7 Ways You May Be Unintentionally Sabotaging Your Weight Loss

Are you doing everything right? You’re eating clean, you’re getting all your vitamins. You’re exercising. And yet, you are falling short of your weight loss goals. There isn’t something physically wrong with you, you might just be stepping on your own toes and not even know it.

Here are some common self sabotages and how to fix them:

 

1. You’re eating too much.

Healthy eating doesn’t mean ‘free’ eating. Just because something is healthy, it doesn’t mean you can eat truck loads of it. Take fruit for example. It is good for you but eating too much can get in the way of a shrinking waist line thanks to carb and calorie content.

Quick Fix: Keep track of what you eat. Listen to your body and your hunger cues. Don’t forget to check portion size. Make sure your meals are balanced with proteins, carbs, and fats to ensure you’re getting enough of each macronutrient.

2. You don’t eat enough.

This one has always been a problem for me in my weight loss. Your body needs fuel to operate. If you skip meals, your body will not get what it needs to be efficient. Your body also stores the food you do eat because it doesn’t know when it will get more.

Quick Fix: Eat at least 3 balanced meals a day and 2 snacks. If you eat something every few hours, your metabolism keeps kicking and it also means your body will get the fuel it needs for your daily activities.

3.“Just a bite”.

You know the kind we mean. Those little nibbles you take while cooking, making the kids’ lunches, or passing through the kitchen, they add up. It is mindless eating and most of us don’t even think about when we consider our daily caloric intake.

Quick Fix: Reserve those special little bites for the food you cannot live without.

4. Your fitness tracker is lying to you.

Fitness trackers are everywhere but they are often not being used properly. People have a tendency to rely on them as being 100 percent accurate but they just aren’t. The technology isn’t that far. It will give you a lot of important information about your body but it won’t give you all of it.

Quick Fix: Don’t live by the numbers. If you run for a half hour and your tracker says you’ve burned 300 calories, it doesn’t mean you have 300 extra calories to consume. You don’t know how many calories you’ve actually burned so you may end up consuming more calories than your body needs and we know that’s not good for weight loss.

5. You buy trigger foods.

If you know that eating ice cream means you are going to be eating the entire carton in one sitting, don’t buy ice cream.

Quick Fix: Keep healthy foods around you. Healthy foods you love to eat. Keep the other stuff for special occasions and don’t buy the things that will get you off track.

6. You’re not drinking enough water.

Hydration is incredibly important. What’s more, did you know that hunger and thirst often get confused? Sometimes when your stomach growls it means you are thirsty. If you have just finished eating and get the sense you are looking for something more, your body is probably looking for water as now it has to do the work to digest your food. Water also assists in several bodily processes including nutrient absorption, energy expenditure, and fat loss.

Quick Fix: Bring a bottle of water with you every where you go. See how much you can drink in a day, you’d be surprised!

7. You’re not sleeping enough.

A lack of sleep can impact so many areas of your life from concentration levels to weight loss. Sleep is necessary for your health. When you are tired you are more likely to make poor food choices and drag yourself through workouts. When you don’t sleep enough your cortisol levels rise. Cortisol is a stress hormone and also works to suppress the immune system and leads to a gain in belly fat.

Quick Fix: The exact amount of sleep you require depends on who you are. One of the best ways to make sure you get more sleep is to go to bed at the same time every night and wake up at the same time every morning. Start by giving yourself 8 hours of sleep and after you’ve done that for a while, you will know exactly how much you need to function properly.

Did you recognize yourself here? How are you unintentionally sabotaging yourself? How do you avoid it?

 

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