Weight tuning after the holidays

Everyone knows that one's own body weight often plays an important role in one's performance in endurance sports. What to do if the Christmas goose or the many chocolates have significantly increased the weight at the end of the year? When trying to lose weight, the same mistakes are often made year after year.

Let's start with the "worst case scenario" of losing weight - the zero diet.

Because with this example, some basic knowledge can be conveyed very quickly. If we as humans do not consume any energy over a longer period of time, our body reacts extremely intelligently, it gradually reduces the largest energy consumer and this is our muscles. The extracted protein is converted into energy. Thus, the basal metabolic rate, i.e. the required amount of calories per day, also decreases, because less muscles also means less basal metabolic rate. If we return to the usual dietary habits after such a diet, then we come to the well-known yo-yo effect. Because with less basal metabolic rate, even more fat is now stored in comparison to the nutritional behavior before the diet. At this point it should be clear to everyone that there is hardly a worse solution for an athlete, because actually we want to weigh less, but by no means lose muscle. So the point is to reduce the "problem areas" and thus the body fat.

This is actually what losing weight is all about

To put it in a nutshell: It's not so much about weight loss as it is about reducing body fat.

The basics

But how do you reduce body fat without losing muscle mass? To answer that, you need to know a few key functions.

One important premise in advance: A diet can only be based on a hypocaloric diet. This means that less energy is taken in through food than is consumed.

Next, we come to the important key hormone: the body's own insulin. Insulin represents the door opener for our cells. Unfortunately, however, this is also a form of one-way street. In other words, high levels of insulin in the blood also mean that fat burning, i.e. the production of energy by using our fat reserves, cannot take place. This quickly makes it clear that an important prerequisite for fat burning is an insulin level in the blood that is not too high. This in turn means that we must keep our blood sugar constant.

Here, science has provided us with a simple solution when it invented the glycemic index. This states that the GI (glycemic index) of a

food, the higher the increase in blood glucose after consumption of a food.

Dextrose (glucose) with the number 100 was set as the standard. If you want to keep the blood sugar and thus unnecessary insulin peaks low, you have to make sure that you eat foods and drinks with a low GI. Here I recommend to deal more closely with the LOGI method.

By the way - who doesn't know them, the people who eat very little, but very regularly throughout the day and who complain about not losing weight anyway. In the morning the jam on a small white flour roll, at work a cappucino with a teaspoon of sugar, at noon next to the light salad a coke and in the afternoon to a small cookie again an espresso with sugar. The insulin spikes are pre-programmed and the high insulin level does not allow any fat burning during the day. Over years this nourishing habit can lead then even to the Diabetis type 2.

Evolutionarily, there is a nice picture for this: Thousands of years ago, we ran after food, some of us still with bows and arrows, and were happy when there was something to eat. Today, food runs after us on every street corner and at every opportunity, and the sugar content has grown many times over. Our bodies are not adapted to this and we are now experiencing the negative consequences.

Solutions to lose weight

How to get out of the holidays fit

01

In order to reduce the unnecessary fat pads or make them disappear, we have to take in less energy than we consume. Helpful and supportive here are of course low-intensity sports units in GA1 mode.

02

It is important to keep our blood sugar as constant as possible throughout the day so that we stay in fat burning mode for a longer period of time.

03

Foods or also special diet products (such as SQUEEZY Athletic) with a very low glycemic index can be used for this purpose. The LOGI Guide by Dr. Worms (RRP € 6.99) can also be very helpful here.

03

To protect the muscles, it may be useful to substitute additional amino acids or protein products, especially in the evening.