According to my observations, all people can be divided into three categories: lucky with a normal physique, thin, who does not know how to get better, and overweight, who does not know how to lose weight. I managed to get into the third category, and all my adult life my weight fluctuated around 95kg with a height of 1.74m, which corresponds to BMI = 31.4 or obesity. And although, in principle, this did not interfere at all, nevertheless, excess weight imposes certain restrictions, both in terms of health status and in terms of personal life. Finally, one fine day I decided it was time, and took up this issue more seriously.
I think there are a lot of people with similar problems among IT-schnicks working in the office, and I hope my experience will be useful to them.
Metabolism
Let's start with the basics of how the body consumes and expends energy. I am not a doctor, so I will speak from the standpoint of physics, not medicine. The basic principle here is simple - the good old law of conservation of energy. Everything, really everything, in the end rests on the balance of calories - how much we get, and how much we spend.
In our body, we have a balance of three factors:
- Calories from outside are what we eat.
- The efficiency of food processing by the body (our predisposition to obesity, thinness, etc.).
- Calorie expenditure based on work and lifestyle.
Unfortunately, we cannot influence point "2". I do not know whether clinical studies were carried out, but I personally checked many years ago on friends and relatives - when staying at a camp site with the same portioned meals and the same pastime, one weighs 55 kg, and the other 90. We can only have a limited influence on the point “3 "- calorie consumption is determined by lifestyle, and if you have to sit at the computer for 8 hours and then sit for an hour in transport, then there are few options. For those who love sports, it is of course simpler, it is an energetically quite costly activity, but here I, for example, are simply indifferent to all kinds of barbells and horizontal bars, and, alas, I'm not ready to spend an hour a day in the gym. Finally, there remains point "1" - food, what we eat. This is exactly what we can and must vary if we want to reduce weight.
Calories
So, back to nutrition, i.e. to balance calories. I do not urge them to constantly count and write down, the main thing is to understand the general meaning. If the weight is above normal, then we get more calories than we spend - the conclusion is simple, their amount needs to be reduced. Moreover, the body, in principle, does not care how these calories will be obtained. You can choose foods with less fat, you can use less carbohydrates, the result is essentially the same.
For example, I will give the calorie content of my usual diet. I took the calorie table from here .
Breakfast : 400 kcal
Ham sandwich - 230 kcal
Coffee + Milk (1 glass) - 100-110 kcal
Sugar (2 tsp) - 2 * 25 kcal or chocolate candy (2pcs) - 2 * 65 kcal
Lunch : 535 kcal
Buckwheat porridge with butter (1 portion) - 155 kcal
Sausage (2pcs) - 2 * 130 kcal
Mayonnaise (1 tsp) - 60-70 kcal
Tea + Sugar (2 tsp) - 2 * 25 kcal
Dinner : 1065 kcal
Chicken noodle soup (1 portion) - 250 kcal
Pork cutlet - 2 * 270 kcal
Pasta (1 portion) - 155 kcal
Tea + sugar (2 tsp) - 2 * 25 kcal or candy 2 * 65 kcal
In fact, I have lunch swapped places with dinner, but it's too lazy to carry full three meals a day to the office, so soup and other dishes are eaten in the evening.
Dessert (in the evening or before bedtime): 120 kcal
Ice cream sundae (200g) - 140 kcal or Orange juice (1 glass) - 70-90 kcal or Yogurt (1 glass) - 165 kcal or Chips (25g) - 120 kcal. I took 120 as an average.
Total for the day: 2120 kcal.
Is it a lot or a little? Judging by this table, it is quite normal for an urban person engaged in mental work, and even slightly below the norm of 2600 calories:
However, the table is a table, but judging by my weight, even these 2120 kcal for my body, alas, are too many. I don’t overeat, I don’t eat 5 hamburgers at McDonald’s, washed down with cola and I don’t eat a pack of chocolate with chips in one sitting, I walk 10 km daily on weekends and 3 km on weekdays, but even the above diet of 2120 kcal for me personally enough to have a BMI corresponding to "obesity". Sad but true. What to do? There is only one recipe, the number of calories must be reduced, and so that it is healthy and tasty.
Nutrition
Again, the whole body weight balance is reduced to the number of calories consumed per day. You can conditionally eat a 140 kcal chocolate bar or 120 kcal vegetable salad as lunch, but in the first case, the stomach will be empty and the feeling of hunger will not go anywhere.
Accordingly, in order to reduce the number of calories and at the same time be full and satisfied, it is necessary to switch to a diet with a lower "calorie density". There is only one solution, nothing new has yet been invented - vegetables and fruits. But just gnawing some cucumbers with cabbage is sad and depressing, the menu needs to be diversified.
Solution: we place an order in an electronics store and diversify our kitchen appliances.
Multicooker / slow cooker
A very convenient device that allows you to cook the same vegetables either steamed (45 minutes) or in slow cooking mode (3-4 hours at a temperature of about 80C, by the way, the device "eats" only 200W in this mode).
They are different, with a timer, different modes, remote control, etc. Just put chopped vegetables (cabbage, tomatoes, peppers) and meat / sausages to taste inside, and we get a very tasty dish at the end. I'm too lazy to cook for a long time, so just slicing and putting the food inside and pressing one button is just what you need.
As a bonus, steamed is healthier.
Blender
I hope it's clear from the title and picture.
It is better to take a good powerful blender that can make not only fruit, but also vegetable smoothies, grind carrots and other dishes. Although to be honest, I personally didn't really like the vegetable puree, but it's a matter of taste. But you get very good yoghurts - if you put low-fat yogurt without additives in a blender and add fruits yourself (apple, strawberry, blueberry, raspberry, you can do it all at once and more :), it turns out much tastier than the store-bought store "with a raspberry flavor identical to natural."
Finally, since we started to stock up on household appliances, we need a good bathroom scale.to weigh yourself a loved one. Without the ability to control weight, we never know if there is any progress or not. Good scales are needed because you can stand on the cheap ones 3 times, and all 3 times get different results. Optionally, you can choose a scale with Bluetooth and downloading data to a smartphone, although for me it is not so critical, once a day one value can be manually recorded. For sports enthusiasts, there are a lot of options to choose from with a body fat / muscle control scale. You need to weigh yourself at the same time, preferably in the morning before breakfast. As suggested in the comments, it is helpful to have a kitchen scale to accurately determine calories. Tables from the Internet may be inaccurate, and knowing the weight and calorie content, the number of kilocalories is easy to calculate yourself.
As a result of various experiments, I came to the following diet. I leave breakfast as before, only remove sweets / sweets as too high in calories. Lunch - meat / sausages + cabbage / carrot / cucumber / tomato salad, or the same variations in a slow cooker. You can vary different cooking modes, different vegetables, there are actually a lot of them, the same cabbage in the store, 3-4 different types, all sorts of avocados, broccoli, etc., you can experiment, choose what you like so that it is not monotonous. For dinner, yogurt + fruit in a blender. Again, you can vary it so you don't get bored. This in itself turns out sweet, and sweets are not needed separately.
As a result, I got such an approximate alignment of calories.
Breakfast : 330 kcal (-70 kcal compared to the original version)
Ham sandwich - 230 kcal.
Coffee + Milk (1 glass) without sugar - 100-110 kcal.
Lunch : 440 kcal (-95 kcal compared to the original version)
Sausage (2pcs) - 2 * 130 kcal.
Salad - 120 kcal or steamed vegetables - 180 kcal.
Tea without sugar - 0 kcal.
Dinner : 293 kcal (-770 kcal compared to the original version)
Fruit mixture in a blender: yogurt - 120 kcal, apple (1 pc) - 70 kcal, raspberries (100 gr) - 53 kcal, pineapple (100 gr) - 50 kcal ...
Dessert : until the weight has stabilized, it was decided to refuse dessert for the night, so 0 kcal.
Total: 1063 kcal Of course, there are some hidden calories, for example, you can put a spoonful of mayonnaise in a salad, and it will be +65 kcal - it's funny that one spoonful of calories corresponds to half a plate of cabbage. Plus, on weekends, you can afford a more varied menu, for example, pancakes with cottage cheese in the morning (400 kcal) and a Starbucks frapuccino in the evening (293 kcal). By the way, this can be clearly seen on the graph as an increase after the weekend - alas, extra calories immediately affect weight.
In the comments, there was a question why sausages or ham sandwiches were left on the menu, because this is not the healthiest food. The answer here is simple, and boils down to a compromise between reducing the number of calories and the quality of life - hardly anyone will be able to eat only boiled chicken and broccoli all their lives. Only sweet and high-carbohydrate dishes were removed from the menu; this is quite enough for a fairly significant reduction in calorie content.
By the way, it is interesting to compare the calorie intake for different activities. Judging by the online calculator, 10 minutes of running at a heart rate of 150 bpm burns only 131 kcal, and 200 kcal is consumed when walking for an hour. At the same time, one hamburger at McDonald's is 250 kilocalories, which is equivalent to 20 minutes of running or more than an hour of walking! You’ll think twice about whether to eat a hamburger on the way, or replace it with something more useful ...
Addition : Calories are not always convenient to count, in practice it is quite enough to focus on the amount of carbohydrates in the product. They are absorbed by the body almost immediately and are deposited in fat almost immediately. There is a simple "rule of thumb" that to lose weight, the mass of carbohydrates per day should not exceed 40 grams.. Actually, this is how I started, and I used kilocalories later to refine the results. The table of carbohydrates can be found, for example, here , also in the comments they advised to pay attention to the glycemic index of foods.
Results and conclusion
Finally, the most interesting thing is the results. I think everything is clear from the graph:
I initially thought to postpone the release of the article until the final results, when the weight reaches
As a conclusion, it can be noted:
- Losing weight is still possible, even for those who have never lost it before.
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- I'm not sure about the accuracy of the above calorie numbers, and it's not that important. Habr is not a medical journal, and this is not a dissertation, only the general idea is important. Some people do calculate calories with kitchen scales to the nearest gram, but for me, this is too much, the results are visible anyway.
- I still took up sports. A little bit. It's not particularly interesting for me to go to the gym, but doing a 10-15 minute exercise, going up to the 9th floor without an elevator and doing 100 push-ups in a day is quite realistic even for a lazy IT guy.
If this material inspires someone to improve the quality of their life, I will only be glad, in fact, it was written for such people.
For those who are interested, there are several videos under the spoiler that I found useful in preparing the material.
Video
PS : Thank you all for your comments and helpful tips. I cannot answer all> 100 comments, I will add answers to the most popular questions
Q: Too superficial, many things are not disclosed.
A: The title immediately states "personal experience". I am not a doctor or an athlete, I work in IT and spend about 10 hours a day at the computer. The purpose of this publication is not a scientific article on dietetics, but simply to show the general idea and how it works.
Q: If you do not play sports, the muscles will begin to atrophy from the diet.
A: Yes, this is important, it is still impossible without movement at all. I for this time slightlyincreased physical activity: I do not use an elevator, I do push-ups, squats and other simple exercises, for a total of 15-20 minutes a day. I can say that I feel better than before.
Q: Sitting on that many calories a day is unhealthy.
A: I am 95% sure that the previous diet was even more harmful. If you replace pasta, cookies and sweets with vegetables and fruits, it is unlikely that this will have a bad effect on your health. But of course, in case of doubt, it is better to consult a doctor.
Q: The diet will get bored in six months.
A: It's hard to argue with that. That is why I try right away so that the food is tasty and not a burden.
Q: In the beginning everything is simple, it is interesting to see the results in a year.
A: Ok, I promise to write a sequel in a year;)