With so many diet programs and with so much information being available about weight loss it’s surprising that some of the same mistakes are made time and time again. Of course there will always be the small deviations from your diet plan - perhaps - when you’ve been out with friends for and evening or entertaining at home. Frequently however the mistakes are fundamental and will prevent you from achieving the weight loss you wish to achieve. Understanding the basic errors will help you change your attitude and subsequently lead to weight loss that is permanent.
1. It’s got to be All or Nothing
All or nothing dieters will often pick out a complicated diet that is almost impossible for them to maintain. Before beginning, they will search the kitchen for anything that does not fit the plan and throw it in the garbage. They are planning to be the perfect dieter, and so they will be, for one day, three days, seven days or even a couple of weeks. Then, inevitably, something happens that means they cannot keep to the diet one time. Immediately the whole thing is ruined in their eyes and the diet is over. They go to the store and buy all the things that went into the garbage last week and proceed to gain back all the weight that they lost, as fast as possible.
If you are this kind of dieter you need to ask yourself some tough questions. Do you really want to lose weight permanently, or just lose a few pounds so that you can enjoy putting them back on again? The way forward is to make small changes to what you eat so that you have a slow but steady weight loss.
2. The Attitude of Sacrifice
Sacrificing or cutting out too many of your favorite items of food and drink may enable you to achieve your short term weight loss target but odds are that it will be too much to sustain. If you can make some adjustments and consume less of the more damaging or higher calorie items then you will gradually educate your body to the new regime. Once you have achieved your required weight loss then you’ll find it much easier to maintain your new weight because you have not sacrificed some of your favorites. Even the odd beer won’t ruin your entire dieting process.
3. Failure to achieve goals
Setting achievable goals is vital in any weight loss plan. Goals should be clear, realistic and set out in writing. While you probably do have an ideal weight in your mind, unless you are only very slightly overweight it is probably too distant to be useful. A more useful goal would be to lose two pounds per week for the first five weeks and then one pound per week after that. Some weeks you will lose more and some less, some weeks you may even gain, but if you track your progress on a graph you will see that ups and downs are natural and do not stop you progressing steadily toward your major goal.
If any of the above sound familiar to you then don’t worry too much - just regard the whole process as part of the learning process. Move on from your mistakes and implement what you have learnt. If you understand the mistakes you have made then you stand a chance of correcting them and make your own weight loss program work for you. I may be making a too general statement here but being determined to be healthier by eating and drinking with more awareness should lead to a healthier life and a more sustainable target weight.
