With Spring officially here on Friday more people are thinking about getting fit and losing weight. To help you get the best returns on the energy you invest this Spring here are the top 5 fitness pitfalls to avoid.
Top 5 Spring Fitness Pitfalls That Are Holding You Back
1. Trusting your Fitbit: my Fitbit tells me that I can earn a whole large pizza in just 45 minutes of poorly played pickleball, but a calculator says, “not even close.” Smart watches and activity trackers are great for keeping track of your step count, and for getting on your nerves with incessant notifications, but they cater to wishful thinking for calories burned from activity. A better strategy is to simply have a daily limit on your intake, and to disconnect your activity tracker from whatever app you use to track food.
2. Focusing on healthy fats: for decades, all fats were demonized, but the pendulum has swung all the way to the other side – carbs are the villain and we’re told that “healthy fats” will help us lose weight and burn more fat. While it’s true that replacing the trans fats and some of the saturated fat in your diet with unsaturated fat will likely improve your lab work, it is not true that adding unsaturated fat on top of your existing diet will be good for you.
Saturated and unsaturated fats still have 225% more calories (per gram) than either protein or carbohydrates. In short, reduce your overall fat intake because this will help reduce your calorie intake more than anything else, and then focus on swapping some of the remaining fat in your diet with healthier fat.
3. Eating too often is a huge spring fitness pitfall: one of the most insidious nutrition myths is that we need to eat small, frequent meals to boost our metabolism and avoid overeating. The facts say otherwise. The more often you eat the more total calories you eat. This is a big pitfall for your spring fitness goals.
For example, we’re all told that skipping breakfast (and the calories it contains) will somehow add calories to our day, and therefore inches to our waistline. The opposite is true. Meaning if you take a group of women who do not eat breakfast, and randomize them to either add breakfast (8:30am or earlier) or not add it, the ladies who add breakfast eat more food and gain weight due to the increased calorie intake.
The addition of breakfast did not decrease how much they ate at any other meal, nor did it lead to increased movement. There was also no change in hunger or fullness. More on this here.
4. Not tracking your food: we all know weight loss is calories in vs calories out, but it’s easier said than done. A powerful strategy is to increase your “calorie awareness” by logging your food using an app like My Fitness Pal. Taking the time to look up what you are eating, think about the portion size, etc is both a pain in the ass and of irreplaceable value… kind of like most important things.
Investing 4 weeks in consistent tracking can go a long way to helping boost your calorie awareness. (As of this writing the so-called AI photo food logging programs don’t work very well, but, maybe, if we can double the amount of electricity produced for data centers these apps can get a lot better.)
5. Not using a calendar is another spring fitness pitfall: when people can workout whenever they just drop the first 3 letters and workout never. Scheduling your workouts – day, time and location – nearly triples follow through. At a big box gym the top 10% of members workout once-a-month. However, at True 180, voted best fitness gym in Charlotte, our top 10% workout 13 times a month and we have fewer hours, and less flexibility. In short, schedule your workouts. Having consistent days and times (to the best of your ability) helps build routine and leaves less room for excuse making.