When you are trying to lose weight, every small thing counts, and if you are not losing weight even with diet and exercise, it’s time to analyze what actually might be going wrong and working against your progress. Often, it’s little things that we tend to overlook that add up and lead to gain weight. That’s why, it’s important to rule out these 10 small things that make you gain weight and weed them out asap.
1. Eating Too Much Healthy Food: Excess of everything is bad, and the same age-old theory applies for “healthy food” as well. There’s no doubt that clean and healthy eating is the foundation of a good weight loss strategy, but the point is to remain within calorie deficit even with the healthiest of foods. No food is calorie free; there’s some amount of calories that come attached with healthy food as well, and without mindful eating, they can put you into calorie surplus and lead to weight gain instead. It’s easy to overeat peanut butter, dry fruits, avocado because they are so delicious and there’s a wrong notion that there’s no need to count calories with healthy food, but absolutely not, you need to practice portion control with every food that’s on your plate! In this post, we list down “14 healthy foods you are probably overeating” and might be the reason you are gaining weight.
2. Compromising on Sleep: Sleep deprivation is your number #1 enemy – do not compromise on sleep – and 5 hours of shut eye is not enough because the body needs good amount of rest to strengthen metabolism, to optimize hunger hormone “ghrelin” and satiety hormone “leptin.” Most importantly, good sleep lowers cortisol which makes you gain weight and prevents weight loss as well. So, sleep for 7 hours every single night.
3. Eating with Distractions: Having dinner while binging on prime/netflix or while talking on the phone, or sitting with the plate on the work desk, can take your attention away from the food on your plate and it’s it’s easy to miss satiety signal from the body that you have had enough food. Interestingly, it takes around 20 minutes for the body to turn off the appetite signal and if you are distracted while eating doing other activities, you would most likely overeat and take in more calories than needed. Eat in peace, without any distractions, and mindfully to lose weight.
4. Not Being on your Feet: Hitting the gym for just one hour in a day and staying sedentary for rest of the day, can lead to weight gain. There’s an enzyme called “lipoprotein lipase,” which is responsible for burning fat and being in an inactive state can severely impact this enzyme’s “fat-burning activity,” by 90%, such as when you spend most of your day at the desk or on the couch watching TV. Being on your feet triggers the body to release this enzyme that helps to process fat molecules and glucose. If you have desk job, take break every half an hour, get up from the chair, and take a stroll. In fact, set alarm on your phone at every half hour interval so that you can take a short break and get some fresh air, and also reactivate that fat-burning lipoprotein lipase enzyme. In fact, short breaks during working hours also help to boost productivity.
5. Not Eating Nutritious Food: A lot of people resort to crash dieting and food deprivation to lose weight, but this is a completely wrong strategy because lack of nutrients can lead to weight gain – deficiency of iron, B vitamins, vitamin D, copper, calcium, magnesium can cause obesity. So, do not deprive of nutrients, and instead of crash dieting, get started on a healthy diet such as Rati Beauty diet where you can lose weight by eating the right kind of food, not less.
6. Picking Fat-free Food: “Fat” is a scary word in weight loss circle, but you need healthy fats to keep the fat-burning process going. But we are going to burst this bubble right now – when fat content is ripped from food, it usually makes the food bland and tasteless. To appeal to the tastebuds of consumers, companies add stuff like heaps of sugar, refined carbs, salt, emulsifiers, and thickeners which add high amount of calories to the body. Such a tendency defeats the whole purpose where one is actually going “low fat” to lose weight. You can find that Rati Beauty weight loss programs uses healthy fats quite a lot in their diet programs to achieve weight loss.
7. Adding Extra Sugar to Cup of Tea/Coffee: If there’s something you should completely eliminate for good health and to lose weight, it’s added sugar! And do stop adding extra sugar to make that cup of coffee sweeter.
8. Adding High-Calorie Dressings to Salads: Store-bought salad dressings have high amount of calories along with preservatives and other unhealthy ingredients – these dressings can make a healthy bowl of salad a high-calorie treat. Do whip your own salad dressings instead.
9. Drinking Liquid Calories: Packaged juices and liquid beverages with artificial flavours have loads of sugar that carry hundreds of extra calories into the body, and keeping a track of these calories and burning them off would become difficult because they are in liquid form. So, to get into calorie deficit easily, reduce consumption of liquid calories that packaged juices and beverages.
10. Eating Unhealthy versions of Healthy Foods: Soup, salads, fruit juice, yogurt, smoothies, peanut butter are all healthy, but not the store-bought versions. Picking packaged soup instead of homemade soup, packaged fruit juice instead of fresh juice can all trigger weight gain. It’s always recommended to make them at home to cut out unnecessary calories from building up in the body.
So, these were 10 small things that we sometimes overlook which prevent us from losing weight, do avoid them at all cost.
14 Healthy Foods you are Probably Overeating
10 Right Actions That Help Boost Weight Loss
