Are You Making These 3 Diet Mistakes?

If you have tried one weight loss program after another without ever being successful for long, you are probably making some big diet mistakes. You can be given the best diet plan in the world, but it won't work if your attitude is wrong.

The following 3 major diet mistakes are responsible for hundreds or thousands of people going off plan and failing to achieve the weight loss that they deserve. Take the time to consider what effect they may be having on you.

1. Expecting Perfection

Nobody is perfect. We have all heard that statement countless times, but many of us still find it hard to apply it to ourselves and our diets. We take an all-or-nothing approach, thinking we have to stick to our diet plan 100% of the time, perfectly, or there's no point following it at all.

This puts huge pressure on us and makes us feel terrible if we slip up. It also means that after a slip-up we are likely to think, "I've messed up yet another diet, I just can't do this," or "This diet doesn't work," and abandon it. In short, perfection-related diet mistakes mean that we will use the smallest slip-up as an excuse for a massive binge.

This problem is worst for dieters who like to follow very restricted plans where no treats are allowed. Inevitably, life gets in the way and instead of planning how to cope with the challenge of a party or a wedding, they try to eat nothing all day and then cave in, abandoning the diet completely.

Your weight loss does not have to be a straight downward line. It's OK to have occasional diet mistakes, slips and gains along the way, as long as the overall trend is downward. And it's much better in the long term to lose weight slowly. It's much more likely to stay off that way.

2. The Band-Aid Attitude To Dieting

Many dieters see their weight loss plan as a temporary fix that they will use for a short time and then abandon as soon as they have reached their target weight. We call this the band-aid approach to dieting, and it's the second of our major diet mistakes.

People who see a diet as a temporary measure will often pick very restricted eating plans and then go back to their old eating habits after the diet ends. If you do that, all of the weight will go back on, in 99% of cases.

Unless you only have a few pounds to lose, it is much better to pick an eating plan that gives you flexibility. You need something that you can follow for weeks, months or even years. In fact, you need something that will allow you to live your life.

Instead of using a band-aid, you need a diet that will become like a new skin: a permanent way of eating that will enable to maintain your goal weight after you achieve it.

3. The Wrong Goals

That leads us to the third of our big diet mistakes: setting the wrong goals. In  anything that we do, goals should be clear, set out in steps and achievable. In terms of weight loss, this means that as well as having an idea of your ideal weight or clothes size, you should also set smaller goals along the way, and reward yourself for each one achieved (but not with food!).

Be flexible about your final goal: as you approach it, you may want to change it. That's OK. If you avoid these diet mistakes and have the right attitude toward dieting, you will be able to achieve a weight that you are happy with - and that is much more important than numbers.