Dieting culture can be incredibly frustrating! Even despite your best efforts, like focusing on reducing calories, exercising, and following popular diet trends, your progress can still stall or even reverse.
This can definitely be discouraging, especially when you put up hard work. So, the article explains the five most common dieting mistakes that can hinder fat loss here to save readers trouble!
Eating Too Few Calories
Eating excessive calories will make you gain weight, but eating too few won’t make that weight go away overnight. It will, in fact, curb fat loss because of numerous reasons, so they are listed all below:
Slowing Metabolism
When you drastically and suddenly cut down your calorie intake, your body enters a state of “starvation mode.” At that moment, it perceives this as a threat to its survival, as the food is scarce. In response, the body activates adaptive thermogenesis – a process where your organism reduces the number of calories it burns to save energy.
It means your organs conserve energy by slowing down the metabolism, so you will probably experience digestive issues like constipation, bloating, or indigestion. That’s why you may feel like you’re getting fat, as numbers on the scale just won’t go down even though you eat almost nothing.
So, as your metabolism slows, the calorie deficit you initially created becomes smaller or even disappears, making it way trickier to lose fat. Because of these processes, it is not rare to feel both mental and physical fatigue, so you will find it hard to focus on the diet or have the energy to exercise.
Even though you may experience an initial weight drop, over time, eating a very low number of calories will no longer result in weight loss.
Muscle Loss
The moment your body enters a calorie deficit, it seeks alternative energy sources to fuel its activities. If that deficit is too severe and long, your organism will begin to break down muscle tissue for energy. That process is scientifically named gluconeogenesis, where the body converts protein from muscle into glucose you lack.
However, muscles are super metabolically active, meaning they burn loads of calories even at rest. So, the more muscle mass you have, the higher your number of burned calories will be. Of course, losing muscle decreases that rate, cutting down the calories you burn each day. This makes fat loss harder day after day.
Hormonal Imbalance
“Starvation” messes up with your hormones, too, especially leptin and ghrelin. Fat cells produce leptin, and its role is to signal your brain you’re full and have enough energy stored. When you lessen your calorie intake drastically, leptin levels drop. This causes you to feel more hungry plus slows down your metabolism as a protective measure.
As you already know, the “hunger hormone,” aka ghrelin, stimulates appetite. Thus, when you eat too little, ghrelin levels skyrocket, making you feel hungrier and causing you to overeat.
When people say that dieting is making them stressed, those aren’t empty words only. Severe calorie restriction, in fact, boosts levels of stress hormone – cortisol. Elevated cortisol levels are thick as thieves with increased fat storage, peculiarly in the abdominal area. It signifies that stomach fat will be particularly stubborn to lose.
Obviously, the imbalance in these hormones requires a serious struggle to maintain a caloric deficit as your body is biologically driven to eat more and store fat, counteracting your fat loss efforts.
Skipping Meals
Skipping meals will have similar results as eating too few calories, like slowing down metabolism, hormonal imbalance, and muscle loss, plus a few things linked to blood sugar.
Blood Sugar Fluctuations
When you miss meals, your blood sugar levels drop. This results in intense feelings of hunger and cravings, but peculiarly for high-calorie, sugary, or fatty foods. It is because these foods raise blood sugar levels quickly but drop them down again soon after. These reactions pull you into a never-ending cycle of hunger and cravings, making weight loss almost impossible.
So, when you finally eat after skipping a meal, you are more likely to overeat. That usually means consuming way more calories than you would initially have if you had eaten regular, balanced meals. Thus, you’re completely negating the calorie deficit you intended to create by skipping meals.
Insulin Sensitivity
Naturally, when you mess up your blood sugar, insulin levels will become imbalanced, as well. Insulin is a hormone that synchronizes blood sugar by boosting the uptake of glucose into cells for energy. The thing is, regular meal timing helps maintain stable blood sugar and insulin levels.
On the contrary, skipping meals causes blood sugar to sink, leading to a compensatory rise in insulin when you finally do eat. As time passes, irregular eating patterns provoke insulin resistance, where your cells get less responsive to insulin. This actually ends up in your body producing more insulin to achieve the same effect.
The result is high overall insulin levels plus increased fat storage. Boosted insulin levels actually inhibit fat breakdown, so your body can’t use them for energy. Moreover, this promotes fat storage, chiefly in the abdominal area.
Avoiding Specific Macronutrients
When wanting to lose weight rapidly, people make these three mistakes very often:
Avoiding Carbohydrates
Without sufficient carbs, your energy levels will sink, so you won’t be able to perform well during exercise. Of course, this will decrease the number of calories you burn, slackening your weight loss progress. Even though avoiding carbs usually means prioritizing proteins, it can cause muscle loss.
Carbs actually spare protein, indicating they allow your organism to use carbohydrates for energy instead of breaking down muscle tissue. What’s more, severely restricting carbs often ends up in intense cravings for sugary and processed foods, so you are more likely to binge eat.
Carbohydrates are also super important in balancing blood sugar and insulin levels. It is crucial to prioritize complex carbs in particular, as they provide a slow and steady release of glucose into the bloodstream. Thus, avoiding carbs can lead to low blood sugar (hypoglycemia), causing fatigue, dizziness, and irritability.
Avoiding Fats
Yes, fats are super calorie-dense, but cutting them from the diet to lose weight faster is not a smart idea at all. Without enough fat in your diet, you will often feel hungry even right after a meal. So, craving and snacking on high-calorie and low-nutrient foods is a normal response, which reverses or slows down the weight loss journey.
Fats are important for many nutrients and hormones, so the lack of them creates imbalances in many areas. This not only retards weight loss but also creates long-term health issues.
Not Eating Enough Protein
Proteins are chief for muscle maintenance and growth, so it is best to prioritize them in your diet, especially if you’re working out. Without sufficient protein, it is inevitable to lose muscle, slow down your metabolism, and skyrocket hunger and cravings.
Proteins are a kind of food that will keep you satiated for a very long period of time, so not eating them enough ends up in feeling less satisfied after meals. This is one of the main reasons for snacking on less nutritious, high-calorie foods and overeating, which definitely hinders your weight loss efforts.
Not Tracking Portion Sizes
When you’re used to eating large portions of food, your perception of what constitutes a “normal” portion size can become distorted. Even though you’re eating only healthy “diet” foods, you can still be in a calorie surplus without tracking. For instance, only a handful of nuts or an extra drizzle of oil adds up to a notable number of calories to your daily intake without realizing it.
Since caloric deficit is prime for weight loss, you will only achieve it accurately when tracking portions. For instance, you may think you’re consuming a single serving of pasta, but you could be eating a double portion.
Also, be aware of “hidden calories,” like salad dressings, oils, condiments, or chopped nuts, as they add up to the calorie count. Salad is a healthy choice, of course, but drowning it in the dressing will skyrocket the calories.
Eating “Diet” Foods Only
Diet foods focus solely on being low in calories, fat, and sugar, which is good when eaten moderately. But, at the same time, that food lacks essential nutrients like vitamins, minerals, healthy fats, and fiber. Also, those foods are often highly processed and packed with artificial sweeteners.
They won’t initially make you fat, though, but rather mess up your digestive health, leading to cravings and more serious issues. However, diet foods won’t make you feel full for long, so you will probably be hungry quickly after.
The term “diet food” creates a halo effect, where people assume that because a product is labeled as “low-fat,” “low-calorie,” or “sugar-free,” it is automatically healthy. Believing that these foods are “guilt-free” can lead to larger portion sizes and eating multiple servings, so you end up consuming more calories than you would with regular non-diet food.
Eating only diet foods will provoke a restrictive mindset, where you start viewing food as “bad” and “good” based only on their calorie content. Unfortunately, this ends up in having an unhealthy relationship with food and anxiety, which are much bigger problems than a few surplus pounds.
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- Healthy Food Choices: Ella Olsson
