Looking to get back into the clothes that USED to fit you? Is the beer gut cramping your style?
Make sure you aren’t making these 5 common fat loss mistakes…
If you are looking to lose some unsightly pounds, tone up for beach season or an upcoming vacation, or are just unhappy with the way you look, how your clothes fit, or how you feel about yourself, there are 5 crucial mistakes you need to avoid if you want to succeed.
Here are the 5 biggest mistakes that I see people making when chasing their fat loss goals:
- Not Tracking Calories or What You Are Eating – This is a HUGE mistake when it comes to fat loss. It is incredibly easy to underestimate what you eat in a day, and even if you somehow manage to get yourself into a calorie deficit without tracking anything, it only takes about 5 minutes of unplanned/spontaneous snacking to undo all of that hard work.
- Thinking That Eating “Clean” Is The Key To Losing Weight – Don’t be fooled, calorie or energy balance is the KEY to losing weight, not how “clean” you eat. If your Basal Metabolic Rate (the level of calories at which your bodyweight is stable) is 2000 calories per day, and you eat 2200 calories of “clean” foods, you WILL gain weight. Eating for health and eating for fat loss are not necessarily the same thing.
- Not Sticking To A Plan or “Program Hopping” – Program hopping is a great way to ensure that you never make any meaningful progress in getting stronger, building muscle or losing body fat. Building muscle will elevate your metabolism so that you burn more calories at rest, and will also help you look better naked, once you’ve lost that body fat (admit it, looking great naked is definitely a fitness motivation, right??). The first 6 weeks or so of any progress that you make on a new training program is largely the result of Central Nervous System adaptations (ie, getting better at the exercise so you progress faster). The REAL progress only starts once those adaptations have stopped happening, as this is when the muscular adaptations begin to occur.
- Not Tracking Your Workouts – This is a mistake I see 95% of people in the gym make on a consistent basis. One of the major factors in determining whether or not you make progress with your fitness and fat loss goals is by making sure that there is progressive overload present in your workouts. This is basically a fancy way of saying that you are doing more work over time, the same amount of work in less time, or more work in less time. This means more reps, sets, weights, or the same workout in a shorter amount of time. If you don’t track your workouts, how do you know if you’ve done more work in today’s workout than you did last week? Or last month? Or even last year?
- Focusing On Cardio and Not Lifting Weights – This is probably the biggest reason why people don’t make progress with their fat loss goals. The approach that I see most people take to lose bodyfat is to cut their calories and do copious amounts of cardio. They hardly ever touch a weight, and when they do, they don’t challenge themselves, and they stick to the 5 pound dumbbells for a couple sets of bicep curls. I prioritize strength training with all my clients, especially my fat loss clients, because this is the one main factor, when combined with a smart calorie deficit, that will absolutely transform your body into a lean, mean, fat burning machine.
Making it a point to avoid making these mistakes will go a long way towards ensuring that you continue to see progress for the efforts you are putting in.
Interested to find out how I can help YOU achieve your fitness and fat loss goals while still living your life? Check out my 28 Day Fat Shredder Program which has helped hundreds of busy parents just like you shed pounds and pounds of ugly, oozing bodyfat while still enjoying the foods and beverage that they love…
