If you are reading this then you have had some problems with reliably losing weight and inches. Here then are the biggest mistakes people make when trying to lose weight:
- Skipping Breakfast. This is the most common and worst mistake people make. When you are sleeping your body is using up the food from the night before. It may burn less calories while sleeping but for most people it may be 12 hours or more since their last real meal. That is half an entire day. Sleeping also slows down your breathing, heart rate and other bodily functions while you are sleeping. After hours of this your metabolism has hit rock bottom. You will continue to burn few calories until your metabolism increases. Eating breakfast increases your metabolic rate, giving you energy and making your body work therefore also increasing the amount of calories it uses. If you skip breakfast it works against your goals. Eat a breakfast everyday!
- Skipping Meals entirely. It might sound like a good strategy but it will only make your body put on weight. Eating less means you consume (take in) less calories but it causes you to eat more at meal times. People who skip meals find they need to “reward” themselves more often with less healthy food. More importantly, your body recognizes its receiving less nutrients than it needs and slows your metabolism down and when you eat next, it will try to store more calories from the food you eat. Many people try so-called “starvation diets” where they skip meals regularly or eat so little they starve themselves to losing weight. They lose weight initially but when they go back to any sort of normal eating pattern they find they gain even more weight then they had before the diet. Their body needs to store more calories, fat & energy for the next starvation diet.
- Exercise that’s not Exercise. You join a gym; go to the treadmill or elliptical start walking and read your book. If you can read a book while exercising you probably are not exercising. Treadmills/walking is supposed to be cardio. Cardio stands for cardiovascular and often thought as aerobic exercise. It is about increasing your heart and breathing rate increasing blood circulation throughout the body. If you are able to remain still enough to read a book, this is not what you are doing. You are only burning about as many calories as you get walking around your kitchen looking for food. You need to get your heart rate to at least 50% to 80% of your maximum. Put the book down, get an MP3 player and started running on the machines instead of walking.
- Taking supplements that will burn the pounds away. If you fall for this then you never listened when your parents told you “Anything too good to be true, is not true!.” Weight-Loss Supplements are a 35 Billion dollar industry. It is that large because people keep buying new ones when the old ones don’t work. Whether its Acai berries, teas, herbs, etc. Also because these “Miracles of Science” use either natural foods or herbs they are not regulated by the Food and Drug Agency (FDA) and not subject to the testing required by medications. If a company even found a natural product that worked, they would love to submit it to the FDA so they can charge high-dollar prescription drug prices. Many prescription drugs do in fact come from natural materials. If these actually helped people lose weight without proper diet or exercise it would be on every evening news report instead of only from these companies’ own marketing materials and salespeople. There is no substitute for Proper diet and exercise.
- You only need to Diet. or Only need to Exercise. You need both: Diet & Exercise. Diet is the most important part of losing weight. If you take in too many calories you will probably be gaining weight. Too few nutrients will also make your body weak and possibly sick. Diet is about balance. Take in the amount of nutrients including protein, vitamins, iron, calcium and yes even calories and fat. They are all needed and used for good purposes by the human body. But there are limits. Too much of a good thing is a bad thing. You can consume too much iron, calcium and some vitamins and it can even be very dangerous, even life-threatening. A proper balanced diet.
You also need exercise which increases the metabolic rate therefore burning more calories even when you are not exercising. It will also increase strength, blood circulation and breathing among other things which all help the machine inside you to process food, flush body wastes and keep your body on a steady course.