There are many habits that can prevent you from achieving successful weight loss. It’s important to be aware of what they are before you even begin your weight loss journey.
Habits to Break When Trying to Lose Weight:
1. Little or No Research
Many people jump into fad diets without looking at the science behind them. They hear good things about them and assume these fad diets must work. However, if these diets aren’t backed by real scientific studies and facts, then you’re risking your health on something that may not work.
This is one of the reasons why so many people end up re-gaining weight.
Take time to educate yourself about healthy eating for weight loss. You need to understand how food works with your body before you can know what you need to eat. It’s important to also consult with a health professional before attempting to lose weight.
2. Giving In to Food Cravings
Another common obstacle that can keep you from reaching your weight loss goals is having food cravings. This is especially true of sugars. Sugar triggers your brain’s pleasure centre which means it can be addictive, and hard to avoid since your body craves it. Sugar is also one of the biggest contributors to weight gain, so it’s crucial to resist these cravings.
There are a few ways that you can avoid giving in to food cravings. The best way is to make sure you don’t have any junk food at home. This way, you won’t be able to eat it just because you know you have easy access to it. You also need to make sure everything you do eat is filling and packed with nutrients so that you feel full and don’t need to eat sugary snacks to satisfy your hunger.
3. Focusing on the Scale
Weight loss is about more than just the total number of kilos that you’ve lost or want to lose. When you focus too much on the number on the scale, then you run the risk of disappointment when it’s not moving as quickly as you want or when it goes up even though you’ve been doing everything right. This is a huge pitfall for many people and may even cause them to give up.
Measure more than your overall weight and you may find that you’re actually losing fat and gaining muscle, especially if you’re also working out to improve your weight loss results. Have your body fat percentage tested regularly to see how much fat you’re actually losing, and measure various parts of your body (arms, waist, legs, etc.) to see how you’re getting smaller even if the number on the scale isn’t.
It’s also important to realise that the number you see includes everything in your body, like water. If you weigh yourself after drinking a lot of water or while dehydrated so your body is retaining more water, you may see the number increase. Therefore, it’s good to regularly track your weight, but watch the overall trend, and not worry about the exact number on that day or week.
4. Eating for the Wrong Reasons
Many people who are obese or overweight are like that because they don’t have the right relationship with food. They may use food as a way to comfort themselves when they’re sad, or to keep themselves occupied when they’re busy. Still others eat for the enjoyment of it. This is a problem because when you think of food in this way, it’s hard to change what you’re eating.
If you’re not eating as a way to provide the right type of nourishment to your body, you’ll get trapped by this roadblock. It takes some time, work, and sometimes the help of a food coach or other health professional, but you need to make sure you’re eating for the right reasons. Food should be considered a tool that you use to lose weight (if weight loss is your goal), not something you turn to for emotional help.
5. Letting Others Influence You
Think about the people you spend the most time with, and it’s likely that they weigh about the same as you do. When everyone around you is going out to eat unhealthy food and encouraging you to forget your diet just for the night, it’s easy to give in and keep giving in until you’ve completely fallen off track of your diet.
Sometimes, you may need to cut people out of your life or at least spend less time with them so that you can focus on what you need to do and not let their negative influences affect you. You can also try taking the lead when it comes to planning activities and suggest your get-togethers involve more physical activities or healthy restaurants.
6. Not Planning Ahead
If you don’t plan ahead, then you’re likely to get trapped by this roadblock. When you don’t plan ahead for lunch, for example, you’ll probably find yourself having to go out to eat during your lunch break and will grab the first thing you can find, which may or may not be good for you. Or, if you get hungry between meals and don’t have a healthy snack handy, it’s too easy to grab a quick unhealthy snack from the vending machine or the local cafe.
The more you plan ahead, the better you will do with your diet plan. Meal planning means sitting down once to plan out what you’re going to eat for the next week, two weeks, or month. This will help you know exactly what you need to shop for so you can have the food on hand that you need to cook so you’re not grabbing whatever you can at the last minute.
7. Believing that Healthy Food is Too Expensive
Another common problem that people run into whilst dieting is the belief that healthy foods are more expensive than their unhealthy counterparts.
One way to reduce your grocery bill is to buy what’s on sale. When you do your meal planning for the week, check the catalogues from various grocery stores and use them as a guide. You’d be surprised at how much you can save by simply taking advantage of sales. Grocery stores also have discounted fruit, vegetables and meat during certain days of the week and certain times of the day. These discounted items are usually nearing their ‘use-by’ or ‘best before’ date.
8. Exercising Too Much
Exercising to lose weight will often work against you in a couple of ways. Some people force themselves to get up early to exercise, and miss out on getting enough sleep which is crucial for weight loss. Others think that spending an hour on the treadmill will make up for the couple of doughnuts they had that morning that someone brought into work.
What you eat must be your main focus whilst losing weight, and you can’t expect exercise to bail you out of bad eating habits. Moving regularly throughout the day can help improve your overall health and strength training can help boost your weight loss, but these should be in addition to a healthy diet and should not be the focus of your weight loss plan.
9. Counting/Restricting Calories
Counting and restricting calories is common when trying to lose weight. You’re likely to lose lots of weight fast when restricting calories, which sounds like a good thing, but since you can’t maintain a low caloric intake for long, you’ll soon find yourself re-gaining weight. Instead of counting and restricting calories, you’ll find that by eating whole foods, it’s almost impossible to overeat and you’ll feel fuller and for longer.
10. Unrealistic Expectations
Many people set up unrealistic expectations for their weight loss, and this leads them to quit when they’re not reaching their goals. They often expect to lose too much weight in too short of a time frame. Or, they may expect to continue losing the same amount of weight that they were losing at the beginning of their weight loss journey when they near the end of their ‘diet’.
Setting goals is an important part of losing weight, but if they’re unrealistic, then they’re going to work against you and could cause you to give up since you’ll get disappointed when you’re not able to reach them. Make sure that part of your research before trying to lose weight, is how much weight you can expect to lose so you can set up realistic expectations.
Conclusion
By breaking these common habits, you’ll have a much better chance at losing the weight that you want, maintaining your weight, and becoming healthier. It’s going to take some work, especially at the beginning, but it will all be worth it in the long run.
Meal Planning Made Simple:
