Common Dieting Pitfalls And How To Avoid Them

Dieting is no fun. Most people will fall off their diets within a week. Those that don’t fall in that first week usually fall within three weeks. That’s because most people set themselves up to fail when they start a new diet by falling into one or more of the most common pitfalls. Recognizing these common dieting pitfalls and how to avoid them can mean the difference between staying on track with your diet or falling back into your old, unhealthy eating patterns.

Making radical changes to your eating habits – This happens all the time on diets, especially fad diets. If you go on a diet where you can only eat fruit, or only eat protein, or you must cut out all of one of kind of food it will be very difficult for you to stay on the diet. When you make changes to the way you eat you should make them gradually. If you make an extreme change to the way you eat and you do it fast then you will deprived and you will start to crave foods, making it more likely that you will go off your diet.

Setting unrealistic goals – When you first start dieting you might lose anywhere from five to ten pounds in the first couple of weeks. When that happens, of course, you feel like the diet is great and you want that kind of weight loss to continue but most of the time that is all water weight. Real weight loss does not happen that fast.

Experts say a healthy rate of weight loss is one to two pounds per week. So if you tell yourself that you want to lose ten pounds a week every week you are setting yourself up for disappointment. And if you’re disappointed and you feel like you’re failing on the diet you are more likely to give up on the diet and go back to your unhealthy lifestyle.

Using food as a reward – One of the most common ways that people reward themselves is food. How many times have you told yourself “I stuck to my diet all week so one cheeseburger won’t hurt me”? Well that cheeseburger will hurt you. In the long run, that cheeseburger will be just more calories that you need to burn off.

Instead of rewarding yourself with food for a job well done, take the same amount of money that you would have spent on a food treat and spend it on a new blouse, a new lipstick, a book, a new CD, or something else that will motivate you to keep going on your diet.

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