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Avoiding these common mistakes can make healthy eating and long-term weight management much more achievable.
There’s a lot of content telling people how to lose weight, but much less explaining the habits that can work against you. Here are our top contenders!
1. Getting Too Hungry
Calorie restriction and skipping meals are two different things. Long stretches between meals and skipping them altogether increase hunger and make it harder to make thoughtful food choices. By the time you’re extremely hungry, convenience is more likely to win out over nutrition. Intense hunger invariably leads to larger portions, overeating, or reaching for ultra-processed foods that are high in calories and low in nutrients because they’re quick and satisfying. Balanced meals at regular intervals are the best way to manage calorie restriction for weight loss.
2. Drinking Calories and Loading Up on Sauces
Calories sneak in with specialty coffee drinks, soda, fruit juice, sports drinks, and alcohol, adding hundreds (yes, hundreds!) of calories to your day without making you feel as full as solid foods. Your body doesn’t register them the same way it does whole foods. Not to mention, this list of drinks can also increase the incidence of dumping syndrome in gastric bypass patients.
Empty calories also sneak in with salad dressings, creamy sauces, mayonnaise, butter, cooking oils, and dips. They can wreck an otherwise healthy meal. A little extra flavor now and then is okay, but when indulgences become regular, they can stall weight loss.
3. Relying on “Healthy” Processed Foods and Take-Out
Many foods marketed as “healthy” have nutritious components, but that doesn’t mean they’re beneficial for weight loss or low in calories. Granola, trail mix, nut butters, smoothies, dried fruit, restaurant salads, and protein bars can be sources of concentrated calories and ultra-processed ingredients that can limit how much weight you lose. (Read here for an interesting study about how minimally processed food choices impact weight loss.) For a quick snack on the go every now and then, they can be great, but be aware that “healthy” and “weight-loss friendly” are not always the same thing.
Takeout makes weight management more challenging because portions tend to be much larger, and it takes more self-control not to overindulge. Restaurant meals also tend to contain more cooking oil, butter, sugar, sodium, and calorie-dense sauces than you might expect, even when the meal appears healthy. Relying on it frequently can make it harder to reach not just your weight loss goals, but also health goals like diabetes or hypertension management.
4. Chasing Perfection Instead of Consistency
Letting yourself have a “treat” meal can be highly motivating for staying on track and reducing cravings. Unfortunately, many people adopt an all-or-nothing mindset, believing they’ve failed their plan after one indulgence. That thinking can lead to giving up altogether instead of simply getting back on track at the next meal.
Long-term weight loss happens because of consistency, not perfection. Sustainable habits repeated over months and years have a much greater impact than strict diets that are impossible to maintain. Forget the fad diets and stick to protein as the main attraction, paired with steamed or grilled vegetables, and snacks consisting of low-sugar fruits, nuts, and dairy.
5. Ignoring Sleep and Stress
Sleep and stress don’t seem like they’d be part of a nutrition chat, but they are a big part of weight management. Poor sleep can disrupt hormones that regulate hunger and fullness, and elevated stress hormones can increase cravings for calorie-dense comfort foods. Both stress and poor sleep can also cause fatigue, making meal planning, grocery shopping, and cooking feel much more difficult.
Staying up late can also lead to late-night snacking. Not only do you stay out of the pantry, but you give your body the rest it needs to recuperate and function optimally with a good night’s rest.
6. Avoiding Strength Training
Many people focus exclusively on cardio when trying to lose weight, but strength training is just as important. Strength training exercises, like using resistance bands, build and maintain muscle, help maintain metabolism, and reduce the amount of lean tissue lost alongside body fat.
You don’t just want to weigh less; you also want to improve body composition. Building muscle can also help fill out loose skin that is common after a bariatric procedure.
7. Following Diets That Are Too Restrictive
Extremely restrictive diets might promise equally dramatic results – but they’re rarely sustainable. Severely limiting calorie intake or eliminating food groups altogether can make people feel deprived and increase the likelihood of binge eating and yo-yo dieting. It’s also not good for the body to be starved. Your body also needs enough calories for optimal brain activity, organ function, hormone production, immune function, tissue repair, and muscle mass.
There’s no getting around eating patterns that are realistic for reaching and maintaining weight loss. Moderate, sustainable changes are far more likely to produce lasting results than short periods of extreme restriction, which is usually followed by a return to old habits and weight regain.
8. Mindless Snacking
Screen time munching is one of the best ways to undermine weight loss. Watching television or scrolling on your phone is distracting and reduces awareness of hunger and fullness cues, making it more likely to eat faster, consume more, and continue past our natural limit. Pump the brakes on overeating by portioning snacks into a small bowl instead of eating directly from the package; it creates a physical boundary between overindulgence and adherence to your diet plan.
Sampling food while cooking, grazing from a snack bag, or eating a little extra throughout the weekend are easy to do without thinking about it. Becoming more aware of when, where, and why you’re eating can help cut unnecessary calories without feeling overly restrictive.
9. Rewarding Exercise with Food
It’s surprisingly easy to eat back the calories burned with a post-exercise treat or oversized meal. A 30- to 45-minute walk or gym session may burn only a few hundred calories, which can be replaced quickly by a specialty coffee drink, sports drink, pastry, or restaurant appetizer.
There’s also a mindset that goes along with it: viewing exercise as something that “earns” extra food. It’s important not to use exercise as permission to overeat.
10. Portion Distortion
Portion sizes have steadily increased over the past several decades, changing people’s perception of what a normal serving looks like. Restaurant meals, packaged snacks, and even dishes prepared at home often contain much larger portions than any of us really need.
Even with nutritious foods, weight gain happens if the portions are excessive. If you actually measure out the portion recommendations on nutrition labels, you’ll start getting a visual sense of how much you should be eating. Doing that can help recalibrate your eye and make portion control feel more intuitive over time.
One unhealthy meal or missed day of exercise isn’t enough to derail your weight loss, but small, unsavory habits will eventually stack up and start to work against you. Even with honest effort, some things can slip past or be overlooked. Understanding some common mistakes and being aware of the pitfalls can help you make changes that are more sustainable and effective over the long term.
Struggling to lose weight despite making healthy changes is frustrating, and sometimes the scale doesn’t reflect the effort you’re putting in. If you’ve been eating better and exercising more but aren’t seeing the results you expected, call us. At SAMPA, our bariatric specialists help patients identify lifestyle habits and medical conditions that influence weight management. We work with patients before and after bariatric surgery and during medical weight-loss treatment to create nutrition plans that are realistic and sustainable.
