the habits and behaviour that lead us to overeat.
We take steps to re-engineer our personal environments, for eg avoid buying chips, unhealthy snacks.
Eat without watching TV or Hp, eat slowly, savor and enjoy the food, use smaller plate.
4. Change Body Weight slowly
When we change our body too quickly, there's a higher chance the our body fights back.
On the opposite, when our body weight changes slowly, it's less likely to fight back.
If we have a significant amount of weight to lose, a step down approach may work better than a long steady slide.
Start by gradually losing no more than 5-10% of our total weight.
Then, spend 2 - 3 months maintaining the new lower weight before taking the next step down.
It will probably take us longer to reach our goal weight this way but we are more likely to maintain that goal weight when we get there.
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