How to avoid the yo-yo effect on a diet once and for all

You have spent half your life dieting and the same thing always happens: your weight does not finish stabilizing. Your scale moves more than prices… This can not be! The time has come to take the yo-yo effect for a walk and stay at your ideal weight.

To stand up to the damn rebound effect, the first thing you must do is know your enemy well: “The rebound effect is a reaction to a restrictive or miracle diet, which generally imposes control, prohibits certain foods, limits social life and eliminates enjoyment with food. These restrictions mean that when you finish the diet or lower your level of motivation, you go right to the other side, that of overeating. After a period of much control, the lack of control arises”, Explains the psychologist Itzíar Digón. “As a result of the satisfaction of this emotional hunger, you regain all the lost weight and even gain a few more kilograms” Adds the expert in Mindful Eating and conscious eating.

The importance of following a personalized diet

And what can you do to prevent this from happening? “The ideal would be to find the balance between what we eat and what we spend other words, controlling what we eat and drink taking into account what we consume through physical activity. For it is important to follow a personalized diet (avoiding dangerous miracle diets), doing regular physical exercise and acquiring healthy habits “, recommends Dr. Cristina Porca Fernández, Dietitian-Nutritionist member of SEEDO.

What to do to not recover a gram

The first thing you have to do to not regain the weight you have lost is to incorporate and maintain healthy habits acquired during the diet.

From a nutritional and health point of view, Dr. Porca Fernández offers the following guidelines.

• Assimilate that once the target weight is reached we will not be able to eat exactly the same as before.
• Respect the occasional consumption of sweets, refined flours, soft drinks, or alcohol (if you want to incorporate them again).
• Know how to correctly define occasional consumption, since many times we think that occasional consumption is to be able to consume them from Friday to Sunday routinely and it is not like that. Occasional means every once in a while.
• To practice physical activity.
• Be clear that if one day we go off our usual diet, nothing happens, you do not have to make extreme compensations and the important thing is to be able to return to our healthy and balanced diet.
• Drink enough water.
• Give the importance they deserve in our diet to fruits and vegetables.
• Sleep enough.
• Carry one active life.
• Controlling stress, since generally in these episodes we tend to “look for” foods rich in fat or high in sugar or derivatives that give us a certain momentary pleasure.

The danger of “free meals”

It has already become clear that, after reaching your goal, you cannot consider going back to the diet you used before. If you had gained weight, it is because something was not quite right in your diet.

What to set a number of “free meals” it also has its complication. “It has been shown that it helps patients psychologically and allows them to better carry the guidelines and adapt them to special moments or celebrations, but also carry a certain risk since there are those who hide behind them to make consumption out of control” explains the Dr. and adds:” A single meal cannot spoil your results for a week, but we must know how to control them and not understand them as a time when everything is allowed and in which you can eat without control “.

For this, the nutritionist recommends that, rather than establishing a number of free weekly meals, it is best to know that nothing happens if one day we want to do it; alone you have to have control, enjoy it and return to your routine the next day or at the next meal.

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To finish, the psychologist recommends these tricks that can be interesting for the day today. Put them into practice and take the yo-yo effect for a ride!