I'll touch on an unusual topic for a site – health and weight loss, and how a smartphone can help with this.
This material is unusual for our site, but it seems to me that health can be appropriately discussed in the context of technology. And many modern companies promote a healthy lifestyle. The same Apple made the pedometer a standard feature in smartphones and is promoting the Health app in the US. Therefore, I would like to talk about how a smartphone or other gadgets can help in weight loss.
Why is weight management important?
Everyone is familiar with the saying “Prepare the sleigh in the summer and the cart in the winter”, in our case the cart is our body. If you want to get rid of the 'winter insulation' in the form of an extra layer of subcutaneous fat by the summer season, get rid of the consequences of overeating during the winter holidays, and just look better, then you need to think about this even in winter. Even better – keep yourself in shape constantly and control the diet, and not only when it's too late and we see an extra 5 kg on the scales. But for this you need to have a high level of self-discipline, which, unfortunately, I do not have.
By the way, excess body fat is not only a bad appearance, but also harm to health. Fat affects the entire body: it stimulates the production of hormones, increases the risk of apnea – blockage of the airways during sleep, and this threatens not only snoring, but general sleep disturbance. There may also be problems with joints, the immune system and many other negative consequences. So a flabby tummy is not the worst thing. I advise you to read this material and find out about all the problems caused by excess fat or obesity.
But you shouldn't be convulsively afraid of fat either. Lack of various fatty acids in the body can cause hormonal disruption, skin and hair problems, and a host of other problems. So fat is good. It's bad when there is a lot of it.
How do you lose weight?
So, decided, it's time to lose a couple of extra pounds. It remains to choose a technique. I read a lot about different diets, listened to the testimony of nutritionists, scientists and athletes, and came to the conclusion that almost all diets are ineffective. The best and easiest way to lose fat is to lower your daily calorie intake. Many people mistakenly think that you can run several times in the street, work out in the gym and you will be able to remove the 'sides', but exercise is only a small part of the energy expended for the whole day. Here is a translation of a foreign article about this.
So if you just want to lose 2-5 kg of excess weight and do not pursue the goal of becoming more athletic, then simply increase your household calorie consumption – give up elevators, prefer to walk, rather than transport. Fitness trackers or smartwatches, which many consider useless, can help with this. It is enough to increase your daily rate of steps taken, for example, from 8 thousand to 10 thousand.
We count calories
So, we decided that we need to monitor the diet, what next? Since we have a technological resource, we will be able to count calories using the phone, we will also need a kitchen scale, but I will talk about them later. I recommend the MyFitnessPal app for this, it is one of the most popular and has a very large product base. You can of course choose any other application.
The first goal is to calculate your daily calorie intake. Fill in your table for a week for a week, add up all the calories and divide by seven. That is, on the first day they ate 2000 calories, tomorrow 1950, then 1700, 1800, 2100, 2000, 1800. As a result, our fictitious daily calorie intake is 1907. Then you lower your rate by 10-15% and observe this order to getting the desired result. That is, instead of 100 grams of rice as a side dish, you eat 90 grams, and so on with the whole meal.
Calorie counting is easy. Take a package of pasta, take 100 grams and look for this product in the application, the easiest way is to scan the barcode. If the product does not have a barcode, then it is enough to use a ready-made database through the search. Eat beef stew with rice – add beef stew and rice separately, or all together if it's on the list. But for this it is imperative to use another 'gadget' – a scale. There have been studies that people visually underestimate the amount of food they consume by 20-30%, which is a very significant figure for our business. Therefore, it is important to weigh the food accurately or to use products with the already indicated weight.
Conclusion
It sounds difficult in words, but in fact, the hardest thing is to develop the habit of filling out the calorie table. Therefore, I suggest using a smartphone for this, since it is always at hand and it is more convenient to add products to the list. It takes no more than 2-5 minutes a day. I also recommend getting a fitness bracelet to track your daily physical activity. Let it be the same Xiaomi Mi Band as the most popular and one of the cheapest.
I could not talk about the specific results that can be achieved with this method of losing weight, because it all depends on the condition of a particular person and on the accuracy of following the recommendations. This is not a quick method, but it is one of the most effective, because it is based on banal rules: you spend more calories than you consume, you lose weight. But with this method, you can eat anything, we will not go deep in relation to BJU (proteins, fats and carbohydrates), the main thing is to eat in a balanced way and keep within the norm.
Thank you for attention.