Doing these 7 things ensures you'll FAIL your next diet
A couple of weeks ago, I started cutting for the Summer. I'd already hit my goal high weight. It was time.
But I intentionally chose a time I knew would be challenging.
During the roughly 10 weeks I'll diet for, I have the following lined up in my calendar:
- Helping my partner move 🏃♂️➡️
- A holiday abroad ☀️
- Four family birthdays 🎂
- Mother's Day and Father's Day in the U.K. 🎁
- Various bank holidays, making for additional time off work 🛌
I took the challenge on intentionally, knowing these things would make it harder to hit my weight loss goals.
But it got me thinking... Most people probably don't realize that they're making their diet 100 times harder... Simply because they're timing it poorly.
1) Not sticking to a routine
This is a big one.
The more variables you control for and make identical, the more aware you'll become of the things that impact how you're feeling.
Here's an example:
When you're dieting, you should strive to keep your activity level pretty steady.
When I helped my partner move flat, I'd only been dieting for around five days. But my body was flushing water, getting used to having far less immediately available carbohydrate, and I was probably going through some sugar withdrawal.
Compound this with getting more than 20,000 steps two days in a row (8,000-10,000 is pretty typical for me), putting together furniture all day, carrying things back and forth on trains, lifting boxes, tearing cardboard...
You get the picture. My energy expenditure for these two days brought my weekly total to far in excess of what it'd normally be.
I was tired, irritable, and struggling to make a good impression on my partner's sister, who I was meeting for the first time.
In times like this, when there's stakes are significant, it's easy to blame the diet. Don't do that. Understand instead that events like this simply make the process harder.
It doesn't mean you can't do it. But it pays to turn events like this down completely while you're dieting.
2) Ruling out any flexibility
Now, let's switch gears.
It might be possible to turn down any and all significant life events for anywhere between 10 weeks and six months while you're dieting. This will probably help you not feel so rough...
But a lot of people simply aren't wired this way.
I love my routine. I'm a very structured guy. But my partner is not, and you might not be either.
The truth is, it helps to move towards the middle. Add structure if you lack it. Make room for spontaneity if you lack that.
Life gets in the way. If you have a day where you're way more active than usual (you're remodeling the house, painting, talked into a 5-hour hike...), you can eat a little more than on other days, too.
The same goes for meal choices. The more dialled in they are, the more you'll get to know which ones work for you. Some will keep you feeling full, some will satisfy particular cravings...
But stick to the same few meals on rotation for long enough and you'll invite micronutrient deficiencies. (More on those later.)
This is slow sabotage. Rates of loss that are too high spike cortisol and leave you ragged around the edges. Lack of variety saps your motivation and, eventually, your energy.
Keep energy high and your diet sustainable by keeping your rate of loss under control, and variety in your diet. More doesn't always equal better.
3) Dieting over important life events
Vacations, birthdays, national holidays, stressful events...
Weddings, the birth of a child, a layoff, moving house, multiple family birthdays, a holiday abroad…
I'm not advocating that you find excuses not to diet. But you should be smart about when you start one.
I used to routinely diet over my birthday and Christmas. It was always difficult. Stressful events like moving house also take a toll. Disruption to your routine, like the visit of family or friends, or a vacation, will all stifle your ability to diet EASILY.
You can learn skills and develop the mental toughness to succeed in spite of such challenges, but you shouldn't stack the deck against yourself. Especially if you've struggled to lose weight successfully in the past. Choose a two-to-three month stretch in the year that'll be quiet, where you can prioritize this as your goal.
Use these stretches to also hunker down and prioritize progress in other areas of your life that'll benefit from control and routine as well... like your career, a side hustle, or home improvements (so long as they're manageable and not too stressful).
4) Failing to meal prep
Meal prep might feel boring, but the point isn't to do it for the sake of it. It's to turn the meal options most aligned with your weight loss goals into the easiest options. Make choosing the right option the path of least resistance.
Easy, quick meals with minimal prep, like air fried steak strips on a bed of ore-bought salad are ideal.
But when it's date night, build in some of that flexibility we talked about earlier.
It's super important that you have your partner on-side for your diet. You don't have to eat exactly the same thing, but cooking together and eating together is a great bonding experience, and gives you dedicated time together.
If your partner isn't on the diet with you, it can be fun to share the centrepiece of the meal, and perhaps add additional carbs, like a serving of rice, that they can add to their plate afterwards.
This way, you can weigh everything out, track your macros, and walk away happy that you've stuck to the plan, still having enjoyed a date night with your partner.
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5) Ignoring micronutrients
Don't sleep on micronutrients.
People spend most of their time on a diet sweating their macros. This is important, but to truly diet sustainably, you need to guard against micronutrients deficiencies. This is essentially impossible if you don't prioritize whole foods.
A lack of energy from lack of calories is bad enough. But compound that with anaemia in any form and get ready to feel like 💩 24/7. (Iron deficiency isn't the only type of anemia. Being deficient in vitamins B9 or B12 lead to their own types of anemia.)
Same goes for nutrients like vitamin C, zinc, or magnesium. You'll struggle to feel good without them. Especially while you're sweating more and depleting your body in the gym.
6) Sleeping on sodium (and creatine) 🧂
Load up on sodium and creatine while you're dieting if you want to feel good. You can lean heavily on these (they're calorie-free) to enhance your workout performance and energy levels.
Creatine at (very) high doses can offset sleep deprivation, and it's effects on strength and power sports performance are so well documented, they're almost cliché.
Sodium, though, is frequently slept on.
Most people who are cutting food intake should consciously keep their salt intake high. If you usually add salt to taste while cooking, the simple fact that you're eating less food overall means your sodium intake will drop.
If your water intake doesn't drop too, you’ll find your body flushes water quickly over the first few days, leaving you feeling weak and depleted.
This is often compounded by lower volumes of fibre and food in the gut. These would have absorbed much of the water you were drinking before, helping with gut motility. Without it, that water you're likely continuing to drink out of happy will flush straight through you.
Keeping the (lower volumes of) food you are still eating on the saltier side will combat this.
Don't worry about your blood pressure either Since you're dieting, your intake of potassium-rich vegetables is also likely increasing. Research suggests it's the ratio of potassium-to-sodium that's important for blood pressure.
When that balance skews too heavily towards sodium, there can be a negative impact on blood pressure. Absolute sodium intake is less important. So you can safely use salt to guard against the damage to your energy and gym performance sodium depletion can cause.
7) Having unrealistic expectations
Tempering your expectations is one of the most important elements of dieting successfully. You need to be aware that you will lose strength, and that you will lose SOME muscle mass.
If you know this going in, and embrace it, you'll see it as a sign of progress, rather than taking it as a defeat, or a step backwards.
Similarly, if you deny that it's normal to see your rate of weight loss slow as the diet progresses, you'll feel crushed when you experience it. If you can't accept that it's normal to feel hungry, and even a little irritable, then you'll think the world is falling in on you.
Being able to face these challenges with equanimity makes it possible to persevere and see your goal through to the end.
Bonus: Watching food 🌽 videos
You know what I mean.
When you're dieting, all of the following are disallowed:
- Watching mukbang videos. 🙅♂️
- Saving recipes of foods you want to eat once you're off the diet. 🙅♂️
- Watching people prepare food you'd like to be eating. 🙅♂️
- Following fast food vendors like Krispy Kreme. 🙅♂️
All any of this does is make you crave and fixate on what you can't have. It also reinforces:
- That you're going to reward yourself with food* once you finish the diet.
- That dieting involves depriving yourself of what you really want.
With regard to point one:
With regard to point two:
Every sign that the diet is working, every sign of hunger, every rumble of the belly -- all of these should excite you. After all, they mean you're moving closer to your goal.
Want to be able to lose weight and not worry about what you eat?
If you want to lose weight, but all your efforts seem impossible, it’s because you’re missing the secret cheat code that flips the dieting equation on its head.
Most people try to either eat less, or move more.
But it’s so easy to eat just a little too much. And cardio is both time-consuming and boring.
I've put together a free resource that'll teach you the 8 timeless principles I repeatedly use to drop 20+lbs of fat at will.
Stop stressing about what to eat. Start eating the right way, and learn how to align your mindset, lifestyle, and eating habits with your weight loss goals.