3 surprising mistakes people make when trying to lose weight

The world is full of people who tell you what your body is suppose to look like. True, losing weight is important for some health conditions. True, losing weight often makes people feel better (both in their skin and in their mind). Weight loss is often an emotional journey coupled with releasing old memories, old wounds and retraining every cell of your being to do life differently. The information I am about to share with you may come as a shock, because modern convention says that in order to lose weight you have to do the things I am going to tell you not to do. But trust me, this information comes from 12-years of personal training and 1-year of struggling with weight loss myself. So here we go:

Workout out too much

Guess what? The body is highly adaptive and when you workout, the body says, “Okay, Jen, since you’re burning an extra 600 calories per day, I’m going to hold on to all the nutrients I can to make sure you don’t get to skinny.” In this case, the body is like a well-meaning grandma, that always thinks you’re too skinny.

But seriously, the majority of my female clients come to me because they have tried all sorts of HIIT classes and done allll the workout routines from cross fit to orange theory with no avail. Once I had them decrease their workout frequency and intensity, they started to lose weight.

So if you want to lose weight. Stop working out so much. Weird, I know.

Not eating enough

Again, in this way the body is like that well-meaning grandma. If you don’t eat enough though, your body enters a starvation mode. And in the same way the body is like that grandma, your body will hold on to all the calories you eat because it doesn’t know where the next good meal is going to come from.

Think of it like this - we were designed to withstand famine. Our bodies pack on fat in certain areas for the purpose of taking care of us when we don’t have enough calories. When we deprive our bodies of food, we tell our bodies, “okay, now is the time to start reserving this stuff in the form of fat”. Probably not the message you want to send if you’re trying to shed a couple pounds before summer. If…ya know…bikinis are your thing.

Comparing their body to others

Did you see this one coming? This is probably the most important small detail of losing weight. Simply put, comparing your body to another person’s body is unsustainable. You will never be a super model, unless you are indeed a super model. And super models are curated by people who value very specific body types.

In order to be happy in your skin, you’ve gotta really embrace how it is. Perhaps you don’t even like to workout. In this case, you’d be hitting the gym for all the wrong reasons.

Discover what you like to do: what you like to do for fitness and what you like about your self. Do and embrace those things. You will never be any one but yourself. You might as well be happy in your own skin.

Create Fitness from the Inside, Out.

-Omega