Top 10 Dieting Mistakes
Are you among a million other people who have invested a crazy amount of time as well as countless amounts of effort and money on diet plans that failed to yield any specific results? Is your diet plan adding up to your extra calories and fat consumption? If so, it is more than likely that the scales tripping you up are some of the common dieting mistakes. According to diet experts, you can be eating a lot more calories when you are on a diet – often a result of disconnect between your knowledge about what to eat and what you actually eat!
For starters, you need to stop thinking about dieting as it is. Instead, observe and monitor your everyday habits that could be adding to weight gain. Jumping right into a diet regime can increase food cravings, heighten your obsession with specific foods or even lead to quitting the plan altogether.
Here is a list of the top 10 mistakes made by people when they go on a diet.
1. Pure Soy or Protein-rich Diets
Skipping on proteins while on a diet is never advisable – every form and type of nutrient is necessary for the body in some moderation or the other. While the general understanding is that high protein diets lead to enhanced weight loss, it does not do the body any good when continued over a long time. A diet rich in proteins tend to minimize the effect of hunger by effectively cutting the consumption of carbohydrates and by reducing the overall energy intake.
2. Skipping Meals or Starving Yourself
For anyone who wants to lose some weight, it is a given that they need to keep a check on their diet and dietary supplements. However, what makes a difference is the knowledge of when and how much calories to consume. And for most people, the common notion is skipping meals or at times even starving themselves of the essential nutrients. They fail to realize that, in the long run, skipping meals causes abdominal weight gain, besides creating insulin resistance in the body.
3. Eliminating All Carbohydrates from Your Diet
Carbohydrates are akin to fuel for the body and leaving them out of your meal is one highly popular mistake. Even though people report to losing weight when eliminating carbohydrates from weight, it later leads to exhaustion and clogging, besides putting their bodies in a state of ‘Ketosis.
4. Processed or Diet Foods
A careful analysis of the list of ingredients listed on a pack of “processed” or ready-to-eat foods are essential, because not all diet foods are calorie free. Instead, these foods contain calories in the form of saturated and hydrogenated fats, which contributes little to your weight loss plans.
5. Crash Diets
Crash diets are another fad that seems highly feasible for short-term weight loss programs; however, they too come with their share of risks. For people going on a crash diet regime leads to nutritional deficiency along with weight gain at the end of the program, which might ultimately slow down the person’s metabolism.
6. No Fat Diet
Eliminating or consuming lesser than required fats from your diet, often leads to an imbalance of nutrients in the body, especially in the case of carbohydrates. The body requires fats in the form of omega-3 fatty acids that are essential for the functioning of the body.
7. Not Paying Attention to the Ingredients
This can be understood better with an example – most people on a diet revert to sugar-free alternatives to consuming actual sugar, which contain more carbs than actual sugar. Artificial sweeteners mess up the hormone levels of the body and cause weight gain.
8. It’s All About the Timing
Eating the right foods at the right time is crucial while on a diet. Most diet experts recommend snacking on light foods every 3 hours or so, so as to allow the body to maintain an optimum level of metabolism.
9. Fasting or Binge Eating
Bingeing on particular foods or without having anything for long stretches hampers with the body’s capability of functioning and metabolism. People need to keep a check on their eating habits and maintain a balance with the quantity and type of foods they consume.
10. Liquid Calories
Liquid calories add to your daily carbohydrate intake and people usually compensate for it by cutting down on their solid counterparts. A single can of soda contains up to 15 teaspoons of sugar and around 150 calories. The idea is balance the diet with the requisite calorific intake.
