With the abundance of nutrition information available on the internet, it’s quite easy to understand how people are often struggling to achieve their goals. One expert is telling the world that carbs are the enemy, the next says eating fat will wreak havoc on your body. It can be quite overwhelming at times and leave you thinking that it’s all too difficult and it’s not worth the effort to achieve your goals or worse, you take every piece of information and create the “superdiet” that helps for a very short period of time but often leads to you ending up further away from your goals.
So what should you do?
Shrink the change!
We do this by progressively creating positive habits that will help you meet your goals over time. This also helps with the sustainability of your new lifestyle as it’s much less likely to overwhelm you when you are making very small changes over time. Sure you could change everything immediately and it may work faster but when life gets crazy you are much more likely to go straight back to what you used to do.
Here are some of the most common mistakes most females make when trying to reach their goals.
Not eating enough protein
The first most common mistake we often see is a lack of protein in the diet. Protein has the highest digestive energy requirements out of the macronutrients meaning you will burn more calories from eating higher protein and is also essential for maintaining optimal body functions such as facilitating recovery from training. Often most women struggle to get in enough protein in their diet as their day looks something like cereal for breakfast, a sandwich for lunch with some cold meats and a small serving of chicken breast with some vegetables for dinner. This generally leaves them around half of the required protein intake to achieve their goals.
Since most people are generally a fair way away from their required protein intake jumping straight to that amount is often too big of a change to make straight away. Start by just changing breakfast to include 20-30g of protein there. Once you have made that a habit, do the same for lunch and then progressively to your snacks and dinner until you are around the 1g of protein per pound of bodyweight.
Too Low Calories, Too Quickly
Everyone knows the “eat a little less and move a little more” saying but often people go to the extreme from the beginning. After reading that both carbs and fats are holding you back from achieving your goals, most people set out on removing all of them from their diet immediately leaving them with proteins (that as I have already mentioned are generally too low to sustain healthy function) and salads. This works really well for a short period of time as most people reduce their caloric intake by over 50% leaving their body screaming for energy where it then takes it from both fat and muscle. After your body freaks out a little and the scales drop down a little but, your body then figures out a way to survive. It lowers your metabolism and increases function from your adrenals to keep you moving but your weight plateaus and one of two things happen:
- You go harder, lowering your food even more or adding in a tougher training regimen.
- You give up and binge eat to fill the calories your body needs but your metabolism doesn’t come back as fast and you gain the weight back again.
So what to do to avoid this?
Start by figuring out how much you are currently eating by using myfitnesspal or other nutrition tracking apps, then slowly reduce the amount of calories you are eating. This keeps your energy up and when you hit that plateau you still have plenty of room to move, meaning that you can make another small change and have a big impact on your results. This is a much more sustainable approach and doesn’t deprive you of what you want.
Post “cheat meal” guilt
Who has ever thought maybe I shouldn’t eat this chocolate and then ate it anyway? Most people would have been there in some situation if you change chocolate to whatever your personal vice is. Yes when you have a meal or snack that isn’t particularly healthy there is generally a few extra calories or some sugar but worst of all is the guilt associated with “failure”. I used to struggle with the same problem often beating myself up over getting take out or having a beer with a good friend so I started to not put myself in those situations but that didn’t make me any happier either. And really, the reason most of us pursue our body image goals is about making us happier and more confident in ourselves so we can go out and live life the way we want to so depriving yourself of going out for dinner with a friend or your partner won’t help you achieve happiness anyway.
How can we still meet our goals and live a little without the guilt?
Start by thinking about all the positive actions you have taken towards achieving your goals. If you have been working hard then one little take out meal or a drink with a friend wont hurt you. Don’t go crazy though, make sure that what you will still meet your daily goals for your food. This may mean you have to do a bit of adjustment. Take away foods generally have extra fat and carbs but are often low in protein and fibre, so you will need to plan your day around making sure you get in enough protein and fibre without going overboard on fats and carbs so that you still have some room for your treat. If you can make this fit into the overall plan for your diet, then really you were successful on that day and moving closer to your goals even though you had a treat!
If you think you are making some of these mistakes and want some help in fixing them, make sure to check out our nutrition coaching programs to help you achieve your goals.