Common eating mistakes!

As I was preparing my ultra healthy meal last night- one benefit of working with a nutritionist- I thought about what  mistakes people commonly make that sabotage their diets. Here are a few we came up with:

• Starving yourself and then overeating later due to the deprivation and extreme hunger. This is a totally self defeating policy and is the cause of the Yo Yo dieting complex so often discussed. I have done it and know it doesn't work so best avoid it.
• Eating a really low fat diet but to compensate for this reduction in fat replacing it with higher sugar foods. Generally people do not do this deliberately or consciously. Sometimes this replacement is not done by you, but by food manufacturers. If you want to know what I mean take a look at food labels for low fat foods; you will see that top of the additives list is a high sugar, glucose or fructose component. This is to give us a taste we like as we can become addicted to the taste of highly sugared and fatty foods that are so readily available nowadays. The best thing is to eat fresh, natural foods rather than manufactured foods and the sweet cravings will diminish in time.
• Any extreme "meal replacement diet" which means you can not live a real life - I have never been a fan of the "eat our food shake or packet soup" diets. It just means that after you finish that diet and go back to your normal life, any underlying issues remain and you go straight back to bad food plans. The better diet plan is one that helps you to change behaviour and improve your lifestyle as you lose weight. It then becomes part of your real life and is sustainable.
• A diet that cuts out any major food groups or focuses only on one major food group to the exclusion of others - i.e. no fat or no carbohydrates.  It is simply not sustainable due to the lack of variety and can make eating out or grabbing food on the go very difficult indeed. There is also a reason why your body needs a balanced diet composed of all the main food groups- its processes need a variety of nutrients in order for it to work to its full effect. It is not surprising that Dr Robert Atkins founder of the low carb diet fad suffered from a heart attack, congestive heart failure and hypertension!

There is a lot to be said for simply eating a healthy balanced diet, with a little bit of everything. Avoid adding sugar and salt to your food, keep yourself hydrated and keep the quantity of food you eat proportionate to your needs.