Losing weight is hard enough. Don’t make it harder by making these fat loss mistakes. One of the worse mistakes many people make is to starve themselves or use a radical low calorie diet that has no scientific backing and isn’t healthy to use for long periods of time. Whether it’s a cabbage soup diet or one that promotes a magical lemonade mix, it’s not healthy and can actually make you gain weight.
A fad diet can actually make you gain weight.
You can’t survive on the nutrients of these fad starvation diets for long and when you do, often you’ll gain more weight than you lost. Why? It’s because your body goes into starvation mode, which slows your metabolism and makes weight loss harder and weight gain easier. Most people also eat far more for a few days than they normally would have had they not dieted.
Doing tons of cardio isn’t the route to go either.
Cardio workouts, like running distances, will also make you make it more difficult. Cardio workouts burn a lot of calories and that’s good, except the calories come from both fat tissue and lean muscle tissue. Muscle tissue requires more calories for maintenance than fat tissue does, so the more you have, the more calories you burn 24/7. Reducing the amount of muscle tissue via cardio/endurance workouts, can actually slow your metabolism. It’s better to have a well rounded exercise program. Strength training is best for weight loss because it builds muscle tissue as it burns fat.
Thinking you can out-exercise a bad diet.
One of the biggest mistakes I see many people make is to think they can shed weight with just exercise alone. Great bodies start in the kitchen, not the gym. Although both the gym and kitchen are important. A Big Mac, large fries and large soft drink are approximately 1330 calories. It would take about three hours of rigorous exercise to burn that many calories and working out that long isn’t a good idea.
- Watch out for special “low fat” or diet food. It’s often not as low calorie as you think. When fat is removed, it’s replaced with extra sugar to make it palatable. Food with healthy fat at also leaves you feeling fuller longer so you’ll eat less later.
- What you eat also makes a big difference. Don’t just focus on salads, unless they have some protein. Just like healthy fat, protein is important. Foods high in protein fill you up, reduce your appetite and increases your metabolism rate.
- Watch what you drink, as well as what you eat. One can of soft drink can be over 100 calories and it contains no nutrients. Drink water and use that hundred calories for delicious, nutritious food.
- If you’re not sure what to eat to lose weight, we can help. Switching to healthy eating isn’t dieting and can help you keep weight off permanently.