Although there are lots of amazing diets out there to help you lose weight, the hardest part is actually sticking to one! There are lots of reasons why people struggle with dieting, and knowing the problems beforehand may just be what you need to be successful in shedding those extra pounds.
Here are the top 5 reasons why your diet could be set to fail:
You may not be eating enough
A common mistake made when dieting is to not eat enough! Now this might sound a little silly, because surely you’re supposed to eat a lot less right? But what most people don’t realise is that there is a minimum that you should eat to keep your metabolism going, and to help stay motivated enough to refrain from raiding the cookie jar.
Depending on size and gender, you should be able to work out a minimum amount of calories you need per day. On average, most women should not go below 1,000 calories per day, and men would be around 1,500. This should also ensure that you are also getting the right amount of nutrients in your diet.
You treat yourself to regular post workout snacks
So you’ve just finished a gruelling gym session, and you want to give yourself a reward by munching on a snack. This is understandable as you’ve just burnt of hundreds of calories right? Unfortunately, this may not be the case – and an unhealthy snack like a chocolate bar or muffin could contain as many as 300-500 calories.
What you have to remember when exercising is that it isn’t always a good idea to reward yourself to a treat after, as you may be undoing all that hard work. The best way to make sure this doesn’t happen is to count the amount of calories you’ve burnt during the exercise, and even consider underestimating to be safe. If you do have room for a snack then go for it. Or at least consider a really healthy low calorie snack to get you by until lunch.
You’re hydrating with fizzy drinks
Fizzy drinks contain quite a surprising number of calories. And although it may seem quite low when you check the bottle, you have to take note of the amount you drink throughout the day. You can easily notch up another few hundred calories just through what you drink.
For example, a 330ml can of cola contains around 140 calories. You only need to drink 2-3 a day and you are hitting around 300-400 calories extra to what you may have planned for your diet. You can even reach around 50 calories per cup of coffee with milk and sugar!
Our advice would be to either cut down on these drinks, or cut them out altogether. Water is the best drink to have as it contains zero calories. If you find that a little boring, you can always add low calorie dilutes to give it some flavour.
Your diet isn’t tracked
One of the best ways to ensure you lose weight is to track everything you eat and make a plan. There are some fantastic apps out there at the moment which allow you to easily enter in what you’ve eaten and will instantly calculate the amount of calories – as well as other important information. You can of course put everything down using pen and paper, but this tends to take a long time, and can easily go wrong.
Research has also shown that by digitally tracking your diet, you are much likely to stick with it and get great results! The reason for this is that by taking control of your diet and using great apps that do all the hard work for you, this can be very motivating. You’ll also find that most apps allow you to enter your current weight as well as the weight you’d like to get to by a certain time frame. The app will then also give you the right amount of calories you need to reach that goal.
You’re aiming for low carbs
A common way to diet nowadays is to completely remove carbs, or consume a very low amount. And although this may mean you lose weight very quickly, it will most likely result in a big reduction in energy levels.
One of the best ways to stick to a diet is to actually enjoy it! And you will find that very difficult if you cut out all of the carbs leaving you lacking in energy and motivation. A diet has to be sustainable, and making an extreme change to your diet just won’t work for most people.
However, this doesn’t mean to say that cutting out carbs for the short term is a bad idea. If you are wanting to lose weight quickly over a short space of time, then this may be a good option. You must however remember that you will need to re-introduce carbs after a few weeks, and let your diet and body stabilise.