Here’s what you need to know….
- If you’re not tracking your daily calorie intake it’s easy to overindulge on foods that have a high-calorie content without noticing. This can result in a positive energy balance and compromise results.
- Restricting your intake of certain foods, or entire food groups will ultimately render your diet unsustainable in the long term. Remember, the best diet is the one you can stick to for the longest.
- Setting calories too low too soon can lead to what’s called ‘adaptive thermogenesis’ – a metabolic state which can seriously undermine your results.
For many people, nutrition remains one of the more confusing aspects of losing weight and with the sheer abundance of inaccurate, unsubstantiated and often contradictory information available to us it’s easy to see why. The media, particularly since the advent of the internet and social media, constantly bombards us with a tsunami of misleading information, usually pertaining to the latest ‘fad’ diet that promise quick and easy results. Seldom is this information useful as our brains struggle to filter out the ‘noise’ and make informed decisions about exactly how to structure your nutrition for results. Of course, this is the reason why Personal Trainers like myself exist. My job is to help you cut through that noise and provide you with credible, up-to-date and trustworthy information that makes eating for fat loss easy. With that in mind, here’s a breakdown of three of the most common mistakes I see people make when dieting and how to avoid them;
Mistake No.1 – Not Tracking Your Calorie Intake
Tracking your calorie intake is important for a number of reasons, most notably it allows you to measure what’s known as energy balance – the relationship between the amount of calories you consume through food and those you expend through exercise and activity. The difference between the two figures will determine whether or not you lose weight. If you eat more than you burn, then you’re going to gain weight. Conversely, if you eat less than what you burned, you’re going to lose weight. This all might sound painfully obvious but if you’re not tracking your calories, then you have no real way of knowing whether you’ve burned more or less than what you’ve consumed. The problem is that without a reliable measure, people tend to over-estimate the amount of calories burned through exercise whilst underestimating the amount of calories consumed through food. Inevitably, this will cause your total daily calorie intake to rise, significantly reducing your calorie deficit or even putting you in a calorie surplus – neither of which are conducive to fat loss. The easiest way to track your calorie intake is with the use of a food diary. Personally, I recommend using an app such as My Fitness Pal which will increase your awareness of the foods you eat, provide a platform to which you can be held accountable and offer you the degree of flexibility with you diet need to make it sustainable.
Mistake No. 2 – Heavily Restricting Your Intake of Certain Foods
Adherence is an important thing to consider in the design of any diet and the easier it is to stick to your diet long term, the greater your chances of success. Conversely, the more rigid a diet it is the harder it is to follow. Rigid diets generally require abstinence from foods that are either high in sugar, salt, artificial flavourings, total fat, saturated fat or considered ‘unclean’. This omission of food is effective at reducing body fat because it decreases daily calorie intake while increasing the consumption of satiating high protein, high fibre foods. Where this approach fails, is that these type of diets become increasingly stressful, rigid and obtrusive. As time progresses, it becomes harder and harder to exercise restraint and resist the temptation to indulge in foods we both crave and enjoy eating. At this point the diet usually descends into episodes of binge eating, undoing weeks (if not months) of hard work whilst leaving the dieter feeling guilty, depressed and demotivated to continue. The solution to this problem is to make your diet easy to follow. The simplest ways to do this is to include foods you enjoy as part of your plan, avoid overly restricting any particular food group or nutrient and be careful not to lower your calories too low for too long. This approach, whilst as equally effective, will enable you to sustain your eating habits long term without suffering the inevitable social, psychological and physical stress associated with rigid dieting.
Mistake No. 3 – Crash Dieting
Drastically reducing the amount of calories you consume in order to achieve rapid, short-term results is another common mistake people make when trying to lose weight. A moderate calorie deficit of around 20% is usually more than sufficient to stimulate fat loss of 0.5-1kg per week. Despite this being a realistic and sustainable rate of fat loss, people will opt for deficits as large as 40% in an attempt to expedite results.This is counterproductive for a number of reasons. Firstly, if you start your diet in a 40% deficit you’re not giving yourself much room to manoeuvre when progress stalls, which it inevitably will. If you’re in a 20% deficit and weight loss begins to plateau you always have the option of further reducing your calories by an additional10%, which should be more than enough to get things started again. Second, large calorie deficits can induce what’s know as adaptive thermogenesis (AT). This what people commonly refer to as ‘starvation mode’, where the body attempts to preserve energy in response to the decrease in calorie intake. The body does this by reducing physical activity and other metabolic processes that burn precious calories. The impact of these protective measures is that the difference between calories burned versus calories consumed is reduced and less body fat ends up being burned as a result. When it comes to calorie restriction, your goal should always be to lose weight eating as many calories as possible, whilst remaining in a calorie deficit. This gives you options should fat loss stall, prevents AT and will make the process of dieting far more enjoyable and sustainable in the long run.
Final Thoughts
Whilst they are undeniably frustrating, making mistakes is a fundamental part of learning and growing as a person. Hopefully, by reading this article, you will be able to avoid some of the more common mistakes that people make when trying to lose weight and in doing so increase your own chances of success. If you’re confused about what to eat and how to train to lose weight, then download my free Fat Loss Cheat Sheet. The Fat Loss Cheat Sheet is a concise, step by step guide which explains the 7 key actions that you need to take in order to lose weight quickly and permanently.
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