1. Commitment: Committing to a healthy lifestyle is a choice. Once you find a diet that works, you’ll never want to return to your old habits. But many people have unrealistic expectations of dieting, viewing it as a momentary solution, pursuing overnight results, or resorting to unusual and extreme fad diets.
Rather than making small, incremental, sustainable changes in lifestyle, diets encourage you to turn your life inside out for two weeks or so. This isn’t practical and it’s definitely not sustainable.
There are often many ways you can configure your diet to cut back (i.e. soda, alcohol, dessert), but you shouldn’t starve yourself or let your diet rid you of joy. Balance and moderation should be your slogan. You must approach dieting optimistically or else you’ll fail.
Do not undermine any progress you may have made, even if it is small.
Remember: the small changes last and the big ones don’t. Good health practices are more than just learned — they become a habit and a way of life.
2. Inconsistency: When we eat is just as important as what we eat. Time can either make or break us. Every
human on the face of this earth follows a circadian rhythm, so timing is a huge factor in determining eating and sleeping patterns. Irregular eating schedules have subtle, yet negative health effects and are commonly associated with increased Uncounted calories can happen in a number of ways. First, we tend to forget what we eat, especially items eaten between meals or while doing other things, like watching TV, driving, or on break at work.
The good news is that simply by staying in sync with your body’s natural rhythm, you will accelerate weight loss. Try eating breakfast every day within one hour of waking up, then having a healthy snack or meal every three to four hours.
You need a steady stream of energy throughout the day to maintain alertness and also having energy will prevent your metabolism from slowing down. You will most likely feel better and also look better without necessarily eating less.
3. Underestimating: No matter how good you think you are at estimating food intake, you will get it wrong at least most of the time. It’s been said that people underestimate how much we eat each day by 25% to 40%, even those on a strict weight-loss program. It
appears that the more excess weight an individual carries, the more likely he or she is to underestimate their calories.
Second, we get the portion sizes wrong. Usually they are bigger than we think.
Third, we forget about drinks — juices, coffees with whole milk and soft drinks all provide calories. Lastly, alcohol. This produces its own kind of food amnesia because you may be more likely to forget what you’ve eaten while you were drinking.
Such measures to repair this can include ordering half-portions or an appetizer instead of a full entrée, splitting meals, going light on dressings and dips, and passing on the breadbasket, to name
a few easily implementable steps. The ultimate goal should be to become more sensitized towards your nutritional needs. Eat slowly and eat intentionally.
Some call this “intuitive eating,” which, in the long run, may be the most effective way to judge when enough is enough.
4. Overestimating: If you’re cutting back on calories to lose weight, you may find that your diet makes you tired and could also be preventing you from actually losing weight. Being tired makes finding the time and energy to exercise more difficult, and will make a diet fail. If you’re timing your meals right and getting enough sleep, you should have plenty of rest and energy to burn more calories than you’re consuming. A healthy diet combined with exercise is the best thing you can do.
For those hoping to lose weight, the amount of energy you expend during exercise might often be much less than you think. In reality, exercise is vastly overshadowed by diet in determining weight-loss success. While exercise does contribute to more energy burned in a day, a change in diet will generally be the largest factor in whether or not a person loses weight.
Does that mean that exercise doesn’t play any role in weight loss? No.
Exercise is important for adding and retaining lean muscle tissue while improving overall fitness and health. Plus, it’s been shown that over time exercise will help prevent future weight gain or regain.
5. Rest and Recovery: Logging those 7-9 hours of shut-eye daily helps us stay mentally sharp, repair damage done to our bodies during the day, reduce stress and even achieve more success in life. But what happens when you don’t give your body the rest it needs?
A 2012 Mayo Clinic study compared the eating habits of people who slept as much as they needed to those who only logged two-thirds of their required rest time for eight days, and found that subjects who were sleep-deprived
ended up eating an average of 549 extra calories each day (which could lead to the gaining of one pound per week if the habit persisted).
Other researchers have attributed this overeating response to the body’s simultaneous reduction of leptin,
a hormone that signals feelings of fullness, and overproduction of ghrelin, a hormone that signals feelings of hunger, when you are sleep-deprived.
The disruption of your internal clock that guides your natural sleep patterns also determines the times at which you feel hungry during the day. If you’re considered a “late sleeper” you might experience a delay in your frequency of meals throughout the day, eating
dinner after 8 p.m. and consuming more calories than average at that meal.
And those late-eating habits prevent the body from drifting off to sleep the next night, perpetuating the cycles of sleep deprivation and poor eating habits.