The biggest mistake you can make on your weight-loss journey

What’s the biggest mistake you can make when starting your weight loss journey?

Thinking that more is better…

I'm sure you've been there, started out with six training sessions a week, super low carb diet and tonnes of cardio. If burn out doesn't get you first, the next thing you'll notice is that your results will stall. So what do you do? Increase your training and lower your calories of course… wrong! You are forgetting your physiology, how your body works. For what you should be doing instead, check out my three tips:

1. Increase the health of your cells, with a good nutrient dense diet.

Supporting healthy cells involves a variety of vitamins and minerals, as well as other dietary components. Providing all these nutrients to your cells means eating a nutrient-rich, whole food diet. That cup of black coffee for breakfast doesn’t quite cut it sweetie!

2. Reduce stress.

Your diet and exercise may be on point, but if your stress levels are too high all those good efforts go straight out of the window. Stress and excess fat storage go hand in hand, one triggers the other. When you are under stress, your body releases a stress hormone called cortisol. Oversecretion of cortisol can slow metabolism and promote abdominal fat storage.

3. Get some sleep!

Proper sleep is an essential component of any weight-loss program; a chronic sleep debt is a giant eraser scrubbing away at all those healthy choices you are making. Sleep deprivation sends our appetite regulation hormones leptin and ghrelin out of control, it increases levels of stress hormones and increases insulin resistance, all of which contribute to weight gain. It may sound too good to be true but sometimes the best thing for your waistline is your bed. 

If you're someone who's spending all their time in the gym, super stressed, sleeping poorly and eating low calories or very low carbs, you'll crash at some time very soon. And I am warning you, you will rebound and gain a lot of weight back on when you do.

My advice is you need to focus on respecting your body and its physiology, then results will happen, they just take time. That way you will end up with life long changes, not those over night ones that only last a few months.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author. All articles published on Nutritionist Resource are reviewed by our editorial team.

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