The biggest winners of The Biggest Loser, a weight loss competition, find it challenging to maintain their new weight. For example, Ryan Benson, the first winner of the program, regained more than 55 kg lost in the show in a short time.
Losing weight can be challenging, especially if you do not have the right knowledge or if you make mistakes that sabotage your endeavors, such as these four common mistakes.
4 Mistakes You Should Avoid If You Want to Lose Weight
1. Eating in Sad Times
If there is one habit that will affect or destroy your health, it is emotional eating, which is overeating to relieve negative emotions. Studies by the University of the Basque Country cite emotional eating as the number one reason why people fail to maintain their new weight over the long term.
Stuffing food in your stomach just because you are sad, lonely, or stressed leads to more severe problems without offering any real solutions, and it takes a lot of effort to stop this mindless eating, so you must find a solution.
One essential tip is to watch yourself when you're hungry, angry, lonely, or tired. If you find a way to deal with these negative emotions that don't involve eating, you'll be saving yourself from a lot of unwanted calories.
2. Not Taking Advantage of Fat-Burning Drinks
Coffee and protein shakes are fine, but they shouldn't stop you from having two necessary weight-loss drinks: water and green tea. In addition to preventing dehydration, drinking a glass of water half an hour before each meal helps you lose up to five times the weight you would typically lose, according to a 2015 study by the University of Birmingham.
Green tea offers several health benefits, including burning fat, as it contains very few calories, specifically one calorie per 100 ml, so it makes you feel full without increasing your energy intake.
Green tea also reduces insulin resistance because it contains an active ingredient called epigallocatechin gallate (EGCG). Once this ingredient enters the blood, it reduces glucose intolerance, reduces insulin resistance, and thus promotes weight loss.
Green tea makes you more energetic, as studies show that it can increase energy expenditure by 4% over 24 hours, so experts suggest you drink up to five cups of green tea daily. Therefore, not only will you lose weight, but you will also enjoy its many other benefits.
3. Being Deceived by Numbers
You should monitor your progress to fine-tune your routines. Experts often suggest weighing at least once a week to keep you aware of your progress. However, only measuring weight to monitor your progress is not a good idea.
When you follow a new diet, you will often lose weight rapidly, but this is misleading. This rate will get slower as your body gets used to this new lifestyle, and then you will find that losing weight is getting harder and harder. For some people, this can cause panic or anxiety and may even cause them to give up.
Weighing is not the most reliable way to track your progress, especially as you become more experienced. Muscle gain, fat loss, water retention, and the time you measure your weight — before or after your first meal, for example — all affect your numbers.
Experts recommend using more than one tool to measure your progress, so measure your body fat percentage and muscle mass, write down your numbers weekly, and test the fit of your old, smaller-size clothes.
4. The Environment Is Not Suitable for Weight Loss
Everyone eats what they eat primarily because of their environment, says author Brian Wansink, author of Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think? “We overeat not because of hunger but because of family, friends, packages, plates, names, numbers, labels, lights, colors, candles, shapes, smells, distractions, distances, cupboards, bowls. This list is as endless as it is invisible," he says.
In Conclusion
If you have finally started your weight loss journey, beware of two things: the friends around you and the food in your kitchen.
You'll do well against temptations if you eliminate them in the first place. Experts advise that you keep your fridge empty and plan your meals carefully, whether you eat your meals when you go out with your friends or just right before, and you won't need to eat more food.
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