1. Liquid Calories

If you’re trying to lose weight, you should never be drinking liquid calories. The insulin response from liquid sugars (and from some sugars in general) is extremely high and insulin is a fat storage hormone. Even if these drinks fit inside your calorie budget, they will at best stall your fat loss and at worst trigger fat gain.

2. Desserts That Aren’t Desserts

Muffins are a classic example of a dessert that we don’t think are desserts. They are made up of white flour, fats (usually unhealthy fats), and sugars. In other words, muffins are cake baked in a muffin tin.

3. Cereal

Cereal is almost always a combination of white flour and sugar, along with a lot of other processed ingredients. These cereals are often labeled as low fat or heart healthy to get you to bite.

4. Fast Eating

Contrary to popular belief, the size of the food you eat doesn’t determine whether you feel full or not. The feeling of fullness is a hormonal response in the body. Since the hormonal response doesn’t happen immediately (no matter how much you eat), slowing down can help you to feel less hungry while eating less than a truck load of food.

5. Lack of Sleep

Not getting enough sleep contributes to excess cortisol production because of its stressful effect on the body. Cortisol not only contributes to fat gain, it also contributes to muscle loss which is brutal on your metabolism.

6. Carbohydrate Addiction

Most people don’t realize that if most of their diet consists of grains such as bread, cereal, tortillas, pastas, and rice, their bodies are running almost exclusively on sugar. The lack of healthy fats in the modern diet is contributing heavily to the development of addictions to carbs. If you eat grains almost exclusively, you may be in trouble.

7. General Overeating

Binge eating is likely the most under-diagnosed eating disorder and obviously contributes to obesity. You shouldn’t be overeating to feel better emotionally. You shouldn’t be overeating at all.

8. Relaxing on Weekends

Many people are clean eaters during the week, but blow it on the weekend. While it’s healthy to relax here and there, you shouldn’t be destroying your body every weekend. Don’t stop loving your body just because it’s a Saturday. It’s definitely ok to have a dessert on the weekend. It’s not ok to have 9 unhealthy meals in a row, just because it isn’t a weekday.

9. Lack of Exercise

In order to change, you body often needs to feel that it needs to change. If your body knows that you need more from it, it will improve itself. If it believes that you are going to continue sitting on the couch all day, it won’t produce the necessary hormones to start letting go of your fat stores.

10. Too Much Exercise

Too much exercise can cause muscle depletion and muscle depletion lowers your metabolism.

11. Repetitive Exercise

Runners often fall into this trap since almost all of their exercise consists of running. Our bodies become a lot more efficient at performing the same exercises so they stop having the effect they once had. This is why some people run for more than an hour a day without losing weight.

12. Post-Exercise Reward Eating

Many people feel that after they workout, they should reward themselves with a trip to the {insert your favorite dessert here} shop. They of course feel that the workout will cancel the effect of the dessert. It won’t.

13. Stress

Stress (like lack of sleep) causes the release of cortisol, which is a hormone that contributes to fat storage and muscle depletion.

14. Skipping Meals

News flash – our bodies need to eat. As it turns out, our bodies are interested in self preservation. So, when we skip meals, our bodies and brains are forced to take things into their own hands. They increase our appetites exponentially and cause us to overeat.

Many people have a hard time understanding that two 500 calorie meals will contribute a lot less to fat storage than one 1000 calorie meal. This happens because 1000 calories of food will take your blood sugar to a much higher place, causing more insulin to be released. Since insulin sends food directly to the liver to be stored as fat, you can probably deduce the eventual outcome of taking insulin levels too high.

15. Underdeveloped Muscles

Lack of muscle means lack of metabolism. Increasing the amount of muscle you have by even a small amount will have a healthy effect on your metabolism and will help you to stimulate the loss of fat in your body.

Related posts:

1. Reasons You’re Gaining Weight on a Paleo Diet
2. Why Can’t I Lose Weight? (6 Reasons)
3. Healthy Weight Loss 101: How To Lose Weight Quickly
4. Success In Increasing Calories Without Weight Gain!
5. How To Get Motivated To Lose Weight

Tags: losing weight, not losing weight, weight loss