Common Weight Loss Mistakes

Are you happy with your weight?  The majority of people aren’t, and would prefer if they lost a few pounds, but there’s a problem.  A lot of the information about weight loss is confusing in the best case, and outright contradictory in the worst.

If you’re struggling with your weight, you’re probably falling into one or more of the common weight loss “traps” described below.

Fad Dieting

Hardly a month goes by that some new diet doesn’t burst onto the scene, promising amazing results with minimal effort on your part.  The problem with most of these diets is that they’re extremely unhealthy.  When you deprive your body of important nutrients it needs, your body is going to rebel.  Worse, it takes 21 days for a dietary change to become habit, and most people don’t tend to stick with the fad diet of the moment for that long.

It’s easy to understand why.

When you don’t see immediate results, you start looking around for the next fad diet, and you usually don’t have to wait long before it appears.  Then, you move to that one, which totally changes your eating style, and the cycle begins again.

Finally, after a couple months worth of diet hopping, you just stop altogether, and your body pays you back by making you crave all the foods you’ve been denying yourself while experimenting with the fad diets.  Whatever weight you lost gets put right back on and in a few months, you try again.

Extreme Dieting

The other big problem that most people run into when dieting is that they take it too far.  They go on what amounts to a “starvation diet” and don’t take in enough calories, vitamins and minerals to keep their bodies functioning properly.

When this happens, your body goes into crisis mode, and starts converting whatever calories you DO give it into fat, which is exactly the opposite of what you want to happen!

Not Enough Exercise

The third of the “Big Three” dieting pitfalls is that people mistakenly believe that diet alone is enough, or that diet plus a magic pill will do the trick.

Diet is important, sure, but exercise is just as important.  Unfortunately, that’s not what most people want to hear, because let’s face it, exercise just isn’t very much fun!

There’s an easy way around that problem though, and it amounts to flipping the script.

Don’t think of exercise as exercise.  Instead, pick some activity you enjoy doing, or something that you’ve never tried before, but sounds like it would be fun.  The only catch is that the activity in question must have a physical component.  It could be just about anything though.  Hiking.  Walking.  Swimming.  Tennis.  You name it.  As long as it’s got a physical component and is something you enjoy doing.

Then, just start doing more of it.  You won’t rebel against it because it’s fun, and you won’t actually think of it as “exercise” even though it is!

If you can avoid the Big Three most common dieting pitfalls, you can hit your ideal weight with ease, and keep the unwanted pounds off in the long term.