How can women scientifically control their diet to lose weight? Avoid common dieting mistakes.

Step Two to Weight Loss: Control Your Diet

In the hospital, you can see all sorts of unexpected scenes. Once, I went to the registration office on the first floor and saw several nurses pushing a mobile hospital bed hurriedly forward, surrounded by a large group of staff in suits—quite a sight. I asked around and learned that the person on the bed was a celebrity who had suddenly collapsed while filming a program after sweating profusely.

Later, I chatted with a nurse I knew about this. She said the patient had been admitted to the nutrition department and was receiving intravenous nutrition daily.

"Is it because of dieting again?" I guessed.

The nurse nodded and said that this celebrity had previously left the entertainment industry for a while and was recently planning a comeback. To give her fans a good impression, she decided to lose weight and get back in shape. For over a year, she had barely eaten any staple foods, only fruit, and drank water when thirsty. In winter, the body needs extra nourishment, but she continued eating like that, and her body couldn't take it anymore, so she was hospitalized.

This kind of thing is common in hospitals; every year, many women are hospitalized due to excessive dieting. It's just that this time it's a celebrity, so it's caused a bigger stir. To some extent, it's called dedication, but from another perspective, it's called torturing oneself, playing with fire! Weight loss is a healthy lifestyle, and we must say no to methods that contradict health. We shouldn't sacrifice ourselves for temporary beauty.

People diet to the point of risking their lives simply to lose fat. As I mentioned before, healthy fat loss is actually very simple: "eat fewer calories," without needing to go to the point of near-starvation like that celebrity.

So how many fewer calories?

A suitable approach is to reduce daily calorie intake by 837 kilojoules (200 kilocalories). In other words, if a person's daily calorie expenditure is approximately 7535 kilojoules (1800 kilocalories), then they can consume 6698 kilojoules (1600 kilocalories). This difference of 837 kilojoules is roughly equivalent to the calories in three slices of bread.

Dieting should not be rushed. I once heard someone say that consuming 5023 kilojoules (1200 kilocalories) per day is sufficient. This is excessive. A simple calculation using the calorie expenditure formula shows that 5023 kilojoules only meet basal metabolic needs. If you only sleep and don't work, this amount might be enough. But for a working person, it's simply insufficient. For women, this diet can lead to mild symptoms like irritability and malnutrition, and more serious problems like endocrine disorders, menstrual irregularities, or even amenorrhea.

Excessive dieting can also easily cause rebound weight gain. Why? Simply put, it's about willpower. There's a term called "revenge eating," which means that if people excessively diet for a period of time, they will eat even more food. Excessive dieting violates the body's natural laws and fails to make a balanced diet a habit, therefore it's unsustainable.

Another important point in controlling your diet is to cultivate the habit of chewing slowly and thoroughly. Because the feeling of fullness is delayed, it takes about 20 minutes for food to make you feel full. Therefore, eat slowly, and even stop eating before you feel full; after a while, you will naturally feel full. Doing this can help you eat less than usual.

An important principle of health preservation is "70% full," which is related to the delayed feeling of fullness. You may already be full, but because you eat too quickly, you haven't felt full yet, so you continue eating until you unknowingly overeat. Eating a little slower will bring you closer to your true feeling, making it easier to control your food intake within a reasonable range.