3 Critical Diet Mistakes That Will Guarantee Weight-Loss Failure

It seems simple, doesn’t it? Start a good diet that you think you can stick with and then just abide by the rules. Then again, if it really was simple and easy in practice, wouldn’t far more people live healthy lifestyles as a standard?

The truth is, for many, diets come and go… You start a new diet but before you know it, the best intentions fall by the wayside and you’re back to your old eating habits and are no longer inspired about losing weight like you were when the diet was fresh and new. Chances are, your diet didn’t fail because you’re not a smart or dedicated person—it likely failed for one of the three reasons below.

Diet Mistake #1 – Too Much Too Fast

Sometimes when people start a new diet, especially if it’s one of those “fad” diets, they tend to have an overwhelming amount of new rules, new ideas, and new plans for getting the weight off. When reading about it and hearing the success stories, it seems easy to implement but in fact, it requires an entire lifestyle change—not just a simple change in eating habits. There is so much involved that the person becomes weary quickly and the diet fails. Conversely, even traditional low-calorie diets fail because people are too dramatic in their goals and instead of creating a diet plan that’s sustainable, it becomes more like a “crash diet” which as we all know, is not something that works either. Take it slow and easy; real long-term weight loss does not happen overnight.

Diet Mistake #2 – Excessive Deprivation Leads to Failure

Whether someone is looking to weight a lot of weight in a hurry or over time, the biggest mistake they can make is allowing for the feeling of deprivation to settle in. Unfortunately, many diets are all about restrictions and depravations of one kind or another, whether for the relative short-term or for many weeks at a time. These deprivation-based diets are almost guaranteed to fail for many people simply because they do not provide enough energy and are difficult to shift from diet plan to lifestyle change. When someone is deprived of a food that the body or mind craves, eventually, the need will outweigh the strength of conviction and failure can result. These “relapses” into forbidden foods are bad for the diet overall and lead into the next major dieting mistake, which is #3.

Diet Mistake #3 – Why One Failure Can Lead to Overall Failure

When people are on diets, they feel that in order to derive maximum weight-loss benefits, it is necessary for them to adhere rigidly to the prescription the diet offers. What this means is that people forget that they are allowed to screw up. It’s natural, especially when food is involved. The problem is that there are many people who have one day of “weakness” where due to a situation or proximity to food (the holidays are notorious for bringing on diet failure, for instance) and they feel their whole diet is ruined. This provides them with the mistaken idea that they’ve ruined their diet and now need to start all over. Often, this kind of thinking makes people say things like, “well, I was weak yesterday so I’m going to just eat the same way again for the rest of the week and pick up again with my diet next week.” This is like talking yourself out of being healthy and losing weight…. If you pick a sustainable diet that doesn’t require massive deprivation, you will have a much easier time overcoming this feeling that one failure leads to complete failure.

With these three main causes of failure in mind, the major theme that emerges is diet sustainability. If you do not have a diet that you can honestly envision yourself sticking to on a daily basis without feeling dragged out or feeling that you do not have many options for foods to eat, then perhaps you should rethink your approach. The best diet plans should be slow and steady—this keeps your metabolism up and, with proper diet and slightly restricted fat and calories, you will lose weight in a way that is sustained and reasonable and most importantly, in a way that is not hard on your body or a shock to the system.