How to Avoid Weight Gain During the Holidays

Who is capable of maintaining a diet during the holidays? However, you may not want to regain all the pounds you worked so hard to lose. What is lost quickly is regained quickly, so the recommendation is to lose weight slowly, in most cases.

Lose weight to avoid gaining it back during the holidays and then, upon returning to your routine, not carry several extra pounds. To do this, the goal isn't to arrive at the beach without an ounce of fat, but to return from vacation without extra pounds. The 'bikini operation' begins when you lose weight slowly, but permanently.

”This is about a couple who enrolled in a program to improve their health, as their lives were very sedentary, and they also wanted to lose weight permanently. Both were convinced of what they wanted to do and had a lot of willpower, but there was a small difference. She, after an initial conversation, was convinced to lose weight slowly, little by little, as she wanted to lose 10 kg, and I told her that if she did it correctly, in 10 months, she would lose it permanently and without the dreaded yo-yo effect. He, however, wanted to lose weight quickly; he was more than 15 kilograms overweight and wanted to lose all these 15 kg in 4 months.

I tried to convince him that this was not the best path, but he wanted to do it as quickly as possible, so I made a treatment plan to lose 15 kg in 4 months. All of this was in February.

”But then came the July holidays and 10 days in an all-inclusive hotel. Now, imagine. Eating and drinking at all hours and lying in a hammock. Phenomenal holidays.

”After the holidays, something truly surprising happened: while he had gained 8 kg, about 1 kg per day, she, eating practically the same as him, had only gained 800 grams. She hadn't even reached 1 kilogram yet!”

Very simple. When you lose weight quickly, the body interprets this as an attack, so it uses fat reserves to keep everything functioning perfectly. By eating fewer calories than you need to live, the body has to supply the rest of the calories from stored fat. When losing weight quickly, and our body has the opportunity to store calories in the form of fat, it will do so without hesitation, and this is enough to regain the amount of fat that was there before.

This ensures survival in times of scarcity, because our body interprets our weight loss as a period of scarcity. Thus, reserve fat is used, and people lose weight. That's why when we go on a strict diet and skip a weekend, it's easy to gain a pound or two in a couple of days. However, if you are losing weight very slowly, your body will assimilate the new weight each week, and the loss of fat reserves will have been minimal. Each month, the body realizes that it has lost a kilogram of fat, so if you take a weekend off, it is easier for your body to eliminate what you ate extra than to store the excess food as fat.

For this reason, it is better to lose weight slowly, because if you overeat for a week or a holiday, the body will not store food as fat as easily.

So, if you don't want to gain weight, the next time you go on vacation, keep this in mind throughout the year. Losing 250 grams per week is enough.

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