Fitness: The Pitfalls of losing weight
I hope that everyone is having a successful challenge and you are staying on track. I have been pressing through, however I would be lying if I said there weren’t some challenges. So today’s post I wanted to focus on some early pitfalls that hinder people from losing sight of there goals when it comes to weight loss, health and fitness.
1. You weigh yourself and you have loss so you feel its ok to cheat a little bit
This is the number one struggle that I have. I will get up in the morning feeling great go and weigh myself and I notice that I have dropped 1.2 lbs…I am thrilled. However, this then becomes the reason I allow myself to cheat a little and have some extra lunch, then I am having an extra snack, before you know it dinner comes around and I am going for seconds and even adding a dessert on to that. At the end of the day that 1.2lb weight loss becomes null and void. I do this all of the time so I know there must be others out there like me. Instead of falling for this trap, don’t loose sight of the goal I tell myself “Great, I have lost 1.2lbs but I sill have 8lbs to go” and that really stops the indulgence right there.
2. Eating late no good can come of it
There are many theories on this, some say that if you are within your calorie limit then it is fine to eat late. However, I do not believe this. I think often when you find people who are counting their calories and still not losing weight most of if can be contributed to the time of day they are eating. With that being said, NO GOOD CAN COME OUT OF LATE EATING. We all need to find a cut off time, and contrary to popular belief I think it is more then 3hours before bed. I try to stop most days (I’m still working on the weekend time) at 7pm. I am not saying go to be starving but you certainly shouldn’t be full.
3. Over snacking
Snacks and small meals seem to be all the rage these days. The old philosophy of 3 square meals is out of the window, and now there are whole empires dedicated to the idea of healthy snacking. While I believe you should have something in between some of your major meals because this will keep you from overeating later sometimes we tend to over do it. What happens is instead of those 8 baby carrots you were planning on eating you eat 12 or 15, or while preparing dinner you snack on all of the ingredients before the food is even made (GUILTY). Some solutions to this over snacking would be to plan your snacks and also chew gum and drink water. Honestly, sometimes we are not even hungry we are just bored.
4. One day off at the gym becomes a week and then a month
I used to be the biggest offender of this trap. I would go to the gym diligently for months on end and then one day I get busy, either I have a meeting or decide to go out with friends and POOF no more gym time for the next week and that at times turned into the next month. The biggest way I find to combat this is to do exercise that you enjoy. For example I love this spin class that I go to every Monday and Wednesday I don’t miss it for anything, if I do no other exercise for the week at least I know I will get to spin. Find something that you look forward to maybe its Zumba, dance class, kick boxing or Copperiea more then likely you will stick to it.
5. You only allow yourself to start over on Monday
Guilty again. So its Wednesday and maybe your week has been a little stressful and you indulged just a little bit. There might have been an office birthday with some cake, donuts and cookies that you devoured. Now what do you do? You can a) continue to go down this bad path for the rest of the week/weekend or b) get right back into shape on Wednesday and put the past behind you. If you pick B chances are you will loose weight a lot sooner then the 99% of us who normally choose A. One of the biggest reason Paparoxi wanted to have this weight loss challenge in the middle of the week is to crush the old mindset of always starting over on Monday. Really you should start over the second after you make a bad choice and make your next meal count.
6. You compare yourself to your friends
We are all guilty when it comes to this one. Either we have friends that are slightly unhealthy and over weight so we say to ourselves “Well I am doing better then him/her so I am on track”. Or we have the opposite very thin and healthy friends and we say to ourselves “Well he/she is thin and having a double order of fries so I guess I can too”. However, for the average person trying to loose weight both of these extremes are flawed. In the first situation with the unhealthy friends its really obvious that you might not want to compare yourself to these people if you are trying to loose weight its like comparing yourself to an F student when you are trying to get A’s. Secondly in the case where you have thin or healthy friends in my experience if you really looked at what they ate throughout the day their portion sizes are pretty small so maybe they had the double fries but only ate breakfast before that. In both scenarios don’t focus on them focus on you!