5 Mistakes You Are Making That May be Affecting Your Health & Fitness Journey
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Health and fitness mistakes you may be making without even knowing it.
When it comes to your health and fitness journey, there could be a few mistakes you are making that could be affecting your results. Some of these mistakes you might not even be aware of.
There’s always those endless quick fixes of “eat this and you’ll lose 10 pounds this week”, or “Take this pill for amazing results”, and one of my favorites, “Wrap yourself in this and you’ll sweat off the extra fat!” This, right here, is the start to some of the health and fitness mistakes you may be making on your journey. I’m also going to tell you, it’s a waste of money.
These infomercials and quick fixes are endless and every week there is a new trend hitting the TV and magazines, AND now social media, and we’re all too quick to jump on that bandwagon. I’m here to tell you, it’s all noise!
How do I know this? Let’s just say I know a “friend” who has fallen victim a lot of it, and in the long run, she realized it caused more harm than good. If you haven’t figured it out yet, that “friend” is ME. It wasn’t until I shut the noise out and started listening to my own body that I discovered my true optimal health.
So, let’s break down the 5 mistakes affecting your health & fitness journey:
5 Health and Fitness Mistakes you are making that may be affecting your results
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Counting EVERY Single Calorie
This does NOT work! I can tell you that first hand. I know there are many people out there that will argue with me but, hear me out for a second here.
I used to count calories and weigh and measure my food and it made me stress even more about what I was eating an how much I put in my mouth. Heaven help me if I went over on something. It became an obsession that lead to an unhealthy relationship with food.
Why doesn’t it work?
I became obsessed and would then punish myself if I didn’t hit my macros or calories for the day. That stress just made me feel like I was failing at the whole “DIET” thing altogether. It created such a negative mindset for me and I’d be judging myself and my success based on whether or not I “followed” the numbers. THIS was NOT healthy for me one bit! It lead to years of frustration and yo-yo dieting.
I learned that listening to the needs of my body mattered more. Calories don’t tell the whole picture. We need to look at things like hormones, hunger, energy, and cravings, and our mindset. What we eat and how often we eat matters more than total caloric value. QUALITY -VS- QUANTITY!
I learned a hard lesson with calorie counting…FOR REAL, let’s just call it what it is CALORIE RESTRICTING! This lead to a little thing we call BINGE EATING.
Let’s move on to the next common mistake…HORMONES
2. Hormones
If you are constantly restricting and changing up your calorie count, you are messing with your hormones. Yes, calories matter ( a little) in a sense BUT, hormones matter more. You might just be pushing your hormones to the limit.
Our bodies have an intricately designed system of hormones that send messages all day long to our liver, thyroid, pituitary, adrenal glands and more. The things we eat, how we exercise, our level of stress, and the quality of our sleep, dictate these messages.
Two major hormones in all this are cortisol and insulin. When we have high levels of stress, cortisol spikes, insulin is released to bring cortisol back down. If these two hormones are in constant work mode, this is where the problem lies. This is where we can gain fat, experience fatigue, ravenous hunger, and insatiable cravings…BINGE EATING, once again can sneak into this equation.
So, yes what we eat in a day matters, but what I want you to understand is they matter because of the messages they send to our hormones and in turn our body. We have to learn to use food to send a clear message of balance; there is no caloric total number that can define this. QUALITY VS QUANTITY!
3. Hours and Hours of Exercise are NOT COOL!
I cannot begin to stress how important it is that you know how overexercising can cause more harm than good. First off, you cannot and never will out workout a bad diet. Again, QUALITY VS QUANTITY!
Again, we have hormones involves if you are putting too much stress on your body by exercising your brains out. Adrenaline & nor-adrenaline and when they are overused and tapped out, this can cause things like adrenal fatigue and can lead to more things like a weakened immune system, thyroid issues and then, of course, not seeing the results you’d like to see on your health and fitness journey.
While exercise is great for you, you have to listen to your body and know when too much of a good thing is just too much
Over time, I realized that the quality of the workout is what matters most, not the amount of time I put in. I can get in a good 30-45 minutes of weights and circuit training and feel good and know that I have worked every muscle in my body. This kind of workout can actually increase fat burning without stressing my body and hormones.
4. Skipping out on Sleep and Stressing Out
Again, lack of sleep can stress your hormones causing adrenal and thyroid issues. While sleep and stress have no calories, they have a huge impact on our hormones, and therefore, our results. STRESS can have a huge impact on your weight and fat storage…especially the belly fat!
Think about when you’re tired or stressed or tired. Do you feel agitated? Well, so is your body and your insides, therefore the hormonal message is ‘increase cortisol’ due to stress and we are now faced with hormonal imbalance. This leads to fat gain, water retention, and that bloated feeling. Cravings can spike as well as hunger, so the impact on this is multifaceted. STRESS EATING!!
I suggest focusing on your stress levels and working on getting some quality sleep.
5. You’re not balancing YOUR Nutrition Properly
Sometimes, you may feel like you are doing everything right but you just aren’t seeing any results. So are you really balancing your nutrition properly? By that I mean, are you eating what works for YOU not everyone else or what the mainstream media is telling you to eat these days? Are you eating according to your goals? Are you listening to your body?
I’ll say this over and over again, QUALITY over QUANTITY!! Are there certain things that you may need to eat more of or other things you may have to eat a little less of in order to see results? What works for one may not work for the other and we need to realize that.
Maybe balancing your nutrition is NOT always about the foods you eat but more about your relationship with the food! BE sure you have things balanced out as far as the type of foods you eat along with your relationship with the food. This will be a huge factor when it comes to mistakes you may be making when it comes to your health and fitness journey.
Final Thoughts:
When it comes to health and fitness mistakes, there are many out there yet you should not stress like crazy over them and worry about whether or not you are doing it all wrong. At the end of the day, I can tell you that stressing over it all will get you nowhere.
Focus on what IS working for you and make sure you have a healthy relationship with the foods you are eating, be sure you are getting in exercise a few times a week and getting enough sleep and last but not least, know whether or not you have something outside of the whole food and fitness part of it all (HORMONES). Always revisit the list above and make sure things are in check in all the areas…ESPECIALLY the hormones!!
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