“It’s not me it’s you!” or “is it me?”

There are so many factors that play into the never ending quest to get healthy or loose the weight.  Especially with the New year approaching so many of us are hoping on board to make this “the year” to change.

Here are a few “food for thoughts” to help keep you on the correct path be get you the success you want.

1. You and partaking in mindless eating

Humans have evolved with survival instincts and this survival has one main food instinct which says ‘see food, eat food.’  You can try this experiment yourself. In your working space, fill a bowl up with chocolates and keep it someplace where people often visit, ideally by the printer or the water dispenser.

Now check the same bowl towards the end of the day. There is a good chance that there would be little to no chocolates in there.

Then, ask your co-workers casually what have they eaten all day. Almost nobody will mention chocolates on that list.

Not that they want to lie to you, their brain simply does not register the food they eat subconsciously. The same translates to portion sizes and eating while not paying attention.

Look at the computer screen or TV while eating and you might as well finish off an entire pizza, as your brain does not respond to the fullness signal as your attention is elsewhere.

2. Under-reporting & over-estimating

People are terrible at reporting their food intakes and even worse at estimating their energy expenditure.  Studies show that people under-reported food intake by 47% and over-reported energy expenditure by 51%.

Considering that you eat as per the normal food guidelines and do around an hour of activity per day, your intake would come to around 2200 kcals and expenditure would be 400 kcals.

But as per the study, the same example above meant people reported that they ate around 1200 kcals and had an expenditure of around 800 kcals.
That is a huge margin of error and now you can see where you might be going wrong too.

3. Cheat days don’t count

This is usually the norm that even though you may be eating well or mindfully during the week, every weekend ends up being a deserved cheat day.

Cheat days don’t count

Firstly, if you are dieting in the first place and you are above the normal range of body fat%, i.e. 10 to 15%, nothing about your cheat day is ‘deserved’.
And more often than not, these unaccounted cheat days are a shit ton of calories down your throat that needs to be stored somewhere. They are not going to magically disappear into thin air.

So, the next time you may be struggling to figure out the reason you re not succeeding always remember this: “It may be you!“