Common Mistakes Concerning Weight Loss

Sometimes, exercises with the best intentions lose the least amount of weight. What's worse is that they often seen their friends slim down just weeks after starting a new workout program. It can be frustrating and confusing. So what makes one weight loss workout plan effective and another one fail? There could be a number of factors involved. But in many cases, the cause can be traced to one of these blunders. If you've been struggling to shed a few pounds and your exercise plan isn't yielding any results, see if you are making one of these common workout mistakes.

1. Doing the same workout day after day. It's not a bad thing to exercise every day, and it's not necessarily a bad to do the same workout everyday to maintain heart health. But if you want to lose weight, repeating the same workout mode, intensity, or duration day after day won't work. Why? Your body adjusts to the daily workload and you hit a dreadful plateau.

To fix this try and develop a workout schedule that involves different activities, different intensity levels and different sessions lengths. Try taking classes and since the weather is warming up try outdoor training. Switching up is better anyway because you don't get bored with the same routines!!

2. Compensating by eating more. When you add exercise to your daily routine, you are likely to become more hungry than usual and want to eat more. Dealing with that hunger can be a uphill battle, because there is often a little voice inside your head that says, " I can eat whatever I want because I exercised today."

That rationale makes sense. But if you are trying to lose weight with exercise, you need to achieve a calorie deficit at the end of the day. If you satisfy your post-exercise hunger with high calorie foods or with too much food, you'll end up replacing all of the calories you burned. 

3. Decreasing non-exercise physical activity. It's great if you go to the gym every day and complete a killer workout- unless the payoff is that you spend the rest of the day on the couch. If you compensate for your workout by decreasing the amount of non-exercise physical activity that you do during the day, your total daily caloric expenditure may end up being the same as if you hadn't gone to the gym. 

4. Using supplements/sports drinks. Do you refuel during your workout with sports drinks or bars? Do you grab a high calorie , high sugar supplement drink or bar after the workout is complete? If so, you're probably erasing the calorie deficit that you just earned. For more people that exercise, WATER is the best choice for hydration. Remember there are hundreds of products on the market and, sadly most of them do nothing but make empty promises and drain your wallet. 


~Wendy