Starting this week I’m going to be explaining the 3 biggest mistakes that prevent you from losing weight.

Today, mistake #1

The mistake is dieting. Yep, if you set out to lose weight by temporarily “dieting” – that is eating less food, and/or eating different foods than you plan to once you’re done with your diet – you will not lose weight.

This isn’t my opinion, it’s a fact. See, every size requires a certain number of calories to sustain. If you’re my size you require about 2,400 calories a day. If I had less mass, let’s say I was much shorter, I might require only 2,000 calories per day. So you can see if you cut calories to get down to a certain size, you have to continue to eat that number of calories to maintain that size.

If your plan is to temporarily eat certain foods (like a diet program where you buy their food), or simply to severely cut back on calories as long as you can stand it, that won’t work. As soon as you go back to eating what you ate before, you’ll get back to the size that you were before.

What’s Worse…

Really, the worst think you can do is yo-yo like this. Because when you lose weight it’s typically about 25% lean mass. Once you gain it back, it’s all fat.  So each time you lose weight and put it back on, your body fat percentage gets higher.

Also, with extreme calorie cutting your resting metabolic rate(RMR) may plummet. Your RMR is the amount of calories that your body needs to sustain itself; it’s dependent mostly on your size and is also influenced by your body composition (fat vs. lean mass).  If you’re starving yourself your body will get the message that food is scarce and will begin to spare fuel by burning fewer calories. You don’t want that.

Over the next two weeks I’ll be sharing the second and third biggest mistakes that prevent you from losing weight.

Have you learned your lesson trying to “diet” and having it backfire? Share with us in the comments below.

If you’re not on my list to get more health tips like these, enter your name and email below.