The Biggest Weight Loss Mistakes

Don't deprive yourself of your favorite foods. Don't eat too little. Don't skip carbohydrates. The following advice from nutritionists may surprise you.

At her heaviest, Andrea Liedtke, 63, weighed more than 250 pounds. But she was able to drop to about 140, when she maintained a diet that would be healthy for anyone. She avoided saturated fats and sugars, focusing instead on proteins, good carbohydrates, and fruits and vegetables.

Her biggest mistake? “Going on plans that require you eliminate entire categories of food,” said the Wheaton, Ill., resident. “You know, the no-carbs diet, where you could have mass quantities of meat and cheese, but you couldn’t have carrots. Carrots are not what made me fat.” 

On the other hand, you can’t eat only carrots. “Diets that are nothing but mass quantities of vegetables make it impossible to get enough protein,” she adds.

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Dieting itself is a mistake, she believes, because it’s easy to imagine a beginning and an end, “and then you can go back to your old eating habits.”

She says she never tried a program that sends you packaged meals. “Common sense tells you that, unless you’re willing to eat out of a box the rest of your life, you are going to have to join the real world,” she said. If have your choices made for you, “you haven’t learned anything.”

One could argue that experience is a teacher if a weight-loss program is about changing your habits. You may come to appreciate vegetables you never tried, or you now understand what appropriate portions are.

You can decide for yourself what’s a mistake, but it’s helpful to hear what nutritionists say.   

Sherry Pagoto, PhD, at the University of Connecticut, has a different list of dieting don’ts, including:

• Skipping exercise
• Underestimating the effort it takes to lose weight
• Not prioritizing your weight loss
• Bashing yourself for failures
• Eating when you’re stressed
• Underestimating how much you’re eating
• Skipping meals 

Some people overeat out of anger at being pressured to lose weight, she observes. “As Jane reaches for a cookie, her mother says, ‘You shouldn’t be eating cookies! You’ll gain more weight!’ Jane gets so angry, she decides to eat 10 cookies to spite her mother.”

If you find that you let your weight become a way to get back at or spite other people, you will undermine your success.

Eliminating foods you love entirely can backfire, notes New York City-based registered dietitian Keri Gans, author of “The Small Change Diet.”

“If you crave chocolate on a regular basis, then make sure to include it in your daily diet,” she says. If you love pizza, have a slice every other week. Enjoy French fries with an omelet instead of a burger. “The changes that will make the most impact are often the smallest ones,” she writes.

The key is noticing bad habits.  

Eating too little is a common mistake, observes an Australian nutritionist duo at The Biting Truth. “If your calorie intake is too low, it can prompt the body to retain energy (aka fat), not burn it.”

The first step is to ensure you are eating enough calories throughout the day, with the right balance of proteins, fats, and carbohydrates, to ensure even energy distribution and satiety.

In many cases that will mean you eat more food than you might expect.

• Other mistakes include:
• Overindulging on weekends or with alcohol
• Grazing all day
• Choosing unhealthful afternoon snacks
• Missing sleep   

“Ignoring your body leads to disaster,” says dietitian-turned-business coach Jaime Mass. “It took me years to learn this for myself and it is truly invaluable to my health. We are always trying to dictate and tell our bodies what they need to eat more or less of, or that we couldn’t possibly be hungry — we just ate two hours ago,” she says. “Maybe your body really is hungry, or maybe you are just bored or stressed.”

Listening closely to your body will help you decide.

Finally, you need to understand clearly why you want to lose weight, says Kansas-based exercise physiologist Greg Justice. “You’ve got to establish the ‘why’ before moving to the ‘what’ and ‘how.’”   

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