Five Diet Blunders You Want to Avoid

There’s a lot of bad diet advice floating around out there that’s designed to make the dieter feel better about making the wrong choices. You need to be told the truth — because you could be putting your health (not just your waistline) at risk.

Make sure you’re not making one of these five diet blunders — and if you are, don’t beat yourself up about it — just get back on the straight and narrow path right away!

Diet Blunder #1: Buying into the belief that *all* foods have good qualities. Some people are out there easing your mind by telling you to forget about the bad foods/good foods lists. It only enhances diet guilt, right? Wrong!

Instead of believing there are no bad foods, just allow yourself to indulge from time to time with lower quality foods. You definitely need to know that it’s better for you to eat a fresh peach rather than a peach cobbler – nutritionally, there’s a big difference. But that doesn’t mean you should deprive yourself of lower quality foods; just eat them in moderation.

Here are my thoughts on “Making Room for Ice Cream”:

Diet Blunder #2: Skipping meals to shed more weight. Are you foregoing your breakfast, lunch or dinner because you’ve been too attuned to the “calories in, calories out” rule – and you figure skipping a meal decreases the amount of calories you’ll have to burn off?

While calories in/calories out is the basic fat loss formula, scientists now know that those who eat more frequent, smaller meals lose more weight than those who skip meals or stick to the three a day plan. Don’t starve your body into a craving frenzy. Give it plenty of healthy food choices throughout the day and you don’t be left wondering why your scale’s not budging even when you thought you were doing everything right! If you want to lose fat, create a healthy calorie deficit and split those calories into five or six different meals.

Calorie Deficit Calculator
Calories Per Meal Calculator

Diet Blunder #3: Thinking that healthy food is too expensive. Are you scared of staying in the perimeter of the grocery store because you worry about what it will do to your wallet? Once you begin eating healthy, you’ll be eating less food because your body will be satisfied for longer. You’ll slash your grocery bill, not add to it!

Diet Blunder #4: Adhering to a low carb diet to flush out the calories. People were mistakenly set on the path to thinking low carb diets help your body flush out ketones (fat) through your urine. Studies are proving this wrong. Low carb dieters lose weight from overall calorie cutting. Their flushing experience only lasts 10-14 days and then the body readjusts itself, so the weight loss is not long-term.

Diet Blunder #5: Trying to reach satiety via a full fat meal. You hear even the most educated diet instructors admonishing you to make sure you get plenty of fat in your diet because it’s what keeps you feeling full. But are you going overboard?

You might be staring at that BK Whopper thinking it has enough fat in it to keep you feeling full all day long. But in reality, it’s the protein that will fill you up – not the fat. Choose a healthy protein without the added fat and carbs and you’ll feel fuller, longer – without having to starve yourself the rest of the day. Add fiber in where you can and satiety won’t be a problem for you anymore.

Tags: diet, diet blunders, diet tips, diets, fat loss, food, healthy eating, low carb, low carb diet, Nutrition, Weight Loss