Why eating more can be the best way to lose weight

Have you spent half your life crushing your body (and mind) with low-calorie diets, but you cannot stabilize yourself at your ideal weight? The same is that you should stop counting calories and pay more attention to the nutritional value of the foods you put on your plate.

How much we walk. How many liters of water do we drink. How many hours do we sleep? We spend our lives setting ourselves ‘numerical’ challenges, forgetting that old maxim that so wisely proposed putting quality before quantity.

An explicit exponent of this quantifying mania is our obsession with counting daily calories, especially when our goal is to lose weight. Guided by the simplistic “men should eat 2,000 calories a day and women about 1,800”, we fall into the trap of thinking that the secret to getting rid of our parrots is to reduce the amount of food by forgetting that wise saying that put in I value quality over quantity.

“Any diet based solely on the intake of a specific number of calories is, at best, surreal for many reasons. The first of them and, probably one of the most obvious, because our activity and, therefore, our caloric expenditure is not the same on Monday as on Sunday, to put a very visual example,” explains endocrine Maria Amaro.

In addition to the physical activity we do, Amaro explains that other factors should be considered before crushing our body and morale with low-calorie diets, such as “the muscle mass or body temperature of each person.”

 In terms of diet and exercise, there is a point on which we should all reflect. “The important thing is not the number of calories, but the quality of the nutrients they provide us. Two thousand calories from a pizza are not the same as from a steak. The key is to discern where those calories come from,” says Amaro.

“We eat, but we don’t eat. We put a lot of calories into our bodies very quickly that don’t fill us up, and we have to keep eating.”

The main culprits of this nonsense are, of course, the ultra-processed because, beyond the nutritional disaster to which they lead us, they are ‘designed’ to fuel our gluttony. “Fish, meat, eggs, or potatoes, to give a few examples, can have the same calories as a cake or a muffin (depending on the amount), but their passage through the digestive system is slower. On the other hand, by being digested more quickly, the ultra-processed ones prevent our brain from secreting the hormones of satiety, and we continue to eat. “

Influencing only the quantity without taking into account the quality and nutritional balance of the food we eat will generate a hormonal imbalance that, in the long run, will even make us gain more weight. Look, it’s not a sustainable way to live a healthy and energetic life. 

Eat more, opting for satisfying foods with a high nutritional density that provide the body with vitamins, minerals, and fiber.

Our body needs that the food we eat provides us with the essential nutrients that it can only obtain from what we eat. Vitamins and minerals are present primarily in fruit and vegetables -; nine critical amino acids in quality proteins like eggs and fish.