Gym won't help you lose weight if you make these mistakes

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

You bought a gym membership, but the fat doesn't even think to leave your sides. The life hacker finds out what is preventing you from losing weight.

1. You do not follow the diet

There is no magic in losing weight: as long as you consume fewer calories than you expend, you will lose weight. If you have not changed your diet in any way and continue to overeat, do not expect that the kilograms will start to go away.

What to do

Nutrition provides 80% of success in losing weight, so you will have to completely revise the menu. The most effective way is to count calories. This will allow you to track the dynamics of weight change and adjust the diet.

2. You underestimate the calorie intake

You regularly count calories and wait for the scales to show less, but this does not happen. You are probably wrong in your calculations.

First, most people underestimate the calorie intake. Experiments show that subjects do not honestly indicate how much and what they ate, even if they know that they will be rechecked.

It is possible that you do not consider all sorts of little things: eat a couple of nuts, bite your partner's burger, finish a spoonful of soup for a child. These snacks are easy to gain quite a decent amount of calories.

Secondly, the mistake can be caused by laziness and unwillingness to count calories. For example, you eat borscht and do not calculate KBZHU for it, but select a dish in the application that someone brought there before you. But 100 g of borscht can contain either 50 kcal or 150.

What to do

Write down the calories of each bite you eat honestly. You’re not in school, and nobody’s going to give you a bad grade for overeating. When it comes to weight loss, it's important to be honest with yourself.

And, of course, don't be lazy. Calorie counting is already a pretty rough procedure. Without a laboratory, it is impossible to know exactly how much KBZhU is contained in a particular piece of meat or cucumber and how much of them will be assimilated. Therefore, calculate the calories for a particular dish in order to at least somewhat level this approximation.

3. You eat too many healthy foods

Calorie counting is optional. You can provide a calorie deficit in other ways. For example, give up refined sugars, fast food, fatty meats and similar foods. This will help reduce your daily calorie intake without complicated calculations.

But it's not that simple. Even with boiled chicken breast, rice and cucumbers, you can exceed your energy requirement. And if you add such healthy but high-calorie nuts, avocados, red fish, vegetable oil to the menu, then you can gain weight without cakes.

What to do

Find out the calorie content of the foods you eat most often. Determine the optimal serving size to maintain a deficit. This will help you in the future to control what and how much you eat, without weighing and counting.

4. You cut calories too much

It would seem that everything is logical: the less you eat, the faster you lose weight. Therefore, you have limited calorie intake as much as possible and wait for the first cubes to appear from under the layer of fat. But too strict a diet is fraught with breakdowns, even for a person with a will of steel.

Instead of slowly and surely moving towards your intended goal, you are causing your body to starve.

He lacks energy even for basic processes like heartbeat, digestion, blinking, metabolism. But the body knows how to defend itself by its own methods. And now, after a week on cucumbers, you are already eating the cake with a spoon with the thought "the barn is burnt, burn down and the hut."

Most likely, you will still be able to lose weight. But as soon as you relax a little, the pounds will return and bring your comrades to your sides. Scientists call the result of hard diets the "yo-yo effect": you throw the toy, and it will certainly come back to you. The same thing happens with weight.

What to do

Recognize that losing weight is not a sprint, but a marathon. Therefore, you need to correctly distribute your forces along all sections of the path in order to reach the finish line. Cut the average daily calorie intake by 10-15% and do not rush things.

5. You are exaggerating the load

You started going to the gym and think that now you have an indulgence to eat high-calorie cakes or fatty pork. But working out in the gym doesn't waste as much energy as we would like it to.

Very rough calculations show that for an hour of running at a speed of 8 km / h, a person weighing 75 kg will burn about 600 kcal, for an hour of active weightlifting - 225 kcal. What you spent a full 60 minutes can easily be returned in 5 minutes with one bun.

What to do

When calculating the average daily calorie intake, use the activity coefficient. In this case, energy consumption can be ignored, just do it for your pleasure.

6. You have reduced your daily activities

Previously, you could walk for two hours before going to bed, ride your bike all weekend, and generally lead an active lifestyle. But now you think that you already work out enough in the gym, so spend all your free time on the couch.

Reducing your daily activity can be fatal to your weight. It is she who allows you to spend calories throughout the day. Gym training does not compensate for this energy expenditure.

What to do

Live a normal life and do not miss the opportunity to spend extra calories. At the very least, try to walk more often.

7. You don't do much

The fact that you go to the gym every day does not mean anything. If you manage to take three sets of selfies, discuss all the latest news with a friend or friend, but at the same time your T-shirt is not wet even in the armpit area, you should not expect either weight loss or muscle gain.

What to do

Pay for several sessions with a trainer to write you a workout program, or create your own exercise plan. You should have a clear understanding of what you are doing in each workout, and tangible progress in the weight lifted, the number of repetitions or approaches, and the increase in speed.

8. You have hormone problems

People so often cover up overeating with hormonal disruption that this argument in a healthy lifestyle crowd simply ceased to be taken seriously. Still, a small percentage of gym goers can actually face this problem.

If you have been eating with a calorie deficit for a long time, carefully weighing each serving, but the weight is stagnant or growing, hormonal imbalance is probably your case.

What to do

Go to your doctor as soon as possible. Hormonal disruptions cause problems much more serious than excess weight, so it is worth making health a priority.