Seven bad habits that make you gain weight: know them and avoid them

If you think you follow a healthy diet to lose weight but still the numbers on the scale do not move (or move up!) Maybe it’s because you have some bad habits that make you fat. You may not be aware of them, or even see them as something positive but in reality they are not.

Many times, due to lack of information or excess of information (what we now call “infoxication”), we acquire bad habits that can take us a long-term bill. We present some of the most common, so you identify them and you can eliminate them from your day to day.

You skip meals believing bad habits that this will make you lose weight

Even though you are hungry, you prefer to skip meals to lose weight quickly: one of the biggest mistakes we make when we go on a diet. We believe that we have to eat less, when really what we have to do is eat better. If you are hungry (physical hunger, not emotional hunger) , eat food: physical or physiological hunger is a sign of your body, so do not ignore it.

You do not have to eat five meals a day, although this will help you to get less hungry to the main meals and to order your diet. The basic thing is that, regardless of the number of meals you eat, you eat food and not products : you will save undesirable fats and added sugars.

You make a detox bad habits diet based on smoothies

Spending a week based on juices or smoothies only makes you lose weight, of course: you are ingesting an amount well below the calories you need daily and, in addition, in liquid form, with which you go to the bathroom much more than habitual. The problem is that what you will be losing to a greater extent will be liquid, not greasy , and that you run the risk of not taking enough nutrients during those days.

To this we can add the rebound effect of re-introducing into your diet the usual foods after having spent X days only on the basis of juices. You do not need a detox diet: to detoxify you already have your kidneys and your liver that, if they work correctly (which is usually the usual) already work for it.

A thousand hours of cardio in the gym

You get to the gym and you pass the tape to the bicycle, from there to the elliptical and, to top it off, a spinning class . All cardio, not a minute of anaerobic exercise. During the first weeks this may work well for you, but with the passing of days you realize that you need a lot more effort to keep losing weight.

And is that aerobic exercise causes adaptations in our body: in short, the more we practice it, our body becomes more efficient, which means that little by little spend less energy to perform the same job . What can we do about this? Include anaerobic exercise sessions (strength work with weights or with our own body weight) and try interval training .

You do not sleep or rest well

One of the three pillars of fitness , along with training and diet, is rest . And it is not just about sleeping, but also resting so that our body can continue to function correctly the next day.

Sleeping badly or sleeping less than we need can cause changes in our intestinal flora and favors the intake of low quality food. In addition, sleep and diet are fed back : a healthy diet results in a better night’s rest. Do not underestimate the power of sleep!

Your snacks are ultra-processed food instead of food

You get hungry in the middle of the morning or in the middle of the afternoon and what do you drink? It is very possible that you take a hand of cereal bars, rice pancakes, sugary sodas or, in the worst case, jelly beans or salty snacks to kill the worm. This type of ultra processed products not only do not take away the sensation of hunger , but they tend to be loaded with added sugars and palm oil.

Choose to eat food instead of products , also when it comes to chopping something. A piece of fruit (an apple or a banana is perfectly carried in the bag and is easy to eat in front of the computer), a bag of nuts (not fried or salted!) Or a smoothie that you prepare yourself ( shake and no juice : to carry the whole fruit) are good healthy options to take care of our food and not add extra kilos.

You take care of your diet during the week, but you spend with alcohol on the weekend

In general, we tend to underestimate the calories we consume through beverages, whether they are sugary sodas or alcoholic beverages. There are many people who are able to take a healthy bad habits diet from Monday to Friday but that are out of date in an incredible way on the weekend (often as a “prize”) based on fast food and, above all, alcohol.

We must bear in mind that alcohol are empty calories of nutrients and that, in addition, they make a great caloric contribution (7 kilocalories per gram, more than proteins and carbohydrates) without providing satiety. Eliminating alcohol is one of the first steps when it comes to losing weight .

You think spending an hour in the gym is enough

Just as we underestimate the calories we eat, we tend to overestimate the calories we spend in our training . We rely too much on quantifying wristbands or calorie counters on cardio machines , which are usually not too accurate. And, worst of all: we believe that by spending time in the gym every day we can spend the rest of the day without hardly moving.

In addition to integrating training into our day-to-day activities, we must also move more in our daily lives. Solving a bad habits diet with exercise is very difficult: we are very fast ingesting calories and it requires much more effort to get rid of them. To lead an active life, moving as much as possible (walking, climbing stairs, changing the car on the bicycle, playing with our children, cousins ​​or nephews, spending less time in front of the television or the computer), along with a healthy diet is the best solution to get rid of those extra kilos.