11 Major Weight Loss Mistakes

If you recognize yourself in any of them, maybe it’s exactly the reason why you can’t lose weight or keep the result.

Creating too much of a calorie deficit

The human body is perfectly adapted to survive in conditions of starvation. Therefore, when the calorie intake is sharply reduced, the body immediately adapts to the new conditions and begins to save energy – it goes into “protective mode”.

In clinical studies for rapid weight loss with severe calorie restriction (below 900-1200 kilocalories per day), the body itself reduces its energy expenditure even without any changes in physical activity.

Three months after the start, the study participants consumed 431 kilocalories less per day than the control group, and after six months – another 240 kilocalories less!

With a short-term 4-day restriction of caloric intake below 1500 kilocalories per day, the basal metabolism decreases by 6%, and with restriction below 1200 kilocalories per day – by 13%.

With a medium-term three-week restriction of caloric intake to half of the calculated norm, the basic metabolism decreases by 266 kilocalories per day, and the energy spent on walking – by 22%.

The reverse recovery is quite inert, and the body, which is already set to save energy, spends few calories at the same rate, and spends them for a very long time even after normalizing nutrition.

As a result, not only are lost kilograms restored, but even the initial weight is exceeded.

What can you do?

If you are losing weight on your own, do not limit your caloric intake by more than 25% of what is required for your weight, age, gender and lifestyle.

If you lose weight with our trainer, trust him and follow his instructions as precisely as possible – he has calculated everything personally for you. Under his leadership, this percentage may be slightly higher.

How quickly you can lose weight without harming your health, you can learn in our club and its various forms of training and challenges, including online.

Skip a meal

Despite the recommendations of trainers, many people continue to believe that by skipping meals, they accelerate weight loss.

For example, a person skips breakfast or misses lunch at work, but at the same time eats a very large and high-calorie dinner.

I myself, before I started eating properly, did exactly that – I didn’t eat all day, but in the evening I ate everything I could get my hands on. And then I was the worst with health.

This weight loss strategy obviously does not bring good results. First, after a whole day without food, extreme hunger will make you eat much more than usual. Second, skipping meals can negatively affect blood sugar, metabolism, and energy levels.

Why all this happens, you will learn in detail and easily with us. The explanation is simple, but practice shows us that a person does not believe in it until he experiences it for himself.

What can you do?

Try to eat at small and regular intervals, starting with water and the obligatory breakfast after getting up, and depending on your lifestyle, distribute at least 4 more meals until 2-3 hours before going to sleep – ie. breakfast, first snack, lunch, second snack and dinner. If you go to bed late, you can add another light meal 2-3 hours before sleep, but remember that not getting enough sleep is another weight loss mistake.

Lack of protein in the diet

Protein provides a feeling of satiety, reduces calorie intake and plays a key role in maintaining muscle mass during weight loss or at least maintaining it.

A high-protein breakfast (30 grams of protein in the morning and about 15 grams of protein in between snacks) significantly reduces cravings for sweet and salty foods between meals.

All other things being equal, high protein intake (about 140 grams per day) provides a greater feeling of satiety than usual consumption (about 70 grams).

Feeling full directly affects calorie intake throughout the day in an interesting way. People who consumed 30% of their daily calories from protein ate an average of 575 fewer calories without feeling hungry compared to those who got only 15% of their calories from protein.

In the process of losing weight and shedding fat, you will inevitably lose muscle mass in the beginning. Protein helps protect the body from this unpleasant effect.

Tracking normal protein intake is necessary for healthy weight loss or maintenance. Increased protein intake (but not more than 2.1 grams per kilogram of body weight) during a low-calorie diet allows you to preserve your muscle mass, increase your basal metabolism and normalize your blood pressure. Keep in mind that the human body cannot normally digest more than 30g of protein per meal, no matter how much protein is consumed.

What can you do?

Try to keep your protein intake at 30% of your daily caloric intake every 4 hours, excluding sleep time.

Consult with your trainer how you can achieve this.

“Liquid” diets

Often, people who want to lose weight with minimal effort prefer “liquid” diets (fresh drinks, juices and smoothies). Although generally healthy, fruit or vegetable juices will not provide the body with enough fiber and protein – key nutrients needed to feel full and provide the “bricks” from which our body is built and regenerated.

In addition to cleansing the body, fiber helps control calorie intake and reduces the risk of obesity.

Fibers high in pectin (apples, citrus fruits) and beta-glucans (oats, barley) have now been fully proven to reduce appetite, leading to lower calorie intake.

What can you do?

Do not start a “liquid” diet. Consume enough protein and fiber. Limit fresh and natural fruit juices to 125 g per day – in large quantities they are calorie “bombs”!

Complete exclusion of fats or carbohydrates

Fats are essential for healthy skin, joints, good vision, memory, spermatogenesis, fertility and mood. In addition, without enough fat, vitamins A, D, K and E are not absorbed by the body, which can lead to a deficiency of these vitamins and health problems.

For weight loss, it is more important to reduce the amount of carbohydrates, not fat. Although fat contains about 9 kilocalories per gram and carbohydrates and protein only 4 kilocalories, various studies show that low-carb diets are more effective than low-fat diets.

All things being equal, over six months on a low-carbohydrate diet, participants lost about three times as much weight as those on a fat-restricted diet, a fact confirmed by more than 50 clinical studies.

These facts should not tempt us to cut out carbs completely – they are the main food for the brain, and I’ll leave it to you to judge what would happen in the complete absence of carbs. Carbohydrates are also important and it is no coincidence that they are the largest part of the daily intake.

The same applies to gluten – only people who have been conclusively proven that gluten is harmful can resort to complete gluten deprivation. In all other cases, gluten is necessary.

What can you do?

You do not have to significantly reduce the amount of fat in the diet, but it is recommended that you consume unsaturated fats, which are found in fish, avocados, nuts, vegetable oils and, of course, in our products.

You don’t have to limit carbohydrates either, but again we need to emphasize complex carbohydrates and fiber at the expense of simple carbohydrates, which it is desirable to reduce. A good ratio of total caloric intake for people who are not professional athletes is 30% protein x 30% fat x 40% carbohydrates.

Physical activity without diet or diet without a “gram” of physical activity.

Physical activity is necessary for health and maintaining muscle mass during weight loss. However, without a change in eating habits, exercise will not lead to significant weight loss. According to our philosophy, 80% of success is due to the change in nutrition and 20% – to physical activity.

However, people often overestimate the amount of calories burned during exercise. For example, if a girl weighing 60 kilograms works for 30 minutes at an average speed of 8.5 km/h, she will burn only 250 kilocalories. For an untrained overweight person running for 30 minutes, these are unattainable numbers. At the same time, just four or five chocolate chip cookies or one beer compensates for all this labor and energy expenditure.

Another problem with this approach to weight loss is the increased calorie intake after exercise. Often after physical activity, people allow themselves to eat whatever they want, including sweet and fatty foods. Yes, to preserve the muscles, it is good to eat immediately after training, but the food should be a rapidly digestible protein.

It may be strange, but practice shows that when people perceive physical activity as a necessity, they consume the wrong food more often after training than when they perceive this activity as fun.

The other extreme is a complete lack of physical activity. Practice shows that even the smallest activity significantly improves the effectiveness of the diet. For example, more walking. I agree, and I have experienced it myself, that when a person is bigger, he does not feel like physical activity at all. As “appetite comes with eating” 😉, so the desire for physical activity comes with losing weight.

What can you do?

Do sports, but remember that this will not help you lose weight without a proper diet, and that only a proper diet is not the most effective way to lose weight and improve your health.

Make sports and proper nutrition a part of your life and treat training as a fun and enjoyable activity. Otherwise, you won’t last long and will reward yourself with high-calorie foods, making your efforts pointless.

Monotony in training

The same type of exercise causes rapid body adaptation and routine, so that your body very soon begins to use much fewer calories for the same activity. As a result, weight loss slows or even stops.

In addition, monotony kills interest and motivation, which can completely exclude physical activity from your life.

A greater variety of medium and high intensity exercises, but without maximum load, helps to successfully maintain shape and lose weight.

What can you do?

Vary the exercises for different muscle groups and the intensity of the workouts. Try unusual exercises. Supplement them with high-intensity interval training (HIIT). Any unusual and varied load for the body increases the expenditure of calories and accelerates the metabolism even for some time after training. Don’t neglect strength training. Women are often afraid of becoming muscular and compromising their figure, but under normal conditions without specialized supplements this is not possible to happen.

Expect quick and lasting results

Most diets are quite restrictive and strict and difficult to follow for long periods of time. After their termination, the weight is restored and often even exceeded when restoring the previous lifestyle.

You can completely give up sugar, fatty foods, fast food and cut your calorie intake in half, and at the same time find yourself by the fridge, drinking and stuffing yourself with chocolate cake.

More than half of women give up on the diet before it’s even over, let alone stick with it for the rest of their lives. Men last a bit longer, perhaps because they usually have faster results. The reason for giving up quickly is usually because they had higher expectations than the actual results. The more weight a person expects to lose, the greater the risk of giving up on a long-term diet, and even in the first few months.

Nine out of ten people who prefer slow change and are able to set achievable goals remain successful three or more years after starting.I know many people who go on some strict diet on their own, lose a lot of weight in a week, and after a few months they are back where they started. There are also diets, the long-term observance of which has an adverse effect on health. Such are the diets with the disruption of the balance between macronutrients – high-protein, low-fat, high-carbohydrate, vegan and the like. Crucial to any diet is the coach who monitors the progress of the results and maintains a balanced healthy regimen throughout, while the very lifestyle of his client changes.

What can you do?

The most profitable strategy is slow incremental change. In most cases, losing weight by more than 1.2-1.5 kg per week is not healthy. Of course, this is also strictly individual – for significantly larger people, it is permissible, as long as it does not affect the amount of muscle mass. Don’t try to lose weight quickly. Rapid weight loss, along with healthy weight loss, sometimes also creates purely cosmetic changes – the skin fails to recover according to our expectations. Rethink your entire lifestyle: a balanced, varied and healthy diet with less processed and carbohydrate food, moderate physical activity, better quality sleep, less stress and more rest.

Insufficient hydration

All processes in the body, regardless of their nature, take place in a water environment or with the participation of water.

The body, especially when losing weight, needs a lot of water. The need for water can be 40 mg per kilogram of weight and even more.

Since drinking water is immediately reflected on the scale, most people unknowingly limit their water intake. Or they use diuretics, which increase its deficiency even more. People with edema in the limbs also restrict themselves from water, and then, as long as they do not suffer from any disease, they achieve the exact opposite effect – the body, with a lack of water, tries to preserve at least that, which there is and does not care whether it is in edema, in the bones or elsewhere.

We also observe similar behavior in athletes whose spots depend on weight categories – wrestling, sambo, boxing, weightlifting and the like. They quite purposefully deprive themselves of water before competitions, which actually makes it more difficult to burn fat and “melt” their weight.

What can you do?

Trust your coach. He will make you an individual program, tailored to all your characteristics and your current lifestyle and sports activity. Together with it, you will get rid of unwanted water, unwanted fat and weight in a completely healthy and correct way. With it, you will achieve your goal permanently and as efficiently as possible.

Lack of enough sleep

People who don’t get enough sleep are more likely to make unhealthy food choices than people who get a good night’s sleep. Sometimes even 1 hour more sleep is enough to improve our eating habits.

In the long run, lack of sleep causes hormonal imbalance. Many hormones are affected, but the most important from the point of view of fat burning and weight loss are: ghrelin, leptin and cortisol, which further stimulates appetite.

The body stores the calories it takes in as fat instead of burning them as energy.

Lack of sleep slows down the metabolism, and in addition to accumulating fat, one begins to burn it more slowly.

And the differences are serious – fat burning can be slowed down by up to 55%, while at the same time an accelerated burning of lean body mass (muscle tissue) is observed by up to 60%!

People who sleep 5 hours or less a day accumulate up to 32% more visceral fat. Interestingly, an increase was also seen in people who slept more than 8 hours a night.

So if you want to protect yourself from visceral obesity, you should look for the “golden mean” – 7-9 hours of sleep are recommended and quite sufficient for most people.

In humans, things are always very connected: just as quality sleep improves training performance and affects nutrition, so training and nutrition themselves help to increase sleep quality. Useful for sleep are nuts and seeds, chicken and fish, dairy products, sweet potatoes, eggs, bananas, etc. Drinking enough water before the day reduces the feeling of discomfort and swelling during sleep.

Alcohol

Each gram of alcohol contains 7 empty kilocalories. And that’s not the worst of it. A cup of concentrate can slow down metabolic processes for a week or more. There is a separate article about alcohol that you might want to read.

What can you do?

Stop all alcohol. Especially concentrate. Especially if you want to gain muscle mass and melt fat.

If it’s so urgent or you can’t avoid some alcohol (I understand there may be such cases), it’s preferable to drink a glass of white wine with ice and plenty of water.

There are certainly others that are more specific, but these are 11 major weight loss mistakes.

Keeping them in mind will help you lose weight in a few years, forget about exhausting and unhealthy diets and never gain weight again.

With our coaches and diets, this is not difficult at all to accomplish. The main thing that is required of you is desire and action. We know how to help people!