So, you are on diet for a while now and saying the truth your results are far from expected? You see all these guys who transform their bodies in 2-3 months but you’ve spent 6 months on what you think is a hard diet and still see no effect? Well, you are not alone. In fact, one of the most common reasons for quitting dieting is no visible result after a significant time (and money) spent on it.
To your surprise, you will learn from my article that being successful with diet and overall body transformation is far easier than you realize. My guess is you simply make one of the mistakes I go through below. So, don’t give up – read what I’ve wrote, make corrections and enjoy your new awesome body in few months!
1. You’ve selected the wrong diet
Look – dieting is not a rocket science. But marketers want you to believe it is. For that reason you’ve got hundreds, if not thousands, diets to choose from. Some of them are actually beneficial, but some, unfortunately, can be dangerous.
Your first aim should be to educate yourself. You don’t need the knowledge good nutritionists have but reading one or two books on nutrition won’t do you any harm.
You can break your diet into calories, protein, carbs and fats intake and adjust it to your lifestyle and goals. And pretty much this is it. You don’t need cabbage only diet. You don’t have to starve yourself to death to lose weight. Being consistent and controlling what and how much you eat is really enough to guarantee great results.
2. You don’t count calories
I can’t stress this enough. Complete control over your calories intake is a paramount. If you fail at this point there is no hope for you. No matter how much healthy food you eat, if you eat above your recommended daily calories intake you will gain extra weight.
How to control calories intake?
Once you know your Basal Metabolic Rate, learn about the calories in foods you normally consume. Good site to do it is NutraCheck but there are literally hundreds of this kind of websites.
You don’t want to come back to these websites every time you want to calculate your daily intake so make a list of the foods you eat with their caloric, protein, fat and carbohydrate values. Good way of doing this is to create a spreadsheet in Microsoft Excel.
Underneath your list of foods and their calories you can create a basic Excel calculator (using SUM function). This will let you calculate calories, protein, and fat and carbs intake daily. Your smartphone app can do the job as well – some still prefer to use a piece of paper. It doesn’t matter how you track what you eat – it is important you track it – especially on the beginning when all this is still somehow confusing.
My final though is – after few weeks of dieting you will probably remember the nutritional content of all foods you consume. That’s brilliant – it will help you to maintain good nutritional habits even on your busy days or during holiday period.
3. You’re not consistent
No matter how well your diet is planned if you don’t keep up with it you can’t expect great results. Your diet may say “one cheat meal per week” but if you got two days a week when your calories intake goes over the roof – you are in trouble. Persistence is a key. Ability to say “no” to rubbish food is important. Weight-loss, muscle-gain – no matter what’s your goal it cannot be achieved instantly. You will need at least a month to really notice the difference and 3-6 months to impress with your body (depends on your current fitness level). Within that time you need to stay focus, counting calories measuring progress. If your aim is to gain muscle but they don’t grow chances are you diet isn’t right. If your aim is to lean down but after a month there is no visible improvement – your diet is wrong. You need to constantly monitor your diet and be proactive while dieting.
4. You consume too much alcohol
Unfortunately alcohol is a part of our Western culture. We consume incredible amounts of it. Its consumption very often goes unnoticed.
There is a double problem with alcohol and diet. First of all alcohol has no nutritional value. It’s nothing but a empty calories. A lot of calories. One glass of wine can have as many calories as 4 cookies. Now imagine all this alcohol you consume – loads of empty calories every week.
Secondly, alcohol disables your judgement. You are more likely to “suspend” your diet on the time of drinking. Especially dangerous are the parties where there is plenty of high-caloric food. Not only you consume those empty calories from your favourite drink (which often is mixed with Coca-Cola, Red Bull or sugar-rich juice) but also eat up unhealthy snacks.
If you really want to have full control over your diet quit or limit your drinking.
5. You fall for a myth of healthy food
Don’t believe the hype – most of these diet drinks, natural juices and cereal are garbage. In some cases not only you can’t tell the difference between them and traditional, non-diet products (apart of the higher price that is) but actually they are unhealthy.
How to prevent falling for all this “diet marketing”? Simply check the packaging. Always. Manufacturers are obligated to inform consumers about the nutritional value of each product. It is your duty to check it.
6. You starve yourself at first – then eat a lot
Many dieters pride themselves in keeping low calories intake for a prolonged period of time. Results are quite rapid, weight-loss is visible after two weeks or so and it looks like dieter succeeded. After a while however, person who was consuming minimum calories goes back to her/his usual standard. It’s a popular and well documented yo-yo effect.
Yo-yo effect has psychological and nutritional levels. On psychological level you’re simply not able to sustain diet – your head is failing you. Fatigue and signs of side effects similar to depression has been noticed in people starving on calories for prolonged period of time.
Another, biological level is nothing but a response of your body to prolonged starvation. This mechanism is well documented – body which is deprived of food slows down metabolism. And when you stop dieting, mostly of mental and physical fatigue body want to gain weight quickly accelerating whole process. Of course what I wrote is a huge simplification but hopefully you get the point. There is no need for rapid weight loss. Well balanced and planned diet will helped you to achieve your goal safely.
Conclusion is simple: well-balanced diet which you actually keep up is the answer. You should really shift your mind-set and make a heathy nutrition your habit. It’s always better to make it part of your lifestyle rather than try it once a year when a need for a beach-body is at its high.
