5 Things You Should Never Do When Dieting

Shutterstock.com

Most people can list the obvious diet no-no’s. Eating that entire box of Krispy Kreme donuts will not help you lose weight. Laying around like a lump on the couch instead of going for a brisk walk is counterproductive when you are trying to shed a few pounds. Avoid cake, ice cream, cookies, brownies and just about anything that might belong on a dessert menu. Chips, French fries, pretzels and other salty munchies are similarly out. Join a gym and actually go use the equipment there instead of simply staring at the impossible contortions the advanced yoga class manages to hold with serene smiles on their faces. Eat fewer calories than you burn. Nice and simple.

While the basic formula of “healthy diet – sweets + exercise = weight loss” is more or less true, there is more to dieting successfully than just walking past the package of Oreos in the grocery store. You need to be in the right frame of mind and to be taking care of your entire body, not just your waistline. You also need to avoid the most common pitfalls of dieters everywhere. Here are five things you should never do when dieting.

Skip Sleep

Shutterstock.com

Just about anything you want to do is going to be a whole lot harder to do when you skip out on sleep. When it comes to dieting, sleep is essential for both your mind and your body. As anyone who has tried dieting in the past knows, mental willpower is an absolute necessity if you are going to lose weight. The enthusiasm present for those first few days begins to wane around the turn of week two, and those quotes that were so inspiring when you obsessively emptied the house of everything but carrot sticks, plain chicken and kale start sounding mocking when you open the fridge for a snack and find nothing but vegetables. All those #fitspo posts become far less motivating after the fourth Friday when you have to skip out on the office’s traditional box of donuts or when you are the only one at the bar and grill who orders a salad instead of a juicy burger that smells like heaven.

When your willpower starts to weaken, you start to break your diet. Skip out on sleep and your willpower dissolves that much faster. To make matters worse, a lack of sleep often makes people both hungrier during the day and more likely to crave sugary and fatty foods that give a quick burst of energy at the expense of your waistline later. If you really want to ditch the pounds, you cannot ditch your sleep.

Miss Meals

Shutterstock.com

One of newbie dieter’s favorite tricks is to skip meals. After all, if they do not eat lunch, they do not take in those calories! This, however, is not how it works. Skipping meals does nothing pleasant for your diet. If you skip lunch, your body will spend the rest of the afternoon reminding you that you are really quite hungry. This can lead to a variety of problems, none of which are good for you or your diet. The first is that you simply become tired, listless, irritable and generally useless for the afternoon. This is not good for you at work and makes it extremely unlikely that you are actually going to go to the gym after work. The second option is that around 3:30 p.m. you crack and raid the vending machine. A healthy chicken and tomato sandwich would have had fewer calories than the bag of chips and king sized candy bar you scarf down after your stomach has spent three hours growling at you. The third option is that you tough it out until dinner, only to eat enough to feed a small village when you finally get home. This, again, pounds down far more calories than a decent lunch and a smaller dinner would give you.

Cut Food Groups

Shutterstock.com

No matter what the perky blonde woman or muscular hunk on TV says, carbs are not your enemy. Neither is dairy or naturally occurring sugar or red meat or whatever food group the celebrities of the world have decided to demonize on a particular day.

To lose weight in a healthy manner, you need to eat a balanced diet. Yes, a balanced diet includes carbohydrates, naturally occurring sugars, meat and healthy fats such as those found in nuts and olive oil. Cutting any of these food groups from your diet denies your body key nutrients. Without all the nutrients you need, you will, at best, feel miserable during your diet. At worst, your body will begin to suffer from malnutrition. When that happens, a shattered metabolism and some minor anemia is the best you can hope to suffer. Serious self-inflicted malnutrition can have far more serious, and sometimes permanent, consequences.

Daily Weigh-Ins

Shutterstock.com

If you are going to lose weight, you need to keep track of how much you weigh, right? This is true, but far too many people assume “tracking weight” means “weigh yourself every few hours and try and tell if the number has shifted at all.” Such obsessive number watching is not helpful at all. Your weight will naturally fluctuate from day to day and during each day itself. You will weigh more right after lunch when you have a full stomach than you will first thing in the morning. Your weight will drop after a hard workout when you have sweated out quite a bit of water and jump back up when your muscles begin to repair themselves. Stop obsessing over the tenth of a pound that you may have lost or gained since yesterday. The apparent lack of change that occurs from day to day is discouraging and can lead you to give up. Instead of daily weigh-ins, pick one day a week that will be your weigh-in day. This way, you can track your progress without having to decide if your diet is actually working or you just sweated out more water today.

Expect Miracles

burst.shopify.com

Your body shape is your body shape. Accept that before you start any diet, and you will avoid serious disappointment and discouragement at the end of the diet. The odds are good that you will never look like Christopher Reeve’s Superman or Chris Evan’s Captain America. Most men simply do not possess the bone structure for their impossible shoulder to hip ratio. Similarly, most women will not suddenly possess Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow body or the long, toned form of the professional dancers on “Dancing With the Stars.” Your body shape can only be altered so much before you run into problems with hip width, rib cage placement and leg-bone length. Eating right and exercising often can help you become the fittest you possible, but they will not magically make you look like an action hero. A diet will not work miracles and change your entire appearance. Do not expect it to, and you will avoid feeling like a failure even when you reach your goal.