Good reasons. Why do you sometimes fail to lose weight?

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Excess weight is a problem that almost every person faces in the era of physical inactivity and the Internet. Of course, there are many ways and techniques for weight loss, but not all of them can have a long-lasting effect.

Excess weight is a problem that almost every person faces in the era of physical inactivity and the Internet. Of course, there are many ways and techniques for weight loss, but not all of them can have a long-lasting effect. Most often, after some kind of diet or taking diet pills, a person, returning to the normal rhythm of life, regains the previous kilograms. At the same time, weight gain occurs quickly and for some reason the hated fat becomes much larger. This is all due to an unbalanced diet and typical mistakes that people make when deciding to lose weight at any cost.

Why can't I lose weight?

The reasons may vary. For example, an attempt to lose excess weight through a strict diet can lead to the body deciding that “hunger times” have come and starting to “stock up.” When planning a diet, it is important to take into account a number of factors: not only the quantity of calories consumed, but also their quality, the regularity of meals, the distribution of calorie content throughout the day, and much more. But the main thing is to understand the main task: you need to change your eating habits, and not muster your will for a limited period of time, and then return to your usual diet. The same is true for physical activity: regular moderate exercise sets will have a better effect in the long term than rare trips to the gym for grueling workouts. Another possible reason for failure in the fight against excess weight may be an incorrectly chosen “battlefield”: weight gain can often be triggered not only and not so much by overeating and lack of physical activity, but by the body’s natural hormonal response to stress. In the modern world, chronic stress has become the norm of life, while the human body has remained virtually unchanged evolutionarily. Physiological responses to stress did not change either. To survive in a stressful situation, you need energy; its production and accumulation are regulated by certain hormones produced in the body. In addition to the increased production of stress hormones, other hormonal imbalances can also lead to difficulties in losing excess weight.

Calorie restriction

Numerous studies on mice and monkeys have found that the most important thing is to reduce the total calorie content of the entire diet, and not its individual elements. In 1934, Cornell University researchers Mary Crowell and Clive McKay showed in mice that an overall reduction in dietary energy increased the average and maximum lifespan of the test group by 30 to 50 percent. This discovery renewed the race to find the recipe for the elixir of eternal youth.

But no individual elements, the reduction of calorie content of which will significantly accelerate the normalization of metabolism, were identified during the research.

How to understand that the cause of excess weight is hormones?

If you consistently adhere to a balanced diet and regularly exercise, but the excess weight still does not go away or goes away extremely slowly, first of all you need to exclude diseases that can provoke hormonal imbalances: diabetes mellitus, hypothyroidism (low thyroid function), polycystic ovary syndrome in women, etc. In women, excess weight can also be caused by the onset of menopause and, as a consequence, a decrease in the production of ovarian hormones: estrogens. To do this, you need to consult an endocrinologist or gynecologist and undergo the appropriate tests.

Often, excess weight gain is triggered by excess production of the main stress hormone: cortisol. To determine its level, you can take a number of tests, but, unfortunately, they are not always informative, since the amount of cortisol in the blood changes throughout the day. At the same time, there is a set of external signs by which it is quite easy to determine that it was cortisol that caused excess weight. In particular, these are fat deposits in the abdominal area and their absence on the arms and legs (moreover, the arms and legs may even look too thin), a moon-shaped face (fat deposits are located on the chin), stretch marks and loose skin.

The cause of cortisol obesity may be Cushing's syndrome. This is a serious disease caused by damage to the hypothalamus and/or pituitary gland or tumor formations in the adrenal cortex. But cortisol excess weight can also be caused by a completely everyday reason, a lifestyle associated with a high level of stress.

Why do we decide to lose weight?

Start by understanding why you decided to lose weight. Need to fit into your old jeans? Perhaps you want to re-experience in bed the same relaxedness that you lost with the acquisition of extra pounds? Or are your only winter boots too small for you, but you don’t have the money for new ones? No, that will not do! If these are, indeed, the very reasons why you started the process of losing your fat, then there is no point in all these actions. Once you fit into your old jeans, you'll gain weight again. And as soon as you get a great orgasm in bed, you will again notice your figure. And spring will come, and the boots will end up in the box, and your foot will increase in size again due to swelling. The only correct motivation for final and irrevocably effective weight loss can only be the desire to change your life. Change from edge to edge, from toothbrush, to place of residence.

And on the way to this goal, losing weight is not the main thing. The most important thing is to love yourself and accept yourself with all your shortcomings. As soon as you do this, as soon as you begin to respect yourself and your body, then you will no longer want to eat bread in front of the TV at night, you will not want to relieve stress from time to time with a pack of chips, a bucket of ice cream and a can of cola. You will start looking towards tomorrow. And in this tomorrow there will be no place for a fat and complex woman who will look from the reflection in the mirror. From there, a gorgeous, successful and slender girl will look languidly and femininely.

Where does excess cortisol come from?

Let's understand the mechanism of cortisol production in our body. Cortisol is one of the hormones produced by the adrenal cortex. This is the main stress hormone, it increases blood sugar levels, improves the brain's use of glucose and increases the availability of substances that repair tissue. Cortisol is produced in the body constantly, most of it enters the blood in the morning to provide the body with energy to wake up, then the amount of the hormone gradually decreases throughout the day, except in situations that the body perceives as danger. When faced with a threat, an alarm signal appears in the cerebral cortex, which goes to the hypothalamus. The hypothalamus secretes a hormone that acts on the pituitary gland. And the pituitary gland, in turn, triggers the adrenal glands to produce and release cortisol and adrenaline into the blood. Adrenaline increases your heart rate, blood pressure and energy expenditure, while cortisol supplies this energy by releasing glucose into the blood. This is where the main problem lies: cortisol produces glucose by breaking down fats, and in their absence, proteins from muscles. If there are too many stressful situations, cortisol levels remain at a consistently high level, and increased production of glucose continues, which, in the absence of a real need for it, forms fat deposits. Moreover, in addition to excess weight, persistently elevated cortisol levels can lead to a number of other unpleasant consequences: the risk of developing atherosclerosis, malfunction of the adrenal glands, brittle bones, constant weakness, and depression.

Poor nutrition

This has already been discussed above, but nutrition is worth dwelling on separately. A common mistake beginners make when losing weight is giving up fat completely. However, the body still needs them. Low-fat curds and yoghurts cannot be called “proper” food. Avocados, red fish and other sources of fat will provide great benefits to the body.

Another common phenomenon is large reductions in diet. When you start training, you often become confident that a circle of pizza or a large amount of sweets will be easy to “work off” in the gym.

But junk food is addictive, and not just because of the taste. It seems that this is a quick way to get enough, although usually after such food you quickly want to eat again.

So how to deal with excess weight caused by stress?

The main recommendation for reducing cortisol excess weight is to reduce anxiety levels. Working with a psychologist or independently analyzing the causes of chronic stress can help with this: you need to identify situations that make you feel stressed and try to avoid them or reconsider your attitude towards them. But with sports you need to be extremely careful. Attempts to reduce excess weight through active physical exercise can lead to the opposite effect, since, exhausting your body, you will again fall into a state of anxiety. Also, strength training itself is stressful for the body, so it only increases cortisol levels. However, physical activity that helps you relax will make a positive difference. This could be regular walks in the fresh air, yoga classes, swimming. Also, we must not forget that, in addition to the stress hormone, our body also produces hormones of happiness, satisfaction, pleasure: dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin and endorphin. At a chemical level, they help prevent excess cortisol production or break down excess cortisol. Therefore, you need to try to compensate for stressful situations that arise with something pleasant: communication with loved ones, awareness of your own achievements, a feeling of joy from victories, laughter from the heart, etc.

Learning to count calories

If solving mathematical problems gives you a headache, and you have not been good with mathematics since childhood, the most convenient way for you to calculate the calorie content of food may be a special application for your smartphone. There are many different applications with a ready-made product database.

While others are counting sheep before going to bed, are you making a graph of their jumping ability relative to their external differences? Then, before you run, scrupulously write down the energy value of each sandwich in your notebook, remember a few simple tips:

• 1) To calculate the energy value of foods at home, you will need electronic scales and a table of caloric content of foods.
• 2) The manufacturer must indicate on the packaging accurate information about the composition and calorie content of its product.
• 3) To calculate the energy value of complex dishes, you need to have a little knowledge of cooking. You will have to calculate the weight of each ingredient of the dish separately, find out their calorie content using the calorie table and sum up all the calories received.

Maybe take some sedatives?

Of course, taking sedatives can have a situational effect and temporarily reduce cortisol production to normal. But you can’t take sedatives on a regular basis, they will simply stop working. If you want to support your nervous system, it is better to take vitamin complexes with an emphasis on vitamins B and D. This is a non-specific remedy, so it will not necessarily directly affect the level of cortisol production, but it will increase the chance of stabilizing emotional reactions and anxiety states.

Skip breakfast

Some people skip their morning meal because they don’t want to eat anything at all during this period, while others try to reduce the amount of food they eat. In any case, this can play a cruel joke.

Firstly, if you skip breakfast, then lunch will be more filling, since the feeling of hunger is stronger. Without noticing it, a person eats more than required. Secondly, this slows down your metabolism.

If eating in the morning is too difficult, you can make breakfast light. The main thing is that it exists.

Are there other ways to somehow help the body?

The constant production of large amounts of cortisol is an unnatural state of the body, therefore, along with working to reduce the number of factors that provoke an increased release of this hormone into the blood, the right solution would be to support the work of the organ that produces it: the adrenal glands. For the human body to respond adequately to stress, it is necessary for the adrenal glands to function properly. This is why it is possible and necessary to help the adrenal glands before the consequences of consistently high cortisol production occur. This can be done by supporting the natural self-healing processes that occur in our body, with the help of peptides, substances that regulate the condition of the body's cells and ensure the normal functioning of all organs and tissues. For this purpose, cytamines - complexes of regulatory peptides obtained naturally from animal organs and tissues, which also include the physiologically optimal diet for the corresponding organ in an easily digestible form. In case of potential development of adrenal pathology, cytamine, a natural regulator of intracellular processes responsible for metabolism, can be additionally used. This is, for example, "Suprenamin" . It is a complex of proteins and nucleoproteins that have a selective effect on adrenal cells, which can help restore their functional and organic properties.

Dietary supplement NOT A MEDICINE

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Not enough water

Why am I not losing weight? The reason for this may be a simple lack of water. Water is even more important than food for the human body. If a person lives on average for about two months without food, then he dies from dehydration in just 5-7 days.

Man is two-thirds water. The water content of human blood is about 92 percent. Gastric juice consists of 99 percent water! Dehydration of the body by only 10 percent thickens the blood, causes excess stress on the heart and blood vessels, slows down metabolism and the elimination of toxins.

Do you want to lose weight? Instead of lemonades and juices, drink plenty of water every day. The most common drinking water is the best way to lose weight.

High expectations from training

Morning exercise is certainly useful, but it is unlikely to dramatically change your weight. A person who has never played sports before often regards any activity as a lot of work. But if the goal is to lose weight, then regularity and a suitable training system are important.

When choosing activities, it is important to consider your health status. By ignoring contraindications, you can achieve the desired effect, but in the end you will suffer greatly. For example, with nephroptosis, exercise should be predominantly lying down, and if there are problems with the joints, then running is contraindicated.