5 Common Mistakes When Trying to Lose Weight

It doesn't matter what time of year we are. We like to look good and in good shape. Therefore, it is not surprising the many miracle diets that proliferate online to lose weight in a very short time but, in the long run, are not healthy.

You are going to allow me to start this article with a call to sanity: if you need to lose weight, go to a dietician-nutritionist you trust. Do not waste your time looking for magic solutions on the internet.

Look for a long-term change that improves your health, that adapts to you, your needs and your medical history and circumstances. The only thing that we know for sure that serves to lose weight and maintain the loss in the long term, is adherence (being able to maintain changes over time).

The most common mistakes when trying to lose weight and how to fix them

This paragraph should have actually been the last one, the one that closed the post as a conclusion. However, there is so much misinformation and so many people doing business with the weight of others that I preferred to put it first, just in case the text bores you and you don't get to the last line.

1. Forget about miracle diets

Therefore, the first blunder when it comes to wanting to lose weight is precisely that: looking for a miracle or a short-term result, falling for it on absurd diets or, worse still, spending our money on products and methods that could harm us.

This would be the main mistake and one that should certainly rank first. Those that follow do not go in order of importance, it is rather an enumeration of habitual nonsense.

2. Don't focus on a specific nutrient

The second mistake is to focus on a specific nutrient, for example not consuming or reducing carbohydrates a lot, or consuming mostly proteins. Or in minimizing fats (the starch solution).

Yes, that there are so many “definitive solutions” that contradict each other, you should no longer leave us too calm about these methods. Let's stop looking at nutrients to look at food.

3. Don't trust light food

In third place, I will place the strategy of basing our diet on “light”, “light” or “0% 0” products. All these products are by definition ultra-processed, otherwise, they would not have a label on which to stamp those legends. They are products that by definition should not weight a healthy diet.

The use of the term "light", according to the European Regulation 1924/2006, requires that the product involves at least a 30% caloric reduction compared to the non-light version of it. That does not make a product that is not healthy.

For example, some “lights” bag potato chips will continue to carry excess salt and poor quality fat that we cannot find in a baked or cooked potato. Or a “light” soft drink will have been replaced by sugar for sweeteners, which are far from being innocuous, and in no way will it be equated with water, which is what we should be drinking instead.

On the other hand, 0% products also usually have an enclosed cat. It is most common to find a 0% fat yoghurt, loaded instead of sugar when fat was not the problem in that product. Or some cookies with 0% added sugars, made from refined flours and with hydrogenated palm fat, as well as, again, sweeteners.

4. Do not substitute bars or smoothies for food

Taking fourth place in this messy ranking we have the error of trying to lose weight with bars or meal replacement shakes.

They are products whose first ingredient is usually, oh surprise! sugar. That they do not improve our diet at any point, nor do they contribute to improving our long-term health with healthier choices, which are expensive and that also, their caloric intake is not far from that of a well-planned salad.
In comparing the value and nutritional quality of, for example, a salad with a handful of chickpeas and a substitute bar, I do not go, because it would be an insult for the first.

5. Assume that you will not lose 10 kg in 5 days

I am going to leave the fifth position to the desperate solutions: I am going to the beach in a week and I have a michelín, or there are ten days left until my cousin's wedding and the dress tightens me.
A breeding ground for semi-fasts like the maple syrup diet, drink only smoothies, spend the day with green tea and an apple, spend the whole week eating pineapple and any other similar solution that you can think of. This type of madness only manages to tear up our metabolism, make us lose water and muscle mass, and that we regain the weight as soon as we stop doing awful things. That at least.

Sustaining those types of attitudes with food in the long term can lead to greater deficiencies or be a good breeding ground for developing an eating disorder.

Photo by Jonathan Borba on Unsplash