iTrainer Blog - Fitness Advice, Personal Training, Weight Loss, MP3 Fitness - The MP3 Personal Trainer on Your iPod - 7 Big Weightloss No-No's

What are some of the least effective steps people take when they try to turn their life around? What are some of the things that seem helpful but may actually be harmful to your health and to your efforts to improve it? Just as with the last list, this one will consist of an initial post with the topics and some general information about each, and then follow up posts with more information on each item. So without further ado, here’s the list of things not to do when you’re trying to lose weight, get in shape and be healthy.

1. Fad Diets - You’ve heard of them, you might have even tried them. The diet with nothing but fruit, the diet with nothing but bacon, the Atkins diet, the North Beach diet, the diet with nothing but shrimp or even the diet where you fast for three days to detoxify. All of these are fad diets. They might show some initial weightloss but are difficult to maintain and, in some cases, bad for your health. You’re much better off living a better lifestyle with healthy eating habits than you are trying one of these fad diets.

2. Do No Exersise - This is particularly bad among women. The belief here is that weightloss and health is something that is directly related to eating habits and nothing else. Exercise and physical activity is seen as unnecessary, which is why you often see women engaging in some diet but seeing little in the way of results. Yes, physical activity is absolutely necessary if you want to be healthy and lose weight.

3. Do No Research - And before the men get too cocky, here’s the common failing of most men. Rather than do research, they simply do what they think is right, what their friend Bob the mechanic thinks is right, what they remember from that show they saw on the Discovery Channel two years ago and what they think that girl they dated two years ago did to lose weight. Many men will do absolutely no research before engaging in life changing projects.

4. Cardio Too Soon - While cardio is a vital part of any healthy life, try it too soon, when you’re still overweight and out of shape, and you’ll find yourself out of breath, demoralized and discouraged. Even worse, you could actually damage your health by pushing cardio too fast and too hard before you’re ready for it. Take it easy. It took you years to get your body into the doughy shape it’s in now and it will take some time to fix that damage. So start out slow and work your way up.

5. Weight training too hard - This is another one for the guys. We tend to work out too hard when we first get to the gym, especially when it comes to weights. It’s as though we think the whole world is judging us and laughing at the fact that we can’t bench press more than 50lbs. So we try too hard and we lift too much and two days later we’re in the most intense pain of our lives. And sometimes, this makes us never come back to the gym. Start out slow and with a low weight, then work your way up.

6. Treat little setback as complete failures - This one is common to both men and women and it’s one I wrestled with when I first started recovering from my health meltdown. It’s the tendency to blow up any little setback into a major failure and then self destruct. You wake up in the morning and the scale tells you something you don’t want to hear, so you get frustrated and spend the whole day binging on chocolate. You try to walk up two flights of stairs but are out of breath by the second one, so you get demoralized and stop walking altogether. You give in to temptation and eat a donut in the morning and then you beat yourself up and binge on steak and cheesecake in the evening. We tend to think that one small failure means all our efforts mean nothing. Even worse, we use that one small setback as an excuse to leap headlong into failure. After all, if we already had one little failure, then the rest of the day’s worth of major failures doesn’t count, right? Wrong. It all counts. Stop using your little failures as justifications for bigger ones. So you made a mistake, so what? It’s not the end of the world.

7. Do it yourself, with no support - Human beings are social creatures. What we do and how we act depends in large part on the people around us. Our eating habits and physical activities are reflections of our upbringing, family, social circle and professional life. A change of health and fitness involves changing all of these things. Therefore, it’s much easier to do if you don’t try to do it alone. Get your family engaged in your project, get your friends involved. At the very least, keep people informed so they know what you’re trying to do and why. You’ll find that your family and friends can be very supportive of your efforts to live a healthier life and you’ll find that your health can greatly benefit from their support.