Can hamburger milk tea also lose weight? Does the Single Food Diet Really Work?

"You can lose weight by eating only hamburgers" and "You can lose weight by just drinking milk tea", open some short video platforms, and you can get many bloggers recommending similar weight loss methods. A common feature of this type of method is that it requires people to eat only one food in their daily diet to achieve the goal of weight loss, so it is called a single food diet.

Which one is better? There are many opinions on the Internet: hamburgers, milk tea, sweet potatoes, coffee...... There are many different ways to lose weight with a single food. But, do these really work?

　Is the single food diet really a weight loss trick?

　　Gotte, who is in her early 30s, was a weight loss frenzy in her 20s, trying various ways to lose weight. In 2015, she followed the trend and tried the sweet potato diet method: she mainly ate a palm-sized sweet potato for each meal in the morning, noon and evening, with milk and eggs for breakfast, and green vegetables for lunch and dinner. "But I didn't make it to a month." "Sweet potatoes are so choking and hard to eat. Although she had only tried for a while, she had already developed constipation, and her whole person was not in good condition, and friends described her as "looking like she had dug out of the soil".

　　In addition to the sweet potato diet, she also tried the coffee diet, which advertises a coffee-based diet. Drink a large cup of coffee in the morning, which can be accompanied by some vegetables or eggs; In the morning, make a cup of vitamin C effervescent tablets and drink; Choose high-quality proteins such as steak or chicken thighs for lunch; Finish dinner before 6 p.m. - only a small amount of vegetables. Gorte persisted on such days for nearly 3 months, and the morning coffee suppressed her appetite to a certain extent, and she did lose weight at that time. But Gotte felt that the cost of maintaining this diet was too high, and "every day I ordered takeout and steak at noon, and my wallet couldn't hold it." Secondly, this recipe is too monotonous, which also makes it difficult for her to stick to it. Moreover, the long-term lack of starch in the diet and the reduction of sugar intake made Gote aware of his emotional instability and easily irritable.

　　Both methods more or less achieved the goal of weight loss at the time, but Gotte couldn't tell why. Gorte speculated that the weight loss was "due to eating less."

　　Cheng Lu, a college student, once tried the "McDonald's Diet Method", eating only one hamburger for three meals a day. "At the end of the semester, I was very busy, McDonald's was close to the school, and I had seen similar publicity so I tried it." The McDonald's diet recipe was more convenient than other fat loss meals that needed to be carefully matched, because it was delicious and more satisfying, but she developed constipation within a few days. She also tried a single-food diet that only eats steamed buns a day. "I'm thin, but that's not healthy thin." Cheng Lu said that a single diet made her "loose and baggy".

　　Fan Zhihong, a professor at the College of Food Science and Technology of China Agricultural University and vice chairman of the Nutrition Literacy Branch of the China Health Promotion and Education Association, told a reporter from China Youth Daily and China Youth Network that eating only a single food can indeed lose weight, "because you definitely don't eat much." No matter how tempting the food is, it is difficult to eat more than this one. Fan Zhihong gave an example: "White rice with braised pork is delicious. But if you only eat rice, according to a person's intake of 600 kilocalories per meal, it is about three or two halves of dry rice (about 700 kilocalories - reporter's note), which is equivalent to 1.75 bowls of rice, and the average person can't eat so much at one meal. And after eating some, your blood sugar will rise, and you will naturally feel full. "Similarly, even if you only eat a certain kind of food that is high in calories, fat, and sugar, you may consume too much at first, but gradually get tired of eating and eat less.

　　Specifically, different foods provide different nutrients, but no single food can provide all the nutrients your body needs. Fan Zhihong mentioned that milk can provide more complete nutrition, but it also lacks dietary fiber, iron, vitamin C and other substances, and needs to eat extra vegetables and other foods to make up for it. If you only eat whole grains for a long time, you will lack the intake of nutrients such as vitamin A and zinc. "The human liver stores these nutrients, so when you first start using a single food diet, these problems don't show up, but in the long run, it's detrimental to your health," Fan said. ”

There is a threshold for healthy eating

　　Why is a single-food diet a dietary choice for many young people? In addition to being influenced by marketing, it also has a lot to do with the difficulty of practicing a healthy diet on a daily basis.

　　The four words "healthy eating" seem to be fluttering, but they really have a threshold. First of all, it is not easy to obtain healthy food, and it requires financial and energy support. The average person can't match every meal as exquisitely as a full-time healthy eating blogger or fitness guru. If you eat out, there are not many foods with less oil and less salt to choose from, and in big cities, the price of relatively healthy light food, spicy hot and so on can easily cost thirty or forty yuan for a meal. Although it is cheaper for college students to eat in the cafeteria, the food in the cafeteria is often more oil and salt. Cheng Lu told reporters: "The canteen dishes are too salty, but ordering takeout is expensive, and I have encountered stale dishes. ”

　　Fan Zhihong told reporters that she had communicated with some catering operators whether they could provide additional multigrain rice or takeaway half a meal, "they didn't do it mainly because the input cost of launching the new production line was too large, and the market demand was insufficient, so they were not sure if they could return to their costs." Fan Zhihong hopes that through publicity, consumers can be encouraged to form the awareness of taking the initiative to pay for healthy eating, and with more demand, they can promote catering companies to provide healthier food.

　　In addition to the difficulty of obtaining healthy food, work and rest are also a major obstacle for young people to adhere to a healthy diet. Gou said that he couldn't get up in the morning, so he didn't have time to eat breakfast, and he couldn't get off work at least seven or eight o'clock in the evening, and he was prone to eat too much dinner. Gotte's complaint is also the voice of many migrant workers, and their work and rest affect or even frame their life and rest.

　　The pressure of work in modern society has caused many young people to change their work and rest style, and more and more people stay up late. However, Fan Zhihong said that human genes are formed in long-term evolution, and they adapt to the work and rest of "working at sunrise and resting at sunset". For example, genes determine that 7 or 8 a.m. is the time when people have better digestion, and 9 o'clock is the time when they are more energetic. But if you don't get up until 9 o'clock in the morning, your schedule and body mechanism are staggered, your appetite is not good, and your work efficiency is not high. From a scientific point of view, the rhythm of insulin production slows down at night. If you don't eat in the morning, you will have plenty of time in the evening, so you will inevitably eat more. If breakfast is omitted and the energy that needs to be ingested is transferred to dinner, it will increase the pressure on the body to lower blood sugar. Therefore, such a diet is not suitable for people with weak blood sugar control.

　　Diet shouldn't be a source of anxiety

　　Cheng Lu is an art candidate, and he used to strictly control his weight for the art exam in high school. She told reporters that after excessive weight loss at that time, although she was very thin, she lived in anxiety anytime and anywhere, and her negative emotions seriously affected her life. "Every time I eat, I wonder if I can stay in shape, if I can get fat all of a sudden, if I can continue to lose weight." Falling asleep with hunger every day reduced the quality of her sleep, and her mood became depressed, and then she developed endocrine disorders, and she did not have a period for a whole year, and finally went to the doctor to gradually recuperate.

　　In this regard, Fan Zhihong said: "In fact, the pressure of young people is already great enough, and diet should not become another source of stress. If you treat your body badly, eat irregularly, and are hungry and full, then first, out of compensatory psychology, you may eat more at the next meal; The second is that the body finds that there is no fixed energy supply, and the inertia of its own energy storage will also play a role, but it is easier to grow meat. ”

　　Healthy eating doesn't have to be fanfare. Fan Zhihong said that as long as there are no major problems with eating habits, it is okay to pay attention to some scientific collocations in daily life. For example, you can eat some grains every day to regulate blood lipids and supplement nutrition, soak some oats in milk to solve the problem, and you can also add some nuts and raisins. "It's still more convenient and healthy, and it makes you happy at the same time."

　　Since April, Gotte has begun to insist on clocking in and exercising on a social platform, which has made her feel more in control of her body. "I don't weigh myself every day right now." "I know when I'm relaxed, and I do grow some meat." ”

　　In the process of recuperation, Cheng Lu gained some weight, but her anxiety decreased. "Everybody says I'm healthy now, and I think so." Perhaps because she realized the damage of underweight to her health, she did not have the worries of gaining and losing and worrying at that time, "I don't think it matters if I am not so thin now, just be happy every day."

　　Fan Zhihong believes that compared with a few years ago, people have gradually realized the importance of health, and now the public has access to more nutrition knowledge, which is a good phenomenon. Many people "have gone from blindly pursuing low weight to lose weight, to comprehensively considering muscle mass and body fat percentage", and she hopes that more people can treat their bodies in a scientific way and with a healthy attitude.

(Source: China Youth Daily)