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!
