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Big weight means big problems. Obesity can and should be fought
Yesterday you didn’t eat eclairs, didn’t drink beer and didn’t order a frying pan of potatoes fried in lard at a restaurant. However, when you stepped on the scale today, you discovered that the needle shows several kilograms more than usual. Don’t rush to tear your hair out, get depressed or go on a strict diet...
It turns out that a brutal appetite and foods with sky-high calorie content are far from the only obstacles in the battle for a wasp’s waist. Prolonged stress, a starvation diet, fluid retention before menstruation, and even too little sleep often interfere with making dreams of slimness a reality.
Check the calendar
Surely you have long noticed a strange pattern: before the “critical days” the arrow on the scale inexorably creeps up, the tummy begins to treacherously protrude forward, and you can only get into your favorite jeans with soap. Don't worry. Similar metamorphoses happen to every representative of the fair sex. This is due to hormonal changes in the body.
After ovulation, the levels of estrogen and progesterone change, and fluid begins to be retained in the tissues. That's why you're plump by leaps and bounds. And the appetite, which ran wild before the critical days, has nothing to do with it. During this period of the cycle, metabolism accelerates, the body begins to process food faster and constantly requires an additional portion of “fuel”. Therefore, even if you eat more than usual before your period, it will not affect your figure in any way.
In principle, you don’t have to worry about fluid stagnation, because this trouble will disappear on its own within one or two days after the start of the cycle. If the “swelling” period of time poisons your life and spoils your mood, pay attention to your diet. No matter how much you crave salty foods, forget about pickled cucumbers and sauerkraut. They will only make the situation worse and pump you up even more. It is also worth giving up foods containing starch and sugar for a while, which also contribute to fluid retention. And try not to rely on diuretics, especially coffee, which can lead to an exacerbation of premenstrual syndrome.
Benefits of abstaining from food
There is ongoing debate about the positive and negative qualities of fasting. However, they apply more to those cases when a person refuses, among other things, water or limits himself to food for a long period. The safest ones are intermittent fasting and not eating for up to 3 days, which are practiced more often than others. This time is enough for the digestive system to have time to unload, getting rid of accumulated food residues, and take a break from the load. Drinking fluids helps the body eliminate toxins and waste naturally and prevent dehydration.
ATTENTION! When drinking water daily, you need to add 0.5–1 teaspoon of sea salt per 2 liters of water. This is due to the fact that without salt, water does not stay in the body and simultaneously flushes out both harmful and beneficial substances. If you don't have sea salt, use coarse stone salt. Adding salt is especially important for those on a fasting or low-salt diet.
Another advantage of one-day fasts is that they work better than any medicine, healing the human body from colds accompanied by cough, runny nose, pain in the neck, headache, fever and other symptoms. This is explained by the fact that enormous energy, which is usually spent on digesting food, goes to fight the infection.
Go to sleep
It is known that Napoleon Bonaparte and the American inventor Thomas Edison slept 4-6 hours a day, but Leonardo da Vinci only needed 90 minutes. Despite such short trips to the kingdom of Morpheus, they all felt great and did not complain about anything. But this is rather an exception to the rule. An ordinary person in conditions of chronic lack of sleep runs the risk of not only looking tired and feeling unwell, but also having problems with excess weight. Doctors cite disappointing statistics: people who sleep little have a 73% increased risk of obesity. This is explained quite simply. All processes occurring in the human body depend on how well he rested. When you go to bed after midnight and wake up with the first roosters, the body experiences stress and, just in case, launches processes that contribute to the deposition of fat. In addition, unable to fully rest, he requires more high-calorie food to replenish energy reserves. As soon as you follow his lead, unappetizing folds will immediately appear on your waist. The optimal duration of sleep is a very individual thing. But general recommendations still exist. It is believed that a person who wants to maintain health and figure needs at least 7-8 hours of rest a day. Just be careful not to overdo it. Japanese somnologists claim that those who lie in bed for more than 10 hours shorten their lives by one and a half times.
Don't deny yourself food
Thumbelina, who ate pollen and quenched her thirst with dew, is just some kind of Pantagruel compared to you. You can’t even afford this and constantly limit yourself in food. Completely in vain. Nutritionists never tire of repeating: starvation diets are not an option for those who strive for a slim figure. When you sharply cut back on your diet, your metabolism slows down, and therefore your body's ability to break down fat decreases. Plus, severe gastronomic prohibitions lead to a deficiency of vitamins and minerals, which deals a powerful blow to the immune system, weakening health. This is only half the problem. After the end of the “hunger strike,” the body will certainly want to make up for lost time and will begin to tempt you with high-calorie sweet and fatty treats. If you give in to temptation, you risk gaining weight that is significantly greater than the original one. But even if you manage to resist, your body will still work hard to stock up on calories for future use. And not out of harm at all. He just wants to prepare for the day when you suddenly decide to put him on starvation rations again.
You need to lose weight wisely. Before introducing any dietary restrictions, be sure to consult with a qualified nutritionist. Otherwise, you risk not only harming your health, but also gaining extra centimeters on your hips.
A very radical method in the form of fasting works quite well, but only to obtain a positive effect it must be carried out correctly. The so-called dry fast, as one of the ways to lose weight, is in itself a very effective and positive way to forever part with such hated kilograms of terrible excess weight. If you do not have the necessary knowledge in this area, then the consequences of thoughtless dry fasting can be very unpleasant.
It matters not only the number of days you fast, but also how well you prepared for this period of time. It is better not to even start trying the dry fasting method if you have not thoroughly prepared your body.
Seven days before the start of dry fasting, give up any meat foods, and after four days of such a restriction, for the remaining three days, switch completely to vegetable and only fruit foods. Doctors also recommend preparing your body in this way. The night before you start your fast, avoid eating in the evening, and take a salt-based laxative in the morning, or even better, do an enema.
Now let's move on to fasting. In order to lose weight, it is best to fast only on water. You can drink the liquid without limiting yourself, that is, in any quantity. It's always a good idea to start with one to two times every seven days, and then move on to longer periods of fasting.
Experts strongly recommend moving as much as possible throughout the entire fasting period; gymnastics will not be superfluous and be sure to include walks in your daily routine. Find the most suitable activity for yourself so as not to think about food, for example, chat with your friends whom you haven’t seen for a long time or read a very interesting book that you haven’t gotten around to reading for a long time.
After completing the fasting period, do not joke with your body under any circumstances, because the exit from it is no less important than the beginning. End your fast with freshly squeezed natural juices pre-diluted with regular purified water. The next day, drink regular juices, then switch to light fruit and vegetable salads and after that to normal foods, but exclude all sweet, salty and fried foods.
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Calm down!
They lose weight from stress. It is a fact. When you are worried or anxious about something, the body expends more energy, and the adrenaline released into the blood speeds up the metabolism. In addition, when you experience powerful negative emotions, you think about food the least and, as a result, quickly lose pounds. But if the stress drags on, the situation changes dramatically. Chronic nervous tension forces you to look for different ways of relaxation. Unfortunately, very often we find them in food and, without knowing it, we find ourselves in a vicious circle. By emptying the refrigerator, you risk gaining temporary relief from extra pounds, a new clothing size, and a newly spoiled mood that you urgently need to drown out with a couple of cakes. Believe me, not a single trouble is worth it for you to “eat up” it with high-calorie foods, sacrificing your own figure. Moreover, by switching to food, you are just changing the type of activity, but the problems do not disappear.
Instead of spending money on buns and chocolate, go to an appointment with a psychotherapist who will help you understand your mental anguish. If you wish, you can try to dot all the i’s yourself. But first you need to calm your nerves. So take a bath and drink tea with chamomile and St. John's wort.
How to deal with overeating after hunger strikes?
author Alexey Perchukov, traveler and businessman
(experience in dry fasting practices for up to 12 days)
The first time I realized the fact of overeating was after a seven-day fast on the water
Coming out of hunger also took 7 days.
On the eighth day, I went to visit friends, where I ate a whole pot of vegetables by myself. Since then, I began to notice gluttony in myself. At that time, in addition to quarterly long fasts, I practiced weekly fasts with one day in and three days out, so out of seven days I actually didn’t eat, so I wasn’t in any danger of losing control. I lived in this rhythm for about a year, gradually increasing quarterly dry fasts to eleven days.
Now a little theory:
The state achieved by people on diets is not stable until a certain cleansing occurs on the physical plane and the life support mechanism changes. Namely: food should be consumed consciously in order to obtain the maximum amount of prana from it. Food gives us coarse physical energies and subtle mental ones. The body of an ordinary person is not capable of perceiving subtle energies in full. They simply cannot get into it and get comfortable there.
Below is an excerpt from a lecture by G.I. Gurdjieff
“Where does a person get energy for life? In order for a person to function, he, like anyone else, needs energy. For this purpose, he uses three sources, three types of food that enter into him and which he transforms and assimilates: ordinary food that enters through the digestive tract and is assimilated through it, air assimilated by the lungs, and impressions that come through the senses. . Why are we talking about “food” here? Firstly, because it provides energies that are the source of life. If one of these three types of food is not enough, the person degenerates and dies. Although he can go without food for several days or even several weeks - sometimes even months - when a certain time passes, he still dies. Without air he can live only for a few minutes, and without impressions he is already dead. Food, air and impressions - if we want to absorb the energy that all these types of food can give us, we need to transform them, and like any transformation, this takes some time.
Transformation cannot reach its climax without passing through this universal principle operating throughout creation, where seven stages are required. For example, take regular solid food. We can consider that food enters a person through the physical part in the form of a substance.
In order to achieve transformation, food must successfully pass through seven stages. In the first stage it enters us in solid form. You chew it. The food is transformed into a liquid element. The food, which has been transformed into liquid, then enters the organic fluids, namely the lymph and then into the blood, where it mixes with an element of a completely different nature: air, carried by the blood. This is the third stage of transformation, which at this time occurs at the middle level. All the substance or energy extracted from food is now added to the air. At the same time, it is the stage at which man comes into contact with the truly etheric or vital element of food, from which he receives all his vitality, all his vital forces. Until this moment, in the physical sphere, food required energy from him, the energy necessary for its transformation and digestion. In the second stage, in which it comes into contact with the blood, it does not produce energy, but it also does not require energy from it, this is the stage of equilibrium. Effect on the emotional and intellectual spheres. Then the food continues to rise, reaching the fifth stage of its transformation. Now she is in the intellectual sphere. Before that, it has an impact on emotions. Did you know that food affects your emotions? Drink a cup of coffee or a glass of alcohol and you will get the corresponding experience. Too much coffee and you become irritable, easily excitable - there is an impact on the mental sphere. But as soon as food reaches a certain degree of transformation, it also affects the intellectual sphere, stimulating the thinking, intellectual function. Food has now reached the fifth stage of its transformation. ...the food begins to descend again, reaching its sixth stage of transformation, which is again of a psychic nature, and then lower still. At the end of the transformation, nothing remains of the food except pure life energy, as we might call it. But for this to happen, food must go through a whole octave (a seven-step transformation).
Now you can understand that when you eat, you are not just nourishing the physical body, but you are affecting your emotional life, your feeling life, as well as your thoughts. This is why on the spiritual path they insist on the need for a proper diet. On any spiritual path, it is strongly recommended, for example, not to drink alcohol. Why is that? Because alcohol has a definitely destructive effect on this octave, first on the physical sphere, because... can lead to partial destruction of this sphere - for example, to cirrhosis of the liver, but also in the emotional sphere, in which it creates what we could call cirrhosis of feelings. The same can be said about the intellectual sphere: it gives rise to cirrhosis of the brain. The same thing happens with all drugs, which have a destructive effect on the physical body, emotional sphere and mental abilities. This is what can be said about the Transformation of one of the energies that a person is looking for outside in order for it to enter him. The process that occurs is a natural mechanism for transforming the food we eat; no help required. And if you eat in a healthy, balanced way, then your different centers are fed: your physical body, your emotional center, which is functioning more or less correctly - very mechanically, but correctly - and also your thoughts. We can say the same about the transformation of air, which occurs at the middle level and passes successively through various stages.
Transformation of impressions: occurs exclusively through consciousness. As for impressions, they enter us through our senses, and then what happens?
Specifically, not theoretically! First of all, we must distinguish between two types of impressions: those that enter us unconsciously and those that enter us consciously. Do you understand that there is a big difference here? Only those impressions of which we are aware can become nourishing for us. From the point of view of impressions, we really resemble starving people! We are so little aware of them. Fortunately, the few that we are aware of initiate the octave and their transformation is what allows us to continue living. But most impressions are not transformed. How do we transform the impression? Only by realizing it! This is important to understand! You cannot inhale or digest the impression; the only way to internalize it is to become conscious of it.
If impressions are not transformed, they become poisons in you. These are mechanical thoughts that fill your head. What happens when the food you eat is not processed? It becomes poison. The food you digest is transformed. Otherwise, it remains in your stomach or remains in you as a poison. It's the same with air: if your lungs or blood are sick, the gases in the air are not absorbed properly.
To assimilate impressions, you must be aware of them, and all the impressions that you do not assimilate will poison you. And because you are not aware, you become more and more unconscious, you have less and less conscious energy at your disposal, you become more and more a prisoner of unconsciousness.
Impressions come through the intellectual sphere. What do they poison the most?
The intellectual center is where we find them again in the form of mechanical thoughts. Have you experienced how every morning, as soon as you wake up, they begin their endless run. Your mechanical thoughts are the residual product of impressions that entered into you during the day without your awareness. What happens when you fall asleep? You may think they will stop because at this point your senses are closing off to the outside world. Nothing like this! You have unconsciously accepted so many impressions that the mechanism continues to work, unnecessary products are still active in the form of your dreams. The life of your intellectual center is poisoned by all the unconscious impressions that you have received and which fill your head day and night.
Remedy: Become aware of your impressions. You have understood the need to transform the food you eat, the air you breathe and the experiences that come to you. Without this transformation we cannot escape our mechanical state. At the same time, we saw that from food and air we extract energy that nourishes our centers: our physical center, our emotions and our thoughts. It's the same with impressions, with which we usually do nothing. We can learn to extract energy from them for all these levels. And since we are talking about food, which is not as material as air or food, it can provide us with a much more subtle energy that can nourish not only our lower centers, but also our higher centers. Only those who are able to transform their impressions can begin to nourish their higher centers. Do you understand this? Without working with the impressions that come into us, we cannot develop our soul, spirit, or our higher emotional and intellectual centers.
The practice of self-observation, self-remembering and meditation is necessary; only under such conditions will our impressions be transformed and become energy for our higher centers.
You can therefore understand why self-observation and some form of meditation - active, such as self-remembering, or passive, such as Zen meditation, are absolutely necessary for one who wants to develop his higher centers. Otherwise, these centers have nothing to live with; the little energy they have at their disposal is sufficient for their survival, but it will never be enough for their development. What causes our desire to eat?
Firstly, the need for roughage for a slagged body: proteins, carbohydrates, etc. and, secondly, the desire to replenish our emotional layer. Just remember here that subtle energies exist in normal quantities only in high-frequency food. (honey, freshly squeezed juices and fruits). People, when they begin to feel unwell (emotionally), as a rule, begin to eat a lot, instinctively, to receive subtle psychic energies. But in a kilogram of ordinary coarse food there is only one gram of subtle psychic energies, therefore, to restore emotional balance, a person begins to eat a lot, but this brings only short-term relief, since then the body begins to digest the absorbed foods, spending on this the energy that should be used for its renewal and rejuvenation. Thus, a vicious circle is obtained. It becomes obvious that the process of life support for an ordinary person leads to the destruction of the body. Eating only rough food, a person is almost always a natural vampire. And to improve his emotional and mental state, he must receive energy from the outside. The most common method is aggression, an attempt to forcefully take energy from others for oneself. Here we need to remind you of the following two sources: air and impression.
We all know that prana (energy) is in the air, but it is not very clear how to get it from there. Firstly, of course, the quality of the air is important, and secondly, the body’s ability to absorb this prana. We cannot always choose quality, and for more correct consumption we again need a cleansed body. I read that there are special glands under the bridge of the nose that facilitate the absorption of prana. For an ordinary person, they are clogged with dirt. Rinsing your nose with saline helps cleanse these glands.
There is one more nuance: the energy that we receive from different sources must still be able to be retained in the body. To do this, the body must be clean, healthy and strong.
The third source of food is our impressions. This is how we perceive the world around us, how information enters us and what processes occur.
Thus, it turns out that we cannot do anything for ourselves with diets or short fasts alone, this is just a short-term effect. And the fact that people begin to gain the same weight after such practices, and often even more, is absolutely natural. Diets or hunger strikes are just the first step towards evolution on the spiritual path, and if you stop, the pendulum effect is triggered, you can not only go back, but an even deeper failure is very likely.
In order for the result to become stable, you need to first change your diet, and naturally without violence. Changing your diet will help cleanse your body. A clean body will be able to receive more prana from the air. This will lead to a normal energetic and emotional state. Which again will help to perceive the incoming information flow with joy and acceptance. And here again we get feedback: realizing that everything that happens to us is good and for the good, we remove one of the most powerful energy-consuming channels: worries, frustrations, etc. What causes these emotions? they are the result of our Ego and personality. Therefore, here we reach a deeper layer: subjugation of the ego, but that is another story.
You also need to understand that the process of eating food is a ritual for pleasure. And this is the simplest way. But as always, “free cheese comes in a mousetrap,” you have to pay for short-term pleasure with a breakdown in the loss of first physical energy, and then emotional energy. The effect is very similar to alcohol consumption: a short holiday and a severe and depressing hangover. Therefore, if we know how to control our impressions and get joy from life, then we have no need for feasts and desserts.
Therefore, it turns out that overeating is one of the visible factors of our spiritual imperfection, which simply came to the surface.
So do yoga, love people, accept everything that happens with love and awareness and you will not crave meat, desserts and a lot of food.
Expert opinion
Lidia Ionova, nutritionist, founder of the network of nutritional clinics of Dr. Ionova:
Before you start fighting extra pounds, you need to find out whether the problem really exists. To do this, you need to calculate your body mass index by dividing your weight in kilograms by your height in meters squared. A range from 18.5 to 24.99 is considered normal. Anything lower indicates underweight, anything higher indicates excess body weight. You can also measure your waist circumference. For women, the optimal width is up to 80 cm, for men - up to 94 cm. If you are far from these numbers, take action. To objectively track your weight dynamics, weigh yourself no more than once a week.
Will they help you lose weight?
Cold . Research is now being conducted around the world that proves that freezing, contrary to widespread belief, does not contribute to weight gain, but, on the contrary, to weight loss, since a person has to expend more energy to keep warm. Therefore, when going out, don’t bundle up.
Water . Very often we confuse the desire to snack with ordinary thirst. As a result, we eat more than we need and... we get fat. To avoid this trouble, drink a glass of plain water every time you feel hungry. If hunger still attacks, then it’s really time to have a snack.
Milk. Scientists from the University of California have found that calcium helps you lose weight. After conducting a series of studies, they found that a person receiving the daily dose of this useful element (1500-2500 mg) loses extra pounds due to the activation of calcitriol. The latter promotes the use of fat cells as an energy source. You can find calcium in milk, cottage cheese, apples and nuts.
