10 Weight Loss Mistakes To Avoid

Losing weight is inherently hard. Your body generally tries to resist changes, so there is no point in making things even harder on yourself by making unnecessary mistakes. Here are 10 weight loss mistakes to avoid in order to speed up your results.

Weight loss has simultaneously never been easier and yet never harder to do. There is endless information and resources available on the topic, so why would it not be easy, right? At the same time, the information is often overwhelming and even contradictory. Not only that, but we have never had more unhealthy temptation right at our fingertips.

On top of that everybody and their mother will have some “advice” for you on how you should go about shedding those pounds, even though it clearly hasn’t worked for them.

It’s no wonder that with all of this information we can’t tell right from wrong. There is, however, some good advice out there, and whether it is just too hard to decipher through the sea of weigh loss information or our own stubbornness, many people refuse to listen to it.

So if you are just starting to get healthy or just trying to drop some body fat to get that six pack, here is a list of 10 common weight loss mistakes and how to avoid them.

1. Not Setting Realistic Goals

No matter what you are trying to accomplish in life, setting actionable goals is the foundation that will set you up for success. Weight loss is no exception to this rule.

Outlining what you want to accomplish, how you will do it, and when you want to do it by gives you a road map to achieving the results you want. One of the most common problems people have is aimlessly wandering into the gym and kitchen and not really having a plan. This, of course, will lead to failure.

Be sure to not only set an overall goal but also small milestone goals along the way. For example, if your New Year’s goal is to lose 20 pounds by summer, you should set smaller weekly goals to lose one pound per week up until that point.

Achieving these smaller intermediate goals helps you progress to your ultimate goal but also gives you a sense of accomplishment which will help motivate you to keep going.

On the flip side, make sure that your goals are realistic. If you are 60 pounds overweight you shouldn’t make a goal to get a six pack by summer. It just isn’t going to happen and will lead to discouragement, that will usually lead to you giving up all together.

Set obtainable yet challenging goals and realize that it takes time. You didn’t get overweight in a few months and you won’t lose it all in a few months either. Keep at it and success will come.

2. Too Much Focus On The Scale

When you say you want to lose weight, what you are really saying is that you want to lose body fat. Sometimes we forget about this and put too much emphasis on the number by our feet.

Weight is an OK overall long-term baseline to judge our progress but it isn’t everything. Like I said earlier, discouragement is the enemy of motivation and can be disastrous to your weight loss goals. So just judging progress by the scale may not be a good way to do it.

Our weight fluctuates quite a bit over the course of a day due to many factors including time of day, water retention in the body, and hormone levels. Also, if you are wight training increased muscle mass can actually make it seem as if you aren’t losing any weight.

Rather that just using the scale, measure your waist, observe the fit of your clothing, and do the good old mirror test in conjunction with the scale. You can even take progress photos so that you can see your body changing.

3. Neglecting Resistance Training

For whatever reason, some people still have a negative perception of weight training, especially women. There is a myth that if you lift weights you will look like a body builder. If you look around the gym, there are a lot of people lifting weights, and I’d bet almost none of them look like body builders. This way of thinking is quite honestly just downright foolish.

It’s foolish for a lot of reasons but mainly that you are doing yourself and your goals a huge disservice by not incorporating weight training into your program.

Many studies have shown that a combination of resistance and aerobic training is the most effective way to lose body fat.

Weight training changes your overall body composition, replacing body fat with lean muscle mass and most importantly speeds up your metabolic rate allowing you to burn more calories overall.

Picking up a weight is not going to give you huge bulging muscles. Bodybuilders and strongmen deliberately train with a specific routine to look like that. Adding strength training focusing on compound movements will not do this to you. Instead it will increase your body’s lean muscle mass, which is essential to losing weight and consistently keeping it off.

4. Overestimating Your Calorie Burn

It is great that you are exercising, but you probably aren’t burning as many calories as you think you are. It’s pretty common to hear someone say that they need to eat more because they are working out. Well, not necessarily the case if you are trying to lose weight. Moderate exercise burns around 200-300 calories in about a 45 minute session. If you go and eat a big post workout meal after this you may have actually just put yourself in a calorie surplus.

One study showed that a group of participants exercised and burned around 200-300 calories but when asked to guess how many the average answer was around 800 calories.

If you are severely out of shape it may feel like you just ran a marathon when you leave the gym but in actuality your body is overly taxed due to the lack of use. Keep working out and this feeling will start to lessen, but remember that you probably didn’t work as hard as you think calorie-wise.

5. Overeating/Under-eating

The first part seems pretty obvious. If you eat too much, you won’t lose weight.

If you put some numbers to it, you need to burn about 3,500 calories to lose one pound of body fat. So if you want to lose one pound per week you need to create a 500 calorie per day deficit.

Guess what? People are really bad at estimating anything calorie-wise. Just like the study showing that people overestimate the calories they burn, another study shows that we underestimate how many calories we consume.

Sometimes this is done with the best intentions. There are healthy foods that are high in calories such as nuts, whole grains, and dairy products that can be over-consumed. Bottom line, be conscious of what and how much you eat.

On the flip side if you drastically under-eat, you can slow your metabolism and put your body in starvation mode. This will cause your body to burn less calories and even consume muscle mass for fuel instead of fat. A good rule of thumb is multiply your body wight by 13. This will give you your maintenance calories. Subtract 500 from that, and that is how many calories you should eat a day to lose one pound per week.

6. Not Tracking Your Calories

An easy way to solve the problem in number five is to just track your calories. There is really no excuse outside of pure laziness to not do this today. There are a ton of apps available, including MyFitnessPal, which is free and extremely powerful. It will calculate your daily calories for you and contains a massive database of food information. It also has a bar code scanner, so you can just scan the packaging of a food, and it will automatically import the nutrition data.

Diligently tracking what you eat will ensure that you are eating the appropriate amount of calories to lose weight. Be sure to track everything though. Many people track their meals but neglect the things that they munch on throughout the day. That handful of pretzels or couple of Girl Scout cookies you grab can add up. If you eat it, and it isn’t a green vegetable, track it.

7. Drinking Your Calories

Sometimes we forget that liquids have calories too. Even people who track what they eat can neglect to track what they drink, and this can hold back their weight loss progress. Sports drinks, fancy coffee drinks, and sugar-laced fruit juices are common staples of a lot of daily routines and can be forgotten about as a calorie source.

Another dangerous side effect is that liquids do not seem to effect the appetite center of your brain. This leads to you do not feeling full or satisfied which means that you will still consume the same amount of calories, putting you in a calorie surplus rather than a deficit.

I haven’t even mentioned alcohol yet. If you are diligent all day, create your calorie deficit, and then go out and get a few beers or glasses of wine after work, you very well might have just wiped that deficit away. On average, a beer will have 154 calories, wine 123 calories, and hard alcohol 60 calories for one ounce, not to mention whatever you mix it with.

You don’t need to be a recluse with no life, but if you are getting some drinks track them and plan accordingly in your weekly calorie allowance.

8. Weekend Calories Still Count

Chances are you know that person who is constantly dieting or cutting weight but never looks different. They order a salad out, have a healthy smoothie in the morning, order a light dinner, avoid alcohol…Monday through Friday.

The weekend hits and all the sudden it is pizza, binge drinking, and buffets. There are seven days in a week and even if you create a 3500 calorie deficit during the work week you can easily wipe that out with a couple days of reckless unhealthy eating.

It is easy to keep a routine during the week because most people have a set schedule that they can prepare for and plan your meals around. On the weekend however, you have free reign to do as you please, which often means a break from healthy habits and giving into temptation.

A cheat meal or two or even three has benefits to your metabolism, not to mention your mental sanity. But, be sure you keep it to just that, a meal or two, not a gluttonous three day food bender.

9. Not Exercising

There is no doubt that the best way to lose weight and keep it off is through creating healthy eating habits. But exercise is a great compliment to that and can assist in burning calories.

You are never going to be perfect when it comes to nutrition, so adding exercise into your fat loss program can help compensate for minor diet slip ups or can just speed the process up.

Exercise also offers a host of other benefits including better cardiovascular health, stress relief, and reduced risk of injury to name a few.

10. Eating Unhealthy Healthy Foods

There is not doubt advertisers and companies try to trick us into buying their gimmick “health”foods for a grossly overpriced amount.

Packaging is littered with claims about the health benefits but in reality it is mostly empty words.

Meal replacement bars, sports drinks, and other foods can sound like responsible healthy options, but really it is a marketing ploy. Always read the nutrition facts and ingredients because these foods are usually high in sugar, calories, or fats and are designed not to fill you up so that you buy more of them.

Try to stick with whole foods that you prepare yourself. A general rule of thumb is if it is in a box or a wrapper, it isn’t that good for your health.

Wrap Up

These weight loss mistakes are very common yet can be very easy to avoid if you are conscious of them. Do not let all your hard work be for not because of a few simple mistakes.

Keep these tips in mind and your weight loss journey should become much easier. If you have any of your own tips please leave them in the comments and let me know what you think.

Thanks for reading!