***Another oldie but a goodie! This got a lot of conversations going the first time around and is still a good one!
You might be plugging along on your plan to get ripped with P90X or Insanity, but the results sure seem slow. You’re pushing play every day. You have changed what you eat… “I thought more would be happening!” Here are 5 things that might be slowing your success without you even thinking about it!
1.) Your kids’ food!
If you are home during the summer, or work at home all year, you know that this can be a problem. Most of our parents reinforced this notion of “never waste food!” It is a great thing to learn growing up — you only should take what yon can eat, and you should eat what you take. But as adults and parents, it can be hard to not shake that idea when we see our kids’ food left over. You finish a little bit of this, a bite or two of that, and before you know it you’ve added 100 – 200 extra calories to your day. Over week that really adds up! And if you aren’t always perfect with your tracking other places, you could be spinning your tires. Be the parent and make you kids finish what they take! Don’t clean up their plate for them!
2.) Fruit
Fruit is good for you! It’s healthy! It’s not like I’m eating candy. Yes, you are not eating candy, but if you don’t track your fruit intake… you might as well be. Fruit is sweet. That’s because it has sugar, more specifically fructose. A lot of people see it as a free food, but they are wrong. Not only can you easily rack up 300+ calories with extra fruit, but almost all the calories will be carbs from sugar. Natural sugars are better than processed ones, but if you are on the Fat Shredder plan that much fruit will sink your carb budget and will throw a wrench in your fat loss. When I was on my 1900 calorie diet, my fruit intake was normally only an apple a day. It wasn’t until I was on my maintenance diet that I could add in a larger variety of fruit.
3.) Fat Free Food
The food industry has made a killing with fat free foods. Sure these foods are fat free, and we know fat is the most calorically dense macronutrient, but how do these foods still taste good? We wouldn’t buy them if they tasted bad, so manufacturers maintain the taste and texture these products by adding loads of artificial ingredients and often a lot of sugar. Dietary fat doesn’t make you fat, eating too much makes you fat! Fat free foods still have calories and often undesirable calories from sugar.
4.) Beverages
Y’all should know this by now. Don’t drink your calories! Unless you are trying to build mass and need to hit a really large daily calorie target, stick to water. Again a lot of drinks like to hide behind our old notions of health. Orange juice, cranberry juice, and milk all have a lot of calories. And again, sugar is a main component of these drinks! An 8 oz glass of OJ (and that is a small glass) is around 110 calories with 24 grams of sugar! Skim milk even has 12 grams of sugar per cup. That’s not good for losing fat! Stick to water!!!
5.) Not Eating Enough
This is the flip side of the coin, make sure you get enough to eat. If you are running too large of deficit you won’t be giving your body what it needs to refuel and rebuild the muscle that beat up during your workouts. Muscle growth happens during rest, not exercise. Fuel your body so it can repair your muscles. Proper nutrition will also help your energy level stay as high as possible throughout the day.
I hope you know that all of these won’t be an issue at all if you are tracking your nutrition. If you are logging everything you eat, you know that your calories go pretty quickly if you have a glass of juice at breakfast. You know that the 4 tablespoons of Fat Free Ranch still have 100 calories and 22g of carbs! Stick to your plan and remember that the little things all add up. They might not be that big of a deal by themselves, but they almost always get out of hand!
Need a coach?
My email: coachwayne@teamripped.com
IG: @wayne_wyatt
