There’s no doubt about it, losing weight isn’t easy, if it was we’d all be the perfect weight. The reality is that for many people it takes a huge amount of willpower and the support of people around you if you’re going to reach your goals.
However if you are aware of some of the main diet pitfalls you can make plans and preparations in advance to make sure you succeed.
Below are the top five things that make most diets unrealistic and most dieters go back to square one.
1. The Diet is Too Complicated or Time Consuming
Today, everyone is busy. Time is at a premium and few people have the time or the motivation to stick with a diet that feels like a part-time job. Diets that require you to learn complicated principles or remember formulas and combinations are just too demanding. This is also true of diets that require you to record everything you eat, measure every morsel on your plate or spend too much time planning or cooking your daily meals.
2. The Diet is Too Limiting
Very few people react well to feeling deprived, especially when they’re being deprived of most of their favorite foods. Diets that cut out whole food groups (such as all grains) are far too restrictive for most people. Once your mind focuses on what you can’t eat, temptation becomes too great to stick with your diet for long. Your diet starts to seem like your enemy, not your path to success.
3. The Diet is Too Low in Calories
For years, it was believed that cutting calories was the only way to lose weight. The problem with this thinking is that it’s not only untrue, it’s also unrealistic. You can only cut so many calories from your diet before your metabolism slows in response. In the meantime, you feel hungry, deprived and fatigued. Few people can maintain a diet like this for very long and most will gain back even more weight than they lost.
4. The Diet is too Strict or Regimented
There have been plenty of diets introduced that try to map out for you every single thing you eat. While having a plan is good and some people need a more structured plan for convenience, problems arise when these diets ask you to eat foods you don’t like or meals you don’t have the budget or time to prepare. Because you can’t afford or don’t like what is suggested, you start making substitutions. Before you know it, you’re not on the diet anymore.
5. The Diet Makes You Feel Bad
Making a healthy change in your lifestyle should make you feel healthy. Many diets are so low in healthy fats and proteins that they leave you feeling starved. Others are so low in healthy carbs that you’re always tired. If you’re not getting enough of the essential nutrients, your body will make its needs known in the form of cravings. You’ll also feel so unhealthy on the diet that you won’t have any motivation to continue, even if you lose some weight in the beginning.
Dieting isn’t always easy, but it doesn’t have to be painful or dreadful. A healthy, effective diet will have you feeling satisfied, not starved, energized, not exhausted. Make sure that the diet you choose is one that helps you lose weight in a healthy, even pleasant way. No matter how good a diet may sound, you won’t lose weight if you can’t stick to it.
There are now a wide variety of great programs and resources online designed with the specific goal of making weight loss, and importantly definition in the abs, a core goal. Probably two of the most successful programes that address the five points above are Six Pack Shortcuts and The Truth About Six Pack Abs.