Want to lose weight?
In this post, I’m going to share three overlooked bad habits preventing you from losing weight, specifically for the busy person who has limited time to dedicate to their health & fitness.
First of all, it’s important to realize that whether you know it or not, your day is filled with habits. Almost everything we do is a habit, good or bad.
The key is developing habits that help us achieve our goals. Good habits. 🙂
Here, I’m going to go over some common bad habits I encounter the most with clients that they don’t even realize prevent them from losing weight. I have worked with hundreds of in-person clients and thousands of online clients; most people think what is preventing them from losing weight is some new supplement or workout fad they are missing out on. This is never the case, though.
I’m going to walk you through three overlooked habits, so you can avoid the same obstacles many others have faced, so let’s get to it.
3 Bad Habits Preventing You From Losing Weight [And How To Fix Them]
1. Snacking
If there were ONE THING that I would consider a ‘magic bullet’ to helping someone break through to a body they love it would be to stop snacking.
The first problem with snacking is that no one is snacking on meat and veggies, AKA food. Most of us tend to reach for the fake health foods (granola bars, energy cereals, or whatever it is that has a lovely stamp of approval on the box).
The second problem is that the most common real food snack can even prevent us from losing weight.
Nuts!
You see while nuts are super healthy, they are also super calorie dense. A handful averages 200 calories. You could mindlessly eat 4 or 5 handfuls a day in-between meals while working. This would add up to be over 800 calories.
Half a day’s worth of calories for some people!When it comes to snacking, we tend to do it for 3 main reasons. We are:
When it comes to snacking, we tend to do it for 3 main reasons. We are:
- Conditioned from a young age to never be hungry and always have a “snack” on hand from the time we learn to speak. Chips, bars, goldfish, you name it, snacks are always at arms reach.
- Bored
- Hungry
We also tend to always snack on foods mindlessly. Meaning, we are doing something else and not even thinking about the food.
- Driving
- Watching TV (especially late at night)
- Scrolling through our social media feeds
- working
- reading
I am sure you are nodding your head, “yes” to each of these thinking how you are shoveling snacks down while doing each one of these things.
Well, all these calories add up, and the snack calories can tally up to more calories than our meals.
Cut out the snacking, and you cut out the mindless calories preventing you from losing weight.
Make It a Good Habit
Focus on eating 3, protein & veggie based meals a day. If you find yourself getting ravenous in-between meals, eat more at your meals and try drinking water or a calorie-free beverage between your meals.
If you absolutely must have a snack or happen to be diabetic, try a piece of fruit. The fruit has fiber, is relatively low in calories (about 100 per serving) and you never hear of people bingeing on apples. It typically stops at 1 or 2.
2. Staying Up Late at Night
The problem with staying up too late at night mainly boils down to it is preventing you from getting enough sleep.
Getting 7-8 Hours of sleep a night is ideal.
Typically we need to wake up at a particular time. Subtract 7 hours from your wake-up time, and you have your ideal bedtime. 🙂
If you are staying up past that time you have a bad habit that is preventing you from losing weight that is probably the easiest to change.
Seriously, after 9 pm what is going on that you can’t miss?
Now-a-days we can record our favorite shows or watch them whenever we want, no youtube video or article on the internet is going to disappear by tomorrow, and your Facebook friends will understand you not being able to comment on their posts late into the night.
Make It a Good Habit
Pick a time to be in bed by that gives you 7 hours of sleep and stick to it.
Ex. I wake at 5:30 am, therefore I have a “bed time” of 10 pm. Lights out and in bed by 10 pm.
Do you have trouble falling asleep? Try some of these tips:
- Get outside in natural light for 30 minutes a day
- Stop drinking caffeinated beverages by noon.
- Turn the lights down in your house after dark.
- Don’t look at phone or computer screens one hour before bed.
- Make your bedroom as dark as possible.
- Keep the bedroom cool. A temperature around 68 degrees is usually ideal.
- Do a brain dump and to do list for the next day before bed.
3. Making Every Workout Intense
Do you experience any of these:
- Blood sugar ups and downs.
- Depression and anxiety
- Trouble falling asleep and waking up early
- Intense food cravings
- Less desire to, ahem. 😉
- Missing or having irregular periods
Any one of these can be attributed to training too intensely, too frequently.
Training is a “stressor” on the body, and a good one, but our body can only handle so much stress. Your body sees all stress as the same. So if you woke up late, are past due on a work deadline, have a screaming kid, and spilled coffee on your shirt… it all gets filed in the same folder and needs to be balanced equally with recovery.
But we love intense training.
I get it.
For many of us, intense training is a way to get a degree of control over our body, and we can even depend on it to feel good about ourselves.
“Whew, I thought I was going to die, but persevered through that intense workout, I can do anything!”
We start getting addicted to that feeling and tell ourselves it is for our health and body, but really it is because we need that intense challenge to feel good.
The truth is, chasing that feeling is not healthy and eventually leads to a crash and burn. If you don’t find the balance for yourself, your body will force it: injuries and sickness are around the corner to derail us from losing weight.
Make It a Good Habit
Make an effort to balance your intense training with lower intensity workouts. If you have a killer weight training workout or intense circuit one day, follow it up with an easy walk or bike ride the next day.
If you have one of those days where everything goes wrong, don’t try for a PR in your workout. Tone things down, focus on form and movement and less on the intensity.
This gives your body a chance to balance all the stress and allows you to recover from the demands of life and the gym.
Stress, stress, stress, stress= getting nowhere
Stress, recover, stress, recover = Progress = results
Balance your total training time between resistance training, intervals, active recovery, and fun.
Check out this infographic from my partners at Precision Nutrition that helps break it down for you:
Avoid These Bad Habits At All Costs
These are the three often-overlooked habits to avoid for successful weight loss. Dont expect to conquer all of them at once after reading this post, that’s ok. Just pick one to work on one at a time. I can promise that if you focus on avoiding these 3 bad habits, you’ll have much more success losing weight than if you kept following these bad habits.
Want To Learn More?
If you’ve enjoyed this article and want to learn how to make your exercise and eating balanced and uncomplicated so you can lose fat, get stronger, and improve your health, then be sure to get my exclusive tips and strategies on nutrition, training, and mindset delivered to your inbox: