Anyone who has tried to lose weight, regardless of what method they used, knows that it’s not easy. Yes, in the first few of weeks of a diet or exercise plan, when you lose the easy water weight, you feel like you’ve conquered your personal battle of the bulge.
But then reality sets in, the next few pounds are more difficult and, after that, losing weight becomes a mammoth chore where every pound seems twice as difficult to lose as the previous one.
While a rare few seem to have little trouble losing weight, for the rest of us, there are many contributing factors to our weight gain, and just as many different ways to try to lose it. Those factors and circumstances are unique to each person. Yet most of us use common wisdom – like if you exercise or eat less, you will lose weight – to try to drop the extra pounds.
And that’s just one of the ways that we make weight reduction a tougher chore than it already is. The path to a healthier weight is different for each of us, but we all try to get there using the methods.
Here’s a list of some of the other things you might be doing to try to manage your weight, but that are either not producing significant results, or they are actually making it more difficult to lose weight.
1. Exercising Too Much
There’s no doubt that exercise is good for your overall health Generally speaking, any amount of exercise that’s approved by your doctor should make you a healthier person. But it’s probably not going to produce the weight loss you expect.
There are three main reasons for our misconceptions about the exercise-to-weight-loss ratio. First, we underestimate how many calories are in many of the foods we eat. That leads us to think we can burn off a burger with a bit of a jog. Two, and related to number one, we overestimate how many calories we burn. It would take over an hour of jogging the burn off the calories in a Big Mac (540 calories).
2. Cutting Out Carbs and Fat
It’s a really easy mistake to make. Carbohydrates and fat are targeted as weight-producing culprits because, when we overeat certain carbs and fats, they promote weight gain. But healthy carbs and fats are essential to our health. Health Canada recommends that a well-balanced diet for adults be comprised of 45% to 65% carbs, 10% to 35% protein and 20% to 35% fat.
Instead of cutting out carbs and fat, make sure you are getting enough fibre-rich complex carbs and healthy fats to maintain a balanced diet.
3. Using Your BFF’s Diet
It’s just about the worst case scenario. Your friend goes on a diet or weight management program and ~ poof! ~ it works like a charm and she’s out shopping for a new wardrobe. So it must work for you, right? Wrong. We are all very different, especially when it comes to how our bodies handle weight loss. What works for one doesn’t necessarily work for another.
4. Skipping Meals
Whether you regularly skip breakfast or sometimes you’re busy at work and you’re happy to skip lunch to help you lose weight, it’s probably not helping. Your body exists in a ‘normal’ state that it likes to keep. It’s called homeostasis and anything that threatens it can upset and confuse systems your body uses to maintain it. Skipping a meal disturbs the regulated intake of energy that your body is used to. Skip a meal and suddenly your body can interpret that as a threat to your homeostasis and start triggering all kinds of mechanisms, like increased hunger, that negates any benefit of skipping the meal.
5. You’re Focusing on Weight Loss
Losing weight is a major undertaking for your body. For a 150 pound person to lose just 15 pounds, that’s 10% of his or her body weight. Yet we set off trying to lose 20, 40 or 80 pounds without once talking to a doctor or nutritionist. Focus on being healthier, eating healthier foods and getting the nutrition your body needs to stay healthy, and the weight will take care of itself.
If you’d like to learn about other things you might be doing to manage your weight, but that probably aren’t working as well as you think, talk to a nutritional consultant at your nearest Herbal One Centre. They can create a personal weight loss plan to help you lose weight healthily, and help you keep it off.