Eight Things Not to Do When Dieting
Posted in Weight Loss by Guest
A recent report suggested that more people die from obesity each year than they do starvation. Obviously, if you’re overweight, attempting to lose some of that weight is a very smart thing to do.
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Unfortunately, there’s a right way and a wrong way to go about dieting. And when you do it the wrong way, the results are rarely successful. Should you find yourself looking to drop a few pounds, here are eight things you shouldn’t do.
Drink Away Your Progress
Drinking plenty of water makes sense when you’re on a diet, drinking plenty of alcohol on the other hand, certainly does not. If you’re going to spend the day time carefully watching what you eat, it’s important to spend the evening watching what you drink.
Calories consumed in alcoholic form are identical to those consumed in food form. And if you forget to include them in your daily calorie allowance, you’re never going to lose weight.
Skip Breakfast
At first, the idea of skipping breakfast can seem like a logical thing to do for somebody on a diet. After all, no breakfast means no breakfast calories. Unfortunately, there are two pretty serious downsides to skipping breakfast.
First off, your metabolism slows down when you sleep and it doesn’t speed up again until you eat something. This means that skipping breakfast prevents you from burning calories effectively until lunch. And secondly, those who skip breakfast almost always end up eating a lunch that is both larger and earlier in the day.
Take Diet Pills/Supplements
The majority of diet pills and supplements on the market don’t actually work. And even those that do work are largely unnecessary. There is nothing you can achieve with diet pills and supplements that cannot be achieved by a low calorie diet and ample exercise. The only people that benefit from diet pills and supplements are those who manufacture and sell them.
Give Up Your Favourite Foods Completely
It’s a sad fact of life that the best tasting food is generally the most fattening. Because of this, those going on a diet typically find themselves having to cut down on their favourite meals. While cutting down on fattening favourites does make sense, cutting them out completely does not.
An important part of dieting is being realistic and saying you’re never going to eat your favourite meal again isn’t being realistic. Allow yourself one fattening meal per week. One fattening meal per week is better than quitting your diet within a month.
Only Fight Half the Battle
There are two parts to successfully losing weight. The first is a calorie controlled diet and the second is getting plenty of calorie burning exercise. Some people make the mistake of focusing almost exclusively on one part and these people rarely lose weight.
There’s no point in hitting the gym seven days a week, if you’re going to get a take away on the way home. There’s no point in obsessing over what you eat if you never bother to exercise.
Fail to Set Realistic Goals
One of the most challenging aspects of dieting is keeping yourself motivated in the long term. If you want to stay motivated, you need to set goals for yourself that meet three requirements.
- Your goals should be short term. Take things one month at a time.
- Your goals should be clear i.e. “I want to lose X pounds”, not “I want to be slim.”.
- Your goals should be achievable.
Purchase “Low Fat” Foods
When deciding what food to eat, ignore slogans and focus exclusively on nutritional information. The term “health food” doesn’t really mean anything these days. And more often than not, the term “low fat” simply means a product that is full of sugar, fructose and glucose.
If you want to lose weight, it’s calories that you need to be worrying about. And “healthy”, “low fat” foods aren’t always low in calories.
Go Hungry
Finally, there’s the small matter of hunger. Contrary to popular belief, it is possible to lose weight without starving yourself. Weight loss occurs when you burn more calories than you consume. Forced starvation simply isn’t part of the equation.
If you find yourself feeling hungry all the time, there are two things that you can do. First off, you should divide your daily calorie consumption across more meals i.e. instead of eating three meals per day, eat six.
Secondly, increase the amount of calories that you can consume on a daily basis by increasing the amount that you burn through exercise. Forced starvation is not only unnecessary, it’s harmful as it greatly reduces your motivation to continue dieting.
Patricia Miller is a health blogger and likes to advice people on health related problems. She has plans to become a spiritual life coach at a later stage of her career.
