Changing your lifestyle for weight loss or overall health can be challenging, especially without guidance from a nutritionist. Typically, when people attempt to change their lifestyle without help, there are three ways they are sabotaging their efforts.
You're Not Weighing Your Food
Many people become frustrated by the need to count calories, but unfortunately it is necessary to gain an accurate measure of what you eat each day. The only way to accurately count your calories is to weigh your food and keep a strict log of what you consume. Over time you may become less strict about weighing your food, especially if you frequently consume the same foods. Even people in the fitness industry find weighing their food is the best way to stay on track and remain accountable for everything they eat. In order to remain accurate, you will need to invest time in meal prep at least weekly. Simply portioning proteins and carbohydrates means you can grab one of each and just weigh out your vegetables for each meal, with less fuss.
You Eat Poorly On Weekends
You may be the person who is self-disciplined with eating your prepared meals throughout the week, but as the weekend approaches, you slip. It is easy to convince yourself that cheat meals or cheat days do not matter, but they can derail your goals in a major way. If you are eating at a caloric deficit for five or six days per week, a single night out or one trip to a fast food restaurant could turn that deficit into a caloric surplus for the week. This does not mean you cannot enjoy yourself, but more planning will be necessary to stay on track. Having a glass on wine with your evening meal on Friday can fit into your life, but you may need to skip the snack earlier in the day. If you want a cheeseburger, you might choose to make one at home so you can better control the calories and only splurge every other week.
You Overestimate Your Exercise
Your physical activities will influence your diet. People who are more active may need different macronutrient ratios to continue to lose weight and also to perform at their best. The amount of calories you burn during an activity depends on many variables and the main one is intensity. It is easy to believe you burned a thousand calories during an hour of intense aerobics, but your perception of your effort may not match your actual efforts. Wearing a fitness tracker is a better way of measuring how many calories you actually burn during activities and throughout the day. If you are accurately weighing your food and logging your food intake, it should be easy to determine if your fitness tracker is accurate if you are losing weight at an expected rate. Keep consistent measurements of both your food and activities over the course of a month, since the accuracy of changes week to week may be less reliable.
A nutritionist can provide you with important tools to kick start your lifestyle changes and make it easier to maintain these changes indefinitely. If you are putting in the work to lose weight but the scale is not moving, look for ways you may be sabotaging your weight loss.