Diet means that you prohibit your body from consuming particular foods. How will your body respond?
– It will strive for the food!
– Yes, you can even see it in your dreams. For example, if you are banned from eating bacon, you will see bacon in your dreams.
Nikolay Ivanovich Kosenkov, member of Petrovskaya Academy of Sciences and Arts, Ph. D. of medical science
Food eaten at the end of a meal remains in the center of the food lump in the stomach and enters the intestine later than other food – in three hours. As it usually contains carbohydrates, getting into the blood after all this time, they will help to reduce excess insulin, if any, and there will be no weight gain!
The blood sugar concentration increases all hormones except insulin. This means that any stress, including activation of sex hormones, increases blood sugar levels even without food, when your stomach is empty, which leads to the release of insulin, hypoglycemia (decrease in blood sugar level) and overeating (blind munchies)!
Group session of psychologist
Artyom Andreyevich Ovechkin:
– N.B.! Rule two.
A slim person doesn’t have any list of banned foods. He knows precisely the amount and quality of food consumed and the rules of its consumption.
Let’s talk about doing sports. A woman has to bend over backwards training on running or any other gym machine to lose some weight. Right? Have you tried? Raise your hand if you have. You, and you, Nika. Who else? Nika, have you succeeded with weight loss doing sports?
– No.
– What about you, Mila?
– 24 pounds.
– Was it hard?
– Yes, it was! Six-kilometer cross-country running every morning and diet.
– Diet! So it wouldn’t work without diet, right? Attempt to lose weight and maintain it only through exercises without any diet is a hopeless mission.
– I’ve been trying it for twenty years. No result.
– I am not surprised.
N.B.! Rule three.
A slim person doesn’t try to lose weight by doing sports. He drops and maintains weight by managing his nutrition.
Coding. As usual, the technique is based on fear: take a drink – and you are dead, overeat – you are dead, or something bad happens to you. This way or another, they put this pattern into your mind. You start to believe in it. But it doesn’t last for long.
A coded person often feels angry and annoyed.
Have you ever dealt with that? Which of you met “coded” alcoholics on your life pass?
– Me!
– Me too!
– So, how would you describe them?
– They are aggressive.
– These people are angry and fussy. Sometimes a wife of such a “coded” drunker brings her husband back to the specialist back and says: “Please, decode him! I can’t live with such a person. Just let him drink if he wants.”
Andrey Vasilyevich Trenogov, psychologist, psychiatrist: I studied different coding methods and often said to my clients: “If you have money, try coding. It’s pretty interesting. Besides, it can be helpful.”
I’d like to tell you about a method described by one of my clients.
After the client sits down in the chair, the doctor and his assistant – who is usually pretty big – start a doleful lecture about the dangers of gluttony. When the client almost falls asleep, the doctor, who was walking around the room before, suddenly comes from behind. The assistant fixes the client’s legs and hands, the doctor throws back his head sharply, pressing the lower jaw so that the mouth opens. Then he sprinkles something bitter and smelly, like rotten fish, on the root of the tongue, and, yells loudly looking into the client’s eyes:
“Stop overeating! Stop overeating!” Then they say to the client: “That’s all, you can go.”
I asked her: “So, any result?”
The client: “When I came out, I felt offended. I paid them, and what have I got? They yelled at me. So, I decided to find a snack bar and comfort myself with some pies.”
Group session of psychologist
Artyom Andreyevich Ovechkin:
– Pellets. Please, be especially careful with the pellets from Thailand and China. You shouldn’t take them! Russian Academy of Medical Sciences researched products represented on the Russian market. Thai and Chinese weight loss pellets were banned. They found anorexics in a number of these medicines. These substances are kind of drugs. They improve your mood, reduce appetite, but in a while, you’ve got issues with liver, kidneys, skin, hair, teeth, insomnia, and then, after a certain time, depression and many other upsetting consequences.
There are other weight loss medicines: “Xenical”, “Meridia” and others. Have you taken it?
– Yes.
– By medical prescription?
– No, on my own. I took “Meridia”.
– Did it help?
– Yes, I dropped a good deal of weight, but I was also “coded” at that time.
– Oh, were you?
– I took a coding procedure long ago. So, I decided to add pellets at the end of the coding period.
– As a rule, the effect of the products is either negligible or absent. It is useless. What was your result?
– I don’t remember exactly. But it was not great.
– “Meridia” is off the market right now. It has too many contraindications and side effects.
– What about “Xenical”?
– It doesn’t go well with fatty food. You need to quit one or the other, fatty food or “Xenical”. Can you guess what people usually choose? They say farewell to “Xenical”. When taking the pellets and eating fatty food, you often face the problem of getting to “porcelain bus”, to W.C., as soon as possible. People get terrible diarrhea. It takes a lot to wash away the “pebble dash” from the toilet bowl. If it happens when you are at somebody else’s house, they’ll never invite you again. My clients complained to me about it.
N.B.! Rule four.
A slim person doesn’t believe that coding, “magic” pellets, medicines, herbs, and liquors can help to achieve and maintain an ideal weight. One prefers to change nutrition, mental mindsets, lifestyle to become slim easily and joyfully.
Teas, elixirs, BAAs.
– I tried it all.
– Did you succeed, Snezhana?
– No. I took apple vinegar with honey in the morning.
– In what proportion?
– A tablespoon to glass for a month.
– And?
– I lost about ten pounds.
– In my opinion, you shouldn’t drink vinegar, guys. Imagine someone asking you: “How about a glass of vinegar in the evening?”
– ☺
– The body starts losing weight in surprise. You have no idea what comes into the mind of people who try to drop weight. But by and large, all these pellets – number one weight loss pills, as they try to persuade us on T.V., do not help in the long-term period! Name at least one medicine that helps you both to lose weight and maintain the result for a long time.
– My daughter tried “Swallow’s Nest” or something like this. A sort of slim tea. But it’s tough. Intestines are almost get knotted.
– Yes. So, you know how it works.
Reflex therapy. We have already discussed it – needles, cautery, impact on biologically active points of the body, and so on. But the effect is temporary. How many pounds have you lost this way?
– Twenty pounds.
– Did you gain them back?
– Yes.
– So, you got these twenty pounds back anyway. And I guess it’s your fault partially.
– ☺
– Enemas. That’s obvious. People torture their weak bodies in any possible way: stick with needles, stuff with pills, and other things. At first, your body starts to lose weight but then gains it again. The reason is simple. We’ve got not only body but. What else?
– Psyche.
– Precisely. Some call it consciousness, the others – psyche or soul, but it’s no matter how you name it. It exists. Why do we know that it exists? It makes itself felt from time to time. In what way?
– Mood.
– Feelings.
– Yes, feelings. It either bleeds or fills with joy and soars in the sky. Then something else happens. Sometimes we get stressed. “Stress” is one of the favorite words in the modern world. The body responds to environmental changes. Everything is changing. Sometimes these changes are critical.
Marriage is a source of stress, isn’t it?
– Yes.
– It’s stressful. Divorce?
– It is stressful too.
– Funeral, moving, new job – they are all sources of stress. We constantly have to adapt to the changing environment.
N.B.! Rule five.
A slim person knows how to manage the response of his body to stress properly and never comforts himself with eating.
Do you usually adapt easily? Successfully?
– No.
– Things often don’t go our way, and we feel bad about it. What negative emotions do you usually feel?
– Low spirits.
– Melancholy, insomnia.
– Anger.
– Anger, rage. What else? The most typical ones?
You feel offended because something goes wrong. “Everything must be different! She shouldn’t act this way and say such things. They shouldn’t…”
You feel guilty because you had to do things differently, but you couldn’t.
Anger, insult, guilt, uneasiness. Loneliness in the crowd. There are so many people around, but you feel lonely. Do you know this feeling?
– Yes, and pretty well.
– Uneasiness. It’s not clear how it will end up, but you want to know it immediately.
What is the easiest way to repress all these negative feelings? Comfort eating. Food is…
– The answer to everything.
Nikolay Ivanovich Kosenkov, member of Petrovskaya Academy of Sciences and Arts, Ph. D. of medical science
Stress, adaptation. Only the laziest does not use these words appropriately and inappropriately! In the dissertation “Dynamics of the body’s sensitivity to certain hormones in the course of adaptation” (1985), we demonstrated that during the three stages of stress, when adrenal gland hormone production decreased dramatically (Hans Selye considered it to be exhaustion), hormone system is not exhausted. It works differently!
The sensitivity of cells with hormone receptors and their response to hormones have changed. A small dose of hormones causes over-response in some organs and reduced response in others, while there is no response at all in some other organs and systems.
Besides, it turned out that the metabolism of the whole organism also changes. The body has reduced oxygen consumption at rest and at work. It led to the accumulation of a fat mass of trial subjects. Many gained up to thirty-forty pounds over the winter.
Such changes were associated with the reorientation of the metabolism from the Krebs cycle to the pentose cycle. It leads to the accumulation of fat in the body.
So as soon as stress enters into its last stage, and real adaptation (not disadaptation, as Selye considered it) occurs, the person immediately begins to gain weight due to changes in metabolism!
The same happens to athletes who stop training. They have constant hypoxia associated with increased oxygen consumption by the body during exercise.
Prolonged hypoxia leads to the formation of the adaptation of the body to any (really any!) stressful effects! But they pay the price facing metabolic changes to the pentose cycle. It leads to obesity in case of a decrease in physical activity.
So, if you start to gain weight, it means that you have adapted to life circumstances and changes. New stress reduces your weight for a particular time, but as soon as you get adapted, the weight starts to grow again!
Andrey Vasilyevich Trenogov, psychologist, psychiatrist: It is noteworthy that, as a rule, there are always people in groups who say that they lost a good deal of weight under stress or during illness.
Under stress, adipose tissue is actually consumed (if the stress is not relieved by eating), but mainly at the periphery of the body (arms, legs, face). As for the corpus, it loses much less weight. The same process occurs when people get older. Arms and legs become slimmer.
If a weight loss is related to some disease, then you shouldn’t be happy about it. It usually occurs due to the loss of muscle tissue.
Group session of psychologist
Artyom Andreyevich Ovechkin:
– N.B.! Food is a psychoactive substance; it changes our consciousness.
How does it change? It increases the endorphin level. Endorphins, as you maybe know, are hormones of happiness, such as natural morphine derivatives in our body. Had some food – got endorphin rush! The endorphin level is high, and you feel high! It’s like pushing a magic button. Everything was so desperately bad. You’ve eaten some food – and things got better. Would you like to try it again? Sure!
When we are under a sort of stressful pressure, hormones cortisol and adrenaline are released. As a result, you feel bad, it contributes to the weight gain, as it provokes an attempt to improve your physical and psychological state by eating. By the way, weight loss slows down if you are under stress.
After a meal, the blood glucose level spikes dramatically, and the rise of blood glucose level causes a strong anxiety-suppressing effect. So, you feel good because of endorphins, and at the same time, anxiety disappears.
Great! ☺
No need for sedatives, right?
We must learn to treat food differently. Escape stress-eating but prevent stress from suppressing a true hunger.
We’ll discuss various methods of reducing stress, and how to relieve psycho-emotional and physical pressure. We have to learn how to do it by using other things and activities.
N.B.! Rule six.
A slim person can distinguish between true and false hunger to avoid comfort eating because of problems, difficulties, stress.
You need to learn how to distinguish between true and false hunger.
True hunger means that your body needs nutrition. As for false hunger, it’s a longing of the spirit or psyche. The psyche lets you know that something is missing by using the sensory system. What does it mean if it sends out a signal of loneliness? What do you lack?
– Communication.
– The psyche is longing for communication. We give it some food instead. It’s easier and faster. We have no time.
– ☺
– Or you suddenly feel anxious. Anxiety is longing for some information. It can be relieved by getting it, as well as by the conscious cessation of “mental walks to the future” and haunting the development of negative expectancies.
Instead, we get some food again!
It’s necessary to break this vicious circle. We need to distinguish between true and false hunger.
When you feel hungry, it’s not always because of physical hunger. Sometimes there is a psyche hunger behind it.
Olga Vladimirovna Tsyganova, 28, economist, lost 110 lbs: That’s true! In the initial stages of weight loss, it’s tough to distinguish between true hunger and false hunger. I trained myself, noted time between meals. It was just as tough for me as it is for you, I felt like I was at the minefield. I was afraid to make a mistake, to do something wrong, so I got one thing straight: hunger appears in a different amount of time depending on what you have eaten. If my thoughts draw me to fridge in an hour or two after a properly balanced meal, it’s not because of the true hunger. Then, it’s infamous false hunger, and I need to do something about it. I went for a walk, tried to distract myself with other things, talked to friends, or simply trained my willpower, persuading myself that after a while, I would pamper myself by eating something yummy. Indeed, as they said in my group classes, you need to learn how to negotiate with yourself. Of course, there were times when nothing worked out. So what did I do? I ate what I wanted, but then I got back on track because I had a goal. As they say, the harder the battle, the sweeter the victory.
Group session of psychologist
Artyom Andreyevich Ovechkin:
– Tomorrow I’ll give you three criteria for distinguishing between true and false hunger and describe the distinction procedure. Then you’ll learn to recognize true hunger in five or ten seconds after receipt of a “hunger signal”.