Liquid diet is one of the best diets to lose weight. It is simple, effective and most importantly – it has no calorie restriction as such. There are a few different liquid diet variations – like for instance with the fibre and without the fibre.
If you are looking for a quick, reliable and sustainable solution for keeping your ideal body weight I think you should definitely consider a liquid diet as one of the best weight control tools. You can check the 5 day liquid diet weight loss if you want to see how quickly you can lose weight.
How do we determine who is overweight and who is not?
BMI or Body Mass Index is the standard of determining if a person is overweight, underweight or normal. It is calculated by dividing body weight by height in square metres. For example, if someone is 175cm tall and weighs 70Kg, the calculation looks like this:
70 / (1.75 * 1.75) = 22.85
- According to BMI, a human body fits into one of the following categories:
- Underweight,
- Normal weight,
- Overweight, obese, and extremely obese.
Honestly speaking, there are no exact commonly accepted official numbers for BMI ranges, however the following are commonly accepted:
- Underweight: BMI less than 18.5
- Normal: BMI between 18.5 and 24.9
- Overweight: BMI between 25 and 29.9
- Obese: BMI > 30
These numbers should be taken with a grain of salt due to additional factors such as your age, gender, bone structure and race affecting the BMI index, which means you can be in a “normal” range if your BMI is less than 18 or more than 25. You can find many BMI calculators online, which take into account all these additional factors mentioned and more.
Additionally, what I find very interesting is that if you are on a predominantly plant based diet and consume non-fatty and low-starch food, your BMI might be lower than 18.5, which does not mean that anything is wrong. There are no real hard BMI groups. How you feel is much more important, so you should not really worry if someone tells you that you are underweight, unless you do not feel too well.
3 main factors causing obesity
From the day you were born there were three main factors deciding if you are going to be overweight or not: your genetics, physical activity and food eating habits. Different health conditions can also affect a person’s weight.
Main foods causing weight gain
Why are some diets better suited for weight loss than others? From my knowledge and experience it is mostly because efficient weight control diet plans focus more on fruits and salads and less on fatty and starchy foods.
You can ask yourself about sugar and the supposed weight gain it causes. There is some truth about it, however the real reason behind the sugar being blamed for weight gain is that most sweet foods causing weight gain are also very high in processed starch and fat. Some most popular examples of such foods are:
- Cookies: starchy dough + fat,
- Cakes: also very fat and often starchy too,
- Chocolate: sweet and high in fat,
- Ice cream: sweet and often high in fat.
However, even eating non-fat, but starchy fruit can cause weight gain. Eating lots of nuts will make you fat too. Let us address both of these things separately.
Eating fat makes you fat
Sounds like an obvious thing, right? Yet still so many people tend to blame sugar for their excessive weight. This whole sugar misunderstanding is mostly because of a combination of sugar + fat + starch very often found in such food items. Food manufacturers know how to trick people to make their products irresistible. Sugar (or salt ) and fat combined together make food quite addictive, it is hard to stop eating ice cream or potato chips once you have had a single bite.
If you still think that sugar somehow transforms into fat inside of you, I can offer you to try a simple 5-day experiment, which will quickly prove to you what causes fat gain. The experiment will consist of 2 phases, here are some details:
- 1st phase: Create a meal plan for 5 days with exact portions and recipes for every day. It does not have to be something fancy or complicated, just regular meals you are used to eating. On top of this diet you add a substantial amount of sugar or honey. It needs to be 100% sugar, not a cake or a donut because they contain lots of fat and starch.
- 2nd phase: Use the exact same diet as in the 1st phase, only this time replace the added sugar with an equal amount caloric intake of fat. You can use extra virgin olive oil, seeds or nuts for this.
100 grams of extra virgin olive oil contain about 880 calories, 100 grams of almonds is about 570 calories, etc. 100 grams of white sugar is about 380 calories, 100 grams of honey is about 300 calories. You can use online calorie calculators to find out how many grams exactly you would need to use for every food item.
After this experiment, I am pretty confident you will see your weight increase only after the 2nd phase of it. Although I would never recommend eating so much sugar or fat on a daily basis, this is probably the only way to learn in practice what the main weight gain cause is.
It is rather a complicated topic and out of scope of this article, however to be concise, sugar alone, in any form, simply cannot cause weight gain. It is also much harder to eat as much sugar in caloric intake than fat. However do not confuse pure sugar with starchy carbohydrates found in pasta, bread, etc – they are not the same.
Even starchy fruits slow down weight loss
Mangos, Bananas, Plantains, Dates and other similar fruits are high in starch and even though they are very low in fat you can easily gain weight by eating too many of them. I personally think these fruits need to be minimised or avoided altogether because even small amounts of starchy fruits can stop the fat burning process. Also from experience they may cause blood thickening.
Eating fruits from the geographical zone of your ancestors, rather than chasing exotic fruits is a preferred option. For example if you are of European descent, you can safely eat apples and oranges, but mangos and bananas are too sweet and starchy, which is not the same for someone originally from a tropical area.