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7 Sure-Fire
Strategies To Guarantee Failure in Your Fat Loss Program
By Eugene Thong CSCS
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 The longer I'm in this
business, the more apparent it is that
successful fat loss
is less about the "doing" and more about the "not doing." In other
words, you should seek to eliminate mistakes and modify old
behaviors instead of trying to generate completely new patterns for
yourself.
Here, in no particular
order, are the most common mistakes I see people making when embarking
on fat loss program.
1) Trying to be
perfect.
A great way to drive yourself crazy is to never touch, look at, smell,
or think about a "bad food" ever again. Realistically, it's not
going to happen.
The surest way to put
the kibosh on your diet efforts is to immediately forbid yourself from
ever cheating – your cravings will come to consume your every waking
moment until you give in, then curse yourself in an orgy of
self-flagellation and guilt.
This doesn’t have to be you! The simple solution is to
schedule in
specific cheat meals so that they are planned into your diet. That
way, you can have a taste of the foods you love (right now) while
consuming the fuel your body needs to fire up its fat-burning furnace.
2) Immediately
cutting out all fat.
Fat adds two majorly important accents to your daily food intake:
flavor and satiety.
Satiety is the
feeling of being full. Fat in foods aids satiety by keeping you
feeling fuller for a longer period of time, decreasing your overall food
intake.
Removing the fat in
foods (as in fat-free or low-fat foods) not only robs your body of the
nutritional value and beneficial effects of the fat in the food, but
decreases the level of satiety you feel after eating that food, causing
you to eat more.
In fact, most low-fat
foods are only slightly lower in calories than their full-fat
counterparts, but you’ll likely end up eating much more of the low-fat
fare. Why?
Low-fat = low satiety
 If you don’t know what
flavor is, then it really won’t matter what changes you make to your
diet since you won’t be able to tell anyway (you’re also probably eating
processed diet foods, like rice cakes, which you need to stop doing
right now).
Fat is not the enemy.
This doesn’t give you license to gobble down pints of ice cream, but at
least you don’t have to feel bad when that person over there eating the
Snackwells sneers at you.
3) Skipping meals.
Skipping meals is as smart as being out in the woods and forgetting to
put a fresh log on the fire before tucking into bed at night. Smokey
the Bear says: “Please don’t put out your fat-burning furnace. Only you
can prevent yourself from skipping meals and bringing your metabolism to
a grinding halt.”
Thanks, Smokey.
4) Over exercising.
Do you know what happens when you do 2 hours of cardio a day? Your body
begins cannibalizing muscle tissue for fuel – which is terrible since
muscle is the greatest single contributor to your metabolic rate.
In other words, by
burning a few calories doing cardio, you’re handicapping your body’s
ability to burn calories in the long run. If you’re eating correctly,
you won’t need to spend hours on the hamster wheel anyway. Remember –
you can’t out-run a crappy diet!
5) Not lifting
weights.
Mike’s already written pretty extensively about the
importance of lifting weights
to maintain or increase muscle mass when on a
fat loss diet, but let me
summarize it here:
When
in caloric deficit, lift weights to avoid losing muscle. Add muscle to
increase your metabolic rate and maximize daily caloric burn.
6) Not
setting or
reviewing goals.
Setting concrete, specific goals and putting them in
writing is the most important step you can take towards the actual
achievement of your fat loss goals. As Mike says,
Once you have an
outcome written down, it serves as more than just a "goals" sheet. It's
a road map with specific directions. This is important because sometimes
during the journey, we get off track. Binging on the diet or missing
workouts can lead to frustration.
That frustrated
state will cloud your decision making process, and may cause you to make
some decisions that will take you away from your goals.
The reason for
having the goals and how to get there in writing, before
you start your journey is to compare where you're currently
going with where you should be going. From there,
you can adjust.
 If you don’t know
where you’re heading to, how do you intend to get there? Moreover, how
can you tell if you’re still on the right path towards your goals?
Easy – Put your
goals down in writing, and periodically review your progress to
ensure you’re moving in the right direction.
7) Trying to
reinvent the wheel.
Also known as “playing it by ear”, or “going with the flow.” The exact
opposite of trying to be perfect is not following a plan. You see this
all the time in several different incarnations:
“I’m just going to eat
healthily.” (Translation: I’m going to impetuously give in to temptation
every time I encounter it.)
“I was trying South
Beach but now I’m trying The Fat Smash Diet.” (How about actually
“following” the diet plan instead of “trying” it? It’s not a bikini,
you know.)
“I went on Atkins but
it didn’t work for me. Maybe it was that pasta I ate.” (Maybe. Just
maybe.)
Whether your
particular brand of poison is to not follow diet recommendations, to
chase the latest fads, or to have absolutely no plan whatsoever, it all
adds up to the same outcome – zero fat loss (and likely, surplus
fat gain). This is not the place to be.
If you find a plan
that has a track record of working, then by all means follow the plan.
Don’t make substitutions. Don’t try to “take what you like” and
substitute this and that from another plan. Don’t follow it every other
day or some other random frequency. If you don’t give the plan the
chance to work, then the plan hasn’t failed you – you failed you.
We’ve put together a
special report of the 21 biggest mistakes people make when trying to
lose fat, and it’s available free to MCNewsletters subscribers.
All you have to do is enter your name and email address and confirm your
(FREE) subscription to our newsletter – it’s chock full of
articles, Q and A, and tips on fat loss. Fresh off the presses!
If you're truly looking to lose weight
fast, I suggest you head over to read our page on
black book of secrets. It includes 61 fat loss tips, tricks and
techniques. It is a very good investment.
About the Author:
Eugene Thong, CSCS, was born a weak, skinny,
bespectacled child. Now, thanks to a steady diet of martial arts, scientific
inquiry, and heavy compound movements, he's no longer weak. His scientific
bent, Zen-like demeanor, and efficient but intense methods have made him one
of New York's most sought-after personal trainers.
 When
not helping clients cultivate their own inner 6-packs, Eugene can be found
arm barring opponents at Renzo Gracie's Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Academy or
sailing through the air on his snowboard. Read Eugene's semi-weekly musings
on exercise, fitness, and fat loss
at his blog
Eugene is Mike's co-author of The Black Book of Secrets. You can purchase
it by clicking
here.
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