3 Mistakes That Are Making it Hard for You to Lose Weight
We live in a fast-paced world, from fast food to fad diets. This makes losing weight feel nearly impossible. Who has time to make a healthy meal when fast-food chains can do it in minutes? Who has time to work out to fit into that swimsuit when you can do the military diet and lose weight in a week? Our time is precious. Why waste it? When in reality making these 3 mistakes is even more waste of what little time we do have.
The Set-Point
One of the biggest mistakes you can make is doing nothing. When you stay at the same weight for too long your body’s metabolism adjusts making it hard for you to lose weight. This is called a set point.
Your set point is essentially your default weight—the weight you always ping back to after a period of weight loss or gain, or that you naturally land at when you’re living in balance with reasonable eating and movement habits.
Hormones play a big role in a set point; they affect how your body stores fat and how often you feel hungry. Leptin hormones tell your body when it’s full and ghrelin hormones tell you when you’re hungry. If your body is used to consistently the same level of these hormones for an extended period of time it’s hard to retrain it to produce more or less of these hormones.
Fad Diets
Well, you want to make a change and lose weight. You go through fad diet after fad diet and you keep bouncing back to your set point. This is a big mistake because it doesn’t create a new consistency and fad diets just aren’t sustainable. For example, the military diet is an inconsistent and unsustainable fad diet.
It promises weight loss, but you can’t sustain that loss due to the heavy restrictions and low caloric intake. The diet is also not meant to be lifelong as are most fad diets.
Our bodies crave consistency, and if we don’t love our diet then we can’t give our bodies what it wants. Constantly changing our diets, and trying diets you don’t love, can cause a ton of imbalance in your hormones. Our bodies want harmony and will bounce back to your set point where your hormones are used to being.
Not taking advantage of fat-burning plants and herbs
Some of those fad diets include high meat diets which can send our bodies into a hormone tornado. High protein in your diet is great but it also means you’re not taking advantage of fat-burning plants and herbs. We’re not saying to go vegetarian, but there are amazing plants out there that help with fat burning.
Look into your spice cabinet and you may find some. Cayenne pepper is an example of this. Cayenne contains capsaicin (the chemical that makes food spicy). One study found that capsaicin reduces ghrelin hormones.
Another great example is ginger. A review of 27 human, animal, and test-tube studies concluded that ginger may help lower weight by increasing metabolism and fat burning while simultaneously decreasing fat absorption and appetite.
While this world spins too fast you are in control of your time and your body. Avoiding these mistakes will save you time and give it back. For persons with severe obesity life expectancy is reduced by as much as 20 years in men and 5 years in women. Taking time to avoid these 3 mistakes that are making it hard to lose weight will give you back so much more than you lose in your efforts.
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Nicely done