Originally published by Matt Weik on nutrabio.com
When it comes to weight loss habits, it seems like everyone has their own quirks. Some make sense, and some have no scientific backing whatsoever. That being said, some weight loss habits start with good intentions but go south incredibly fast.
This article will look at five weight loss habits that could be stalling your results and what you can do to fix each.
Setting Unachievable Goals
Setting goals is one of the best ways to hold yourself accountable, stay on track, and look at measurable milestones. Writing down both short and long-term goals and putting them somewhere you’ll see them every day is a great reminder to keep pushing forward towards your end goal.
Things go awry with your weight loss habits when you start off by setting unachievable and unrealistic goals. You can, in a healthy manner, lose anywhere from 1-2 pounds of body weight a week. If you are extremely heavy, you may see even more (but it tends to be a lot of water weight). Thinking you can lose 50 pounds in a single month is not realistic.
Allow your short-term goals to align with your long-term goals. In fact, what you should do is reverse engineer your long-term goals. If you want to lose 10 pounds in two months, reverse engineer it and develop a weekly (short-term) weight loss goal. If you factor two months is around eight weeks, that means you would need to lose around 1.25lbs each week – which is within the healthy weekly weight loss range.
Don’t go crazy with your goals. Keep them straightforward and achievable, so you don’t set yourself up for failure before you even get started and wind up frustrated.
Dropping Your Calories Too Low
In order to lose weight, you need to put yourself in a daily caloric deficit. This means consuming fewer calories than what is required to maintain your current body weight. One of the common weight loss habits you may see or have even experienced is drastically dropping your daily calories.
If your maintenance is at 2,000 calories, try to eliminate 250-500 calories per day, or simply reduce your intake by around 20%. When you drop your calories too quickly, your body is going to shift into survival mode as it believes you are starving, and for self-preservation, it will hold onto and store any food you consume.
Dropping your calories too quickly will also destroy your metabolism and cause it to slow down to conserve energy and calories. It doesn’t want to be in a fat-burning mode because it thinks you’re in starvation mode. Ease into reducing your calories, and don’t drop them too quickly. Only make a change when you plateau and aren’t seeing the scale decrease after a week
Not Getting Enough Sleep
One of the weight loss habits that not many people think about or consider is your sleep quality. How much sleep are you getting each night? If you’re not getting a minimum of seven hours, you could be stalling your weight loss progress.
Why would sleep even matter? After all, you’re not even up and moving, which means you aren’t burning calories, right? While that is true, sleep is what helps regulate various hormones in your body. One, in particular, is cortisol.
When cortisol levels increase, it can turn on the hunger hormone, ghrelin, and cause you to become “hangry” almost all of the time. Additionally, high levels of cortisol can also cause your body to store more body fat. Therefore, sleep is necessary to help keep cortisol levels under control while also helping you recover and provide you with energy to get you through the day.
Eliminating And Focusing On Food You Enjoy
Have you tried a fad diet that forced you to eliminate a certain food or macronutrient you enjoy? How did that diet work out for you? Probably not very well, right? That’s because it’s not sustainable. Eliminating foods will only cause you to crave them and focus on them more – we tend to want what we can’t have.
Should you find yourself craving food all of the time, you are more likely to binge and fall off the wagon. When it comes to weight loss habits, you want to allow for some flexibility. What that means is, everything in moderation so long as it fits within your daily caloric and macronutrient requirements.
You shouldn’t have to say no to all of those delicious treats if you work them into your nutrition plan every once in a while. It’s about a healthy lifestyle, balance, and changing habits, not about eliminating some of life’s joys.
Doing Too Much, Too Quickly
The old saying, “If a little is great, more must be better” is implemented into many weight loss habits – such as cardio. People think that going from zero to 100 is a good idea. It’s not.
Your body is the world’s most powerful computer. It adapts and changes exceptionally quickly. When you do cardio, your body will adjust and make improvements to be more efficient.
If you start doing cardio for an hour, and your body makes the necessary changes, what do you think will happen next? You’re going to need to do even more cardio in order to achieve the same results. Most people don’t have hours to spare each day to do cardio (nor do they want to do that much), so it would be wise to start with 15-20 minutes per day and work your way up from there.
An Effective Way To Speed Up Your Results
When you combine a solid workout plan that includes weight training and cardio with a clean nutrition plan that incorporates a supportive supplement regimen, you can fast-track your results. By implementing NutraBio Thermo Fuel V9 into the fold, you can support fat metabolism, thermogenesis, a reduction in appetite, energy production, and mental focus.
Establish healthy weight loss habits and allow NutraBio to help you cross the finish line. Achieving your weight loss goals has never been easier!