Captain Ahab’s BodyBlog

These 5 dieting mistakes can slow us down or stop us dead in our tracks.

If we are making an honest effort to lose weight and in doing so are trying to eat a healthy balanced diet but are still having trouble or are being frustrated by a stubborn scale the difficulty might lie with one or more of these common problems.

Not Getting Enough Sleep

Many of us are unaware that sleep is a very important part of our weight loss regime. If we want to lose weight and have a healthy lifestyle we should be aiming for 7 to 8 hours of uninterrupted sleep each and every night. During sleep our body repairs and rejuvenates itself and if we deprive it of sleep we may well feel sluggish and unmotivated the next day. Lack of sleep often leads to a slower metabolism, which means we are burning fewer calories and thus slowing our weight loss progress.

Skipping Meals

Going more than 3 to 4 waking hours between meals causes our blood sugar to bottom out and may leave us feeling weak, tired and irritable. Eating more often (every 2 ½ to 3 hours) often helps regulate blood sugar levels, revs and keeps up our metabolism and our body burning calories rather than storing them as fat.

Nighttime Snacking

Many of us have this habit, which undermines weight loss because the foods we eat after dinner are often full of fat and consumed while we are watching TV or doing other activities that increase the risk of mindless overeating. Going to bed with a full stomach can also affect our quality of sleep because our body is kept busy digesting. Limit our snack(s) to healthy, hi protein, low carb, low calorie ones early in the evening that will not cause us to overstep our daily calorie consumption.

 Drinking Alcohol
Weight loss can be prevented by drinking alcohol for 2 key reasons; 1) the excess calories we are consuming. Having 2 or 3 drinks can add hundreds of extra (empty) calories to our daily total. 2) Alcohol stops our body from burning fat. Alcohol and fat are both processed in our liver and when the liver is busy processing alcohol it cannot effectively process fat.
Alcohol also reduces the absorption of Vitamins A, D, E, K, folate, B1 and B2.
Last but definitely not least…

Setting Unrealistic Goals

A commonly made mistake many, many of us make when setting out on our body transformation or weight loss journey is trying to do everything at once. We must remember that we did not gain all of our weight overnight and it is unrealistic to expect that we will lose it right away. We should all strive to set small, realistic and attainable goals for ourselves. If we set hard to achieve, unrealistic goals we are susceptible to frustration when we do not see immediate progress, and quite often our motivation will falter and we will soon slip back into our old habits, especially if we have taken the “all or nothing” approach.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 25th, 2008 at 5:35 pm and is filed under Training. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.