10 Common Diet Mistakes That Keep You From Losing Weight.
Ever feel like you are in an endless struggle to drop your pants size or squeeze into that sexy dress? Are you perplexed that your clean diet and regular exercise efforts have less than optimal results?
You may think you are doing all the right things, but it’s possible that the diet and fitness protocol you are following could be keeping you from reaching your goal weight and getting the body that you want.
1. Dieting Without Resistance Training
What is the most common known way women approach weight loss? Crash dieting. But the truth is, If crash diets worked all women would be fit and healthy.
There are two massive problems with crash dieting. One, a lot of the weight lost is usually lost muscle tissue. What this means is that even if you weigh less and fit into smaller sizes of clothing, you are most likely still flabby.The second problem is even worse. Dieting actually slows down your metabolism. The longer you diet and the less you eat, the slower your metabolism. Muscle is your body’s metabolism – when you lose muscle, you reduce your metabolic capacity.When you eventually get off the diet (and you will get off, trust me) you are bound to gain all that weight back in the form of fat. Even worse, you will most likely end up gaining more weight than you lost.
2. Focusing On The Scale
What do you see in the mirror? And what does the world see at the beach? Do they see the way your body looks? Or the number that shows up on your scale? Most women focus on the number on the scale even though it isn’t always reflective on the way they really look. If you exercise correctly, you will build muscle and lose fat at the same time. If you lose five kilograms of fat and build five kilograms of muscle, the scale will obviously not move, but you will look way better in the mirror and your clothes will fit much better because muscle is denser and takes up a lot less room compared to fat. The truth is, how you look and feel has very little to do with how much you weigh.
3. Focusing On Cardio
When you do decide to do some form of exercise, is it invariably some form of cardio? Well, guess what? Cardio is the least important form of exercise for getting a sexy, shapely body! That’s right, it’s not the “miracle weight loss go to”. The key to getting and keeping a great body is to increase your metabolism. In other words, you need to focus on activities that not only burn calories during the workout but also cause you to burn calories for hours or even days after your workout. Doing metabolic resistance training and interval training are far more effective than cardio-only exercise for boosting your metabolic rate.
4. You’ve heard it before. Breakfast is the most important meal of the day.
Has anyone ever told you why? Well when you wake up in the morning, you have been fasting for about eight hours give or take. Your body is starving for nutrients. When you don’t give it any, it will start breaking down muscle for energy. This is bad because remember, your muscle is your metabolism. So you are literally destroying your body’s ability to burn calories. Studies have also shown that if you eat a healthy balanced breakfast, you are a lot less likely to overeat later on in the day and when you start your day with a healthy meal, you are more likely to make good nutritional choices from that point onward.
5. Relying on Pills
Diet pills are another common approach that women take to lose weight. There are many different categories of diet pills, but only a hand full of them actually work. The only time you see women who have gotten in great shape thanks to a diet pill ONLY, is in the advertisement for the diet pill. The natural, good old common sense approach is the most efficient, safest, and longest-lasting strategy to losing that weight.
6. Eating Too Little
Eating three square meals is the absolute bare minimum for a healthy and fit body. You should be eating three meals and at least two healthy snacks each day. Most women eat too little. They skimp on breakfast or completely skip it and then often do the same with lunch. This leaves you running on fumes all day. By the time supper comes around, you are ravenous and likely to overeat. You end up having your heaviest meal at the end of the day when there is little opportunity to burn off the calories. This is the perfect recipe for gaining fat.
7. Eating Out Too Much
If your busy lifestyle or need for convenience has you eating out most of the time, you have little to no control over the foods you eat. And to be honest, you also have little to no control over what you look like and how you feel. If you want to look and feel your best, you need to start cooking. This doesn’t mean you have to spend hours cooking gourmet meals – it means finding a delicious variety of recipes that you can put together in a snap. And if you absolutely MUST eat out, learn about the common pitfalls of restaurant dining and how to avoid them beforehand.
8. Emotional Eating
Food can evoke both good and bad emotions and it is also the go-to when women are feeling anxious, depressed, angry, sad, even happy or excited. Women experience a variety of psychological attachments to different foods. Sweets are more often than not in this category. If you are like most women, all forms of sweets serve as comfort food, but If you turn to food when you are stressed, you are letting your emotions control what you eat and how much you eat. If you are going to get the body you deserve, you need to find a way to break this emotional attachment to food. EAT TO LIVE, DON’T LIVE TO EAT.
9. Lack of Consistency
Do you remember what happened last January? Wasn’t this the year you were going to lose weight and get your sexy body? Chances are, you did great for a short while, But then you started skipping workouts (or breakfast), and by February, your New Year’s resolutions were just a distant memory. Maybe you’ll try again, but the same thing is likely to happen unless you change your habits. By now, you have learned that without consistency there will be no results. This means making resolutions and sticking to them.
10. Not Enough Sleep
Lack of sleep is an often overlooked factor. If you are doing everything right, but still can’t lose weight, take a look at your sleeping patterns. Are you getting to bed at a reasonable hour? Do you sleep a minimum of seven hours a night? Stress in itself compounded by too few hours of shut-eye result in an elevation of the stress hormone cortisol. Chronically high levels of cortisol can make losing fat very tough and can even cause you to gain weight.
