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Diet and Training Boredom
One of the best and simplest ways to lose weight is to eat the exact same thing every single day. This way, you don’t have to count calories and you know you’ll never be making any mistakes. This is a fool-proof plan and as long as the caloric intake is low and your nutrition is ample, you’ll never need to worry about weight gain.
Or at least that’s the idea. In reality though, eating the same food very rarely results in success and this is due to one key issue: boredom.
If you are eating the exact same thing every day, then very quickly your diet will seem bland and uninspiring and you’ll end up wanting to give up. After a hard day in the office, coming home to the exact same boring salad is enough to make you want to go eat everything you see at a KFC.
Even if you have the intense mental discipline to stick with this for the first few months, you really need to ask yourself if it’s something you’re going to be able to stick with indefinitely. If the answer is no, then you should reconsider whether the diet you have chosen is really worth it.
Even if you do think you can stick at it, you should still do some soul searching. Eating is one of life’s real pleasures. Are you willing to completely give up all variation and fun in your food?
Training Boredom
The exact same also applies to your training. While sticking to the very same training program does work (despite some claims to the contrary) it’s also really boring. Doing the same exercises day in and day out is not fun at all and this is one reason so many people struggle to get into the gym.
And in both these scenarios, the lack of flexibility can also be a practical issue. What happens when your friends want to eat out? And what happens when someone is using the machine you need for your next exercise?
The Alternative
As mentioned though, there are also definite benefits to being a little more straightforward with your training and diet. Keeping things consistent removes a lot of the margin for error and the confounding variables.
So the trick is to find a compromise as the solution.
One way to do this might be to keep breakfast and lunch consistent (perhaps cycling through three options) but to be more creative with dinner. Another option might be to eat a diet that consists of several different allowed foods throughout each day. This might look like this:
Two eggs OR one can of tuna OR one cut of fish
Two oranges OR one banana OR a salad
And so on.
This approach also works well for your training and in that case you can write down a list of exercises for each body part and then just make sure you find a way to get some of each into your routine.
But actually, sometimes it’s fun to just hit the gym and do whatever you feel like. You’d be surprised by just how much benefit you can get from any training – so make it fun and make working out rewarding in itself!
4 Critical Mistakes to Avoid With Your Diet
The right diet is 50% what you do and 50% what you don’t do. In other words, it’s not enough just to cook healthy meals, you also need to make sure you’re not accidentally taking in calories from unknown sources.
This can make life a little bit difficult for anyone starting a new diet for the first time. You might be careful to follow each step just as you should but all the while find that you have a “leak” somewhere that prevents you from being as successful as you should be.
A successful diet then means finding and plugging those leaks and being careful not to make any accidental, devastating mistakes.
Here then, we shall look at some of the most common mistakes you need to avoid to ensure that you aren’t letting anything slip through the net.
Drinking Soda Drinks
When calculating calories a lot of us forget to count our drinks. This is a massive mistake, seeing as some drinks actually contain a ton of sugar and a ton of calories.
The worst culprit? Soda drinks. If you drink Coca-Cola, 7-Up, Red Bull or anything else on a regular basis, then you are adding potentially hundreds of calories into your diet by mistake. Suddenly it makes sense why you aren’t losing the weight, right?
Other common drinks that it’s easy to forget that add calories are tea with sugar or creamy coffees like cappuccino’s and latte’s.
Not Eating Enough
This might sound counterintuitive but actually not eating enough can also be a big mistake when you’re trying to diet. Basically, many people accidentally go too extreme while trying to lose weight and this leads them to end up with zero energy for training.
Likewise, restricting your diet too much might result in your being malnourished or not getting those all-important satiety cues from your body.
Going Overboard on Cheat Days
A lot of diets recommend having a cheat day in order to avoid your body adapting to the relatively low calories and to prevent yourself from going insane with hunger and boredom.
While this is a good idea, you shouldn’t take it as a free license to consume gigantic amounts of cake as that will only add thousands of calories to your diet and make it harder to lose weight. A cheat day means relaxing your diet a little – not turning into Bruce Bogtrotter from Matilda and eating handfuls of chocolate cake…
Not Sleeping Enough
There are many additional factors involved in improving your health and losing weight that don’t seem to relate directly to how much you eat. Sleep is one such example.
You actually burn an awful lot of calories when you sleep and you produce extra testosterone, growth hormone and other anabolic hormones that help you lose weight.
What’s more, being sleepy will increase your appetite thereby causing you to snack more throughout the day. Studies show that not getting enough sleep correlates with weight gain – so start prioritizing it!