1. Detoxing
Our bodies do an incredible job of detoxing us. I hear this one a lot—“I just need a kick start.” You don’t need a kick start, you need an overhaul. You may lose weight doing a detox but the results will only be temporary. You are not dealing with the real issues around your eating. The best thing you can do is drink more water. Detoxing is an unsustainable approach and can lead you to feeling unwell.
2. Diet shakes
Normally used to replace a meal. These can lead to really bad relationships with food. I’ve also been told by clients who have used them that they’ve lead to getting headaches. Also do you really want to be drinking a shake with your husband or partner and the kids at dinner? What example is this setting?
3. Just doing cardio/no resistance training.
Cardio is great for burning calories but that is pretty much all it does. You don’t burn many calories after a cardio session, you don’t speed up the metabolism. Resistance training speeds up the metabolism and you also burn calories at a higher rate after doing resistance training. There are many more benefits too.
Photo by Anastase Maragos on Unsplash
4. Starvation
When you are losing weight you may have to accept that you’re going to feel hungry as you will need to consume less calories than your body is used to. However starving yourself is not the way to do it. It will leave you very low on energy and leave you to feeling deprived and wanting high calorie foods.
5. Following the next trendy/fad diet
There’s a reason why there are so many diets out there. Companies are preying on people’s desperation to lose weight. You shouldn’t be on a diet—the food you eat should be balanced and it should fit in to how you live, without doing ‘low carb’ ‘keto’ or ‘counting syns and points’. If you can’t see yourself doing it for the long term then I wouldn’t recommend it.
6. Joining a slimming club/group
You can get some success with these groups. However a lot of people put the weight they’ve lost back on as they don’t get taught anything about nutrition, and exercise is not talked about. There is a “buy our food otherwise it won’t work” policy, so where does this leave someone when they finish the ‘diet’ or go on holiday or weekends away, or travel? These groups can also build a bad relationship with food.