Despite hard discipline and strong will, nothing is happening on the scales? It may be due to the following eight habits that inhibit losing weight and make your feel-good weight a long way off.
It doesn’t have to be a strict diet to shed a few pounds from your hips or stomach.
It’s often enough to rethink and change simple, everyday habits – from the length of sleep to the choice of exercise.
The following points encourage rethinking – to lose weight in the long term and permanently.
Long-Term Sleep Deprivation
The sleep duration and the sleep intensity are decisive for the acceptance, success and performance in training. Why?
Sleeping too little (less than 7 hours) produces more ghrelin, a hormone responsible for controlling hunger and satiety. It also slows down energy turnover and thus prevents fat stores from being broken down overnight.
Therefore, it is advisable to establish a solid sleep routine and allow yourself seven to eight hours per night.
Stress In The Morning
Absolute fan of the snooze function on the alarm clock? But after you’ve turned over in bed once or twice, the stress comes, and that’s how it happens that you start the day off right.
It would help if you reconsidered this habit as soon as possible because stress in the morning is one reason for the increased release of cortisol. Only with permanently increased cortisol production can it cause acute damage to the body.
The stress hormone interferes with the body’s ability to build proteins, among other things.
Worse still, it instead pulls proteins from the muscles to convert them into glucose and give the body the energy it needs.
Conversely, this means that muscles are broken down that were previously fought for in hard training.
How do you recognize the elevated cortisol level in yourself? Restlessness, standing a bit beside yourself, being quickly annoyed, and having food cravings throughout the day.
Better to get up a little earlier then.
Coffee Right After Getting Up
After a good night’s rest, the body is usually completely dehydrated, even if you wake up in between and drink a few sips of water. And that makes for a good appetite.
But anyone who immediately reaches for a cup of coffee or tea is not doing themselves any good. Because drinks with caffeine and theine in particular lead to the release of cortisol, even though the body is producing adrenaline all by itself.
It makes more sense: After getting up, drink a large glass of lukewarm water or lemon water, which makes you fit and boosts your metabolism at the same time.
Skip The Lunch Break
If you skip your lunch and work through the break, you are not doing your body and head any good.
If you skip one meal a day, the body automatically reduces its energy consumption and slows down fat burning.
The consequences: performance and concentration drop sharply, mistakes happen—the biggest evil: food cravings in the evening.
So better: Eat something for lunch, and your body will thank you.
Too Few Steps A Day
Taking the escalator or driving short distances in the car – these little things in everyday life ensure that you don’t reach the basic movement level.
Ideally, everyone should take 10,000 steps a day, according to the WHO recommendation. To achieve this, it can help to take the stairs on the subway, at work, and home, walk around the block during a break or leave the car in the garage every few days.
Also ideal: get off the bus one stop earlier and walk home. These little things make a big difference.
Rely Exclusively On Cardio Training
The myth: only through intensive endurance sports will the kilos fall off. Far from it, because strength training is the key to success. By building muscle mass, the body also works at rest and thus promotes fat metabolism.
In other words, the more muscle you have, the more fat you burn. Eventually, when the body uses more energy than it takes in from food, it is forced to go to its fat stores.
Sugar As A Reward
A week of hard training and a new, healthy diet plan completed – and now you would like to reward yourself.
No problem, but you should avoid eating too many sugary foods and drinks and instead reward yourself with sweet things without white sugar – like sugar-free chocolate bars or dried apple rings.
Calorie-free aroma drops can also be an alternative so that you don’t have to do without taste: With aromas such as butter biscuits or raspberry-vanilla, you can easily refine food and drinks without sugar.
Not Enough Healthy Fats
Many eat too few healthy fats, and they can promote weight loss.
At best, 30 percent of your daily food intake should consist of healthy fats. With a height of 170 cm and a daily requirement of 1900 calories, approx. 63 grams of fat (570 calories) per day.
Fats control hormone levels and keep hormones in balance. Testosterone production, in particular, is boosted by healthy fats such as omega-3. This, in turn, has an enormously positive effect on muscle building. And the more muscle mass there is, the more calories are burned at rest.
Foods such as avocado, almonds, almond butter, walnuts, linseed oil, olive oil, linseed, chia seeds, and fatty fish such as salmon, mackerel, tuna, and herring, all of which contain omega-3, are recommended.
You should avoid trans fats and too many saturated fats in sausage, meat, cheese, butter and lard, palm and coconut oil, baked goods, and sweets.
In short: Without healthy fats, the two goals of losing weight and building muscle cannot be achieved.
Also Read: Losing Weight: How Does The Brain Know When The Stomach Is Full?
