Common Dieting Pitfalls

When starting on a diet or trying to improve your nutrition habits, there are a few things to watch out for and consider that can easily sabotage your success without you even knowing it. This leads to frustration from lack of results and then typically, a return to the old eating patterns you were trying to get away from.

Here are a few things over the years that we have noticed can get overlooked leading to poor results from diet.

Drinking Calories

Calories don’t just come from food. In fact, some things we drink can have more calories than our meal. If you are someone who enjoys juices, pop, coffee or tea with cream and sugar, alcohol or even sports drinks and energy drinks, you could be adding a lot of calories to your diet.

If you had a glass of orange juice with breakfast (110 calories), 2 medium double double coffees (230 calories each), and a glass of red wine at dinner (145 calories), that’s over 700 calories a day consumed through beverages. In a week it’s almost 5,000 calories. And this isn’t an uncommon scenario for a lot of people. Just this alone is enough to take you from a calorie deficit you thought you were in for weight loss, to a calorie surplus, and you are now gaining weight from your diet.

I am not saying you have to cut out all calories from drinks, just be aware of how many calories you are consuming from drinks and make sure you take that in to account when figuring out your plan.

A combination of cutting some drinks back (but not totally cutting them out if you enjoy them) with including the calories into your diet along with your food will keep you on track! Just remember that you will feel more satiated from consuming calories through food then liquids.

Not Eating Enough Throughout the Day

We always try to recommend that you eat consistently throughout the entire day to avoid the typical scenario where at the end of the day, when you are tired and your will power is at its lowest, you are starving because you didn’t eat enough throughout the day. You then end up overeating and snacking on things you shouldn’t in the evening, right before you are about to go to sleep and be inactive for several hours and not have the chance to burn off any of that energy you consumed.

To help avoid this, eat your meals spread out evenly throughout the day, say every 3 hours or so, with your last one being about 3 hours before bed. This should keep you feeling energized and satiated throughout the entire day!

Cheat Days

There is nothing wrong with treating yourself, but a cheat day can quickly and easily get out of hand. If you worked hard to eat well all week you can easily negate all that effort in one day of eating off the plan. You can eat and drink back all of your progress you would have had very quickly.

A better way to treat yourself is a cheat meal. One meal where you have no rules rather then a whole day. You can still do a lot of damage in one meal but not nearly as much as a whole day of it.

Or, if you want to do a cheat day and still not sabotage your results, it will have to be less frequent. Like once a month instead of once a week.

My preference is to just incorporate your craving into the calorie allotment of one of your meal times so that you get a treat, fulfill a craving, and still stay on track and not feel like you are depriving yourself all the time. That is important for staying on track long term and having real, lasting results.

No Prep

Just like having no plan for your exercise routine usually leads to failure, it’s the same with your diet. If you don’t have a plan and do some meal prepping, it will be hard to stay the course. A common scenario is you are in a rush, have no meal prepped or planned, or have no back up plan for these times, you just grab whatever is quick and easy, which is usually something not great (unless you planned for these moments!). A little planning and preparation can go a long way!

Nobody said diet and nutrition is easy. It’s not. But with a little bit of knowledge, effort, mindfulness and the willingness to succeed, you can accomplish any and all of your health and fitness goals!