You can't lose fat, or keep it off because you are making these 11 fat loss mistakes
Not Eating Enough
Think of food as kindling for your energy stores. When you are properly fed, your body will body burn through your stored energy from food, and then move on to your fat stores. If you aren't eating enough, your body decides to break down your lean muscle mass so it can preserve what little energy stores it has, and this leads to and even SLOWER metabolism.
Not eating enough for long periods of time messes with your thyroid function. Your thyroid is responsible for fat, carbohydrate, protein metabolism, and more. Your body has the ability to slow down thyroid output in an effort to maintain energy balance
If you don't have willpower of steel, eating too little can lead to binging. Have you ever thought your day is going perfect nutritionally, but once you hit the evening hours, you want to eat everything in sight?? Guess what, you probably ended up worse off than if you had just eaten a little more healthy food throughout the day!
Signs that you are under-eating:
Always Tired
Never Feel Satisfied after meals
You lost your period
Your experiencing headaches
Right Food Wrong Sauce:
Most Sauces are loaded with fat and or sugar. On top of that, we add WAY too much to our food. It's not surprising that someone could eat a whole days worth of calories, just putting too much unhealthy dressing on their salad. It's easy to make that mistake, because sauces don't fill you up. It's not uncommon for the salads to have the highest calorie count on the menu at restaurants, just because of the dressings.
Here are some condiments that will add flavor without all the calories...of course, dried or fresh herbs, you can use to your hearts content (limited calories, and great vitamins and minerals)
Salsa
Wasabi
Soy Sauce
Worcestershire sauce. ...
Tabasco/hot sauce like Franks (make sure to check the nutrition label, there could be hidden sugar)
Mustard
Vinegars
Drinking Calories:
If you want orange juice-eat and orange
If you want apple juice-eat an apple
It's that simple
For a simple half cup of juice, you can have the whole fruit instead. This will help you feel satisfied, and you will get more of the nutrients that are lost in processing. And really, who drinks just 1/2 a cup of juice. Everyone overdoes it.
Same goes for any other Soft Drink, Energy Drink, Sport Water etc. Way too many empty calories with NO benefit to your body..Stick with water with Lemon and save hundreds, even thousands of calories/day
Snacking Between Meals:
Do you have kids? How many bites of their food do you take/day?
How many times do you eat what's left over on their plate before putting it in the dishwasher?
When your kid asks for a snack, do you end up craving one too?
You may not notice these calories because it's just a bite here and there, but they sure do add up!! They probably add up to a few pounds a year actually!
Overeating healthy food:
It's healthy so I can eat to my hearts content right?
WRONG!
Just because it's healthy for you doesn't mean you can go hog wild. You still have to watch your portion sizes. Try measuring for a while, you will be surprised how little a serving is. If you are having trouble losing, start measuring. You could be consuming 1000's of calories more than you think you are.
Not tracking what you eat:
I always suggest to clients to track, measure and weigh everything for at least two weeks. The longer the better. Journaling your daily nutrition can draw out:
Where you are overeating
When and even why you may be having cravings
Food Sensitivities
Nutritional deficiencies
Finding out what your daily intake is while you are maintaining will also help you 10 fold when you are making your future weight loss plan
You aren't including resistance training:
Resistance training is what builds muscle, and muscle is the part of your body that burns the most calories. So, if you have more muscle, you will have a healthier metabolism, and it will be much easier to burn fat with smaller changes in your nutrition.
So get yourself into the gym, and start building that muscle...not only will you burn more calories at rest with the added muscle, but it will give you a tighter shape, and who doesn't want that!
Losing weight will make you a smaller version of your current self, but if you add in weight training, you will also see a beautiful change in shape!
Overestimating how many calories you burn during exercise:
Do you ever think getting a workout in gives you the go ahead to eat whatever you want for dinner and finish it off with a big dessert?
WRONG!
Start to see exercise as a muscle building endeavor, not so much a calorie burn. You'd be surprised how little you actually burn walking on a treadmill for an hour especially if you are a small woman (most machines are OVER estimating your burn by up to 42%, yikes)
So don't use regular exercise as a pass to binge, or you will end up negating the deficit, AND MORE...leading to weight gain, not loss.
Underestimating the importance of sleep:
Sleep is so important for weight loss. It's recharging your battery (brain) which plays a part in so many of the bodies weight loss hormone functions. It is also your time to recover from your workouts and decrease inflammation.
Cortisol (stress) rises when you don't sleep which results in your body to conserve it's energy stores to get thru the day. Which, you guessed it, means less fat burning.
When you are tired you have more cravings and your crankiness will more than likely have you giving in to them. And who are we kidding, how likely are you to be active throughout the day, or make it to the gym when you haven't slept?
In short, sleepiness causes you to make poor decisions. So make it a new habit to hit the hay a little earlier.
Depending too much on the scale:
You don't think you're losing fat because the scale hasn't moved?
Guess what!
If you are doing everything right, you could still be losing fat. The scale doesn't tell the whole picture.
Body Recomposition (exchanging your fat for lean muscle mass) is quite possible. The muscle gained takes up less space than the fat lost which makes you look smaller and more shapely, but because the muscle WEIGHS more than the fat, you don't necessarily see changes on the scale.
This is most common in beginners, so if you're just getting started, take advantage of it and get into the gym along with changing your nutrition habits.
In order to really see these changes, make sure you take photos and measurements every few weeks. Don't get caught up with the number on the scale.
Not drinking enough water:
Drinking water is important during weight loss because it provides hydration without unwanted calories. More water throughout the day will help decrease cravings as well. MOST of the time, a hunger signal can be easily pushed aside with water.
Drinking water also helps flush wastes from the body, which is especially important during times of fat metabolism and weight loss.
So there you have it, my top 11 reasons that you aren't losing fat. It's pretty easy to miss these little things and end up frustrated because you think you're doing everything right!
Let me know what you think and if you put these tips into action! :)
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