Geschatte leestijd: 8 minutenThe road to hell, just like a well thought out diet, is paved with good intentions. Whether you’re trying to lose weight, gain weight, or maintain weight, there are pitfalls around every corner that can sabotage your best intentions.
Even though we see ourselves as well-informed and well-read, we all make mistakes when it comes to our nutrition.
For bodybuilders and fitness enthusiasts, a diet is simply a tool used to support a personal body goal. For us, a diet is a way of life.
Dieting isn’t always a bad thing, but it can go completely wrong when you’re not consistent, conscious, and focused during your sporting years. We all make mistakes and give in to the wrong temptations at times.
It’s what you do afterwards that’s important.
There are probably millions of ways to sabotage a diet, but I’ve chosen to keep this fairly short and concentrate this article on the ten most common diet mistakes you encounter in sports.
1. Relying too much on fat burners
You often see fat burners (thermogenics or fat burners) being used as a kind of security blanket while making poor dietary choices.
Have you ever seen someone gulp down a bunch of fat burners before having a big meal? Apparently, these people think the fat burners will take care of the food. Not true! If you don’t first get your own diet in order, supplements will never work. They are not designed for that. Fat burners are developed to help someone who is doing everything else right to burn fat better.
Do yourself a favor and save those fat burners until you’re ready to make the effort and have the discipline to address your food intake. Your diet shouldn’t control you. If you can do this, you’ll be amazed at how well fat burners can help you get closer to your goal.
2. Following someone else’s diet
You’re probably smart and experienced enough to know that following the diet of a professional bodybuilder probably won’t work. Anyone with normal genetics who doesn’t inject and swallow themselves full will definitely get fat by following a professional bodybuilder’s diet, and that’s not the ‘bulk’ most people want to achieve.
A diet should always be tailored to your body to work. You need to consider your goals, your body type, your metabolism, and your activity level. It takes some experimentation but is definitely worth trying.
The best secret is to keep track of what you eat and how your body responds to it. You need to write down how your body handles the distribution of macronutrients (fat, protein, and carbohydrates), the frequency of your meals, your training volume (aerobic and anaerobic), and how quickly you recover after exercising.
You can then see if you’re doing well or not and if your plans need adjustment. You also definitely don’t want to repeat the mistakes you’re making now in the future.
3. Not getting enough water
How much water have you drunk today? If you can’t answer this question, it probably wasn’t nearly enough.
Your body is made up of a large percentage of water, and during hard training, you lose about a sixth per day. A serious athlete replaces that amount in about a week.
For an athlete, water is important to keep the body cells hydrated, which improves muscle endurance and therefore better performance. Water also helps in the digestive process and helps your body get rid of waste. Water also helps regulate your body temperature.
How much should you drink? There’s a lot of debate about this, but there are a few general rules you can follow. You should drink at least two liters of water on a non-training day, four liters on training days. This depends on your size, so see how you can adjust this to your body!
Oh yes, by water, I mean WATER! Tea, coffee, soda, and sports drinks don’t count. Drinks with caffeine should actually be accompanied by extra water because they dehydrate!
4. Irregular eating
Do you want to know a fantastic way to quickly gain fat? Just wait until you’re hungry enough to eat. There are many people who, in order to lose weight, wait as long as possible between meals to reduce their calorie intake. Big mistake! They will quickly start to gorge when their hormones go crazy when they see food.
You should eat every three and a half hours from now until the end of time (except when you’re sleeping, of course). This habit ensures that your insulin levels remain constant, you have fewer cravings, you absorb nutrients better, and your energy levels stay high.
It’s really important to eat throughout the day and not skip meals. If you do this right, your metabolism will increase while you rest, which helps you burn fat more efficiently. The reason why ‘waiting until you’re hungry’ doesn’t work is that your body becomes very efficient at storing fat due to those long waiting times – starvation.
If you have trouble eating five or six meals, you can take smaller meals that you eat more often and use good meal replacements.
5. Abusing cheat meals
Cheat meals, or meals with food that you normally shouldn’t eat in your diet, can be good for your body and mind. However, many people think that if one meal is good, then more cheat meals are better for you. Not true! And they actually know that too…
By taking multiple cheat meals during the week, your insulin production is raised too often, causing you to store more fat. It’s only desirable to raise your insulin level right after your workout when you eat protein to build muscle mass.
Cheat meals are good, but keep yourself in check, okay?
6. Believing everything you read on a nutrition label
The marketers of food companies have adapted well to the system… Have you ever wondered how cooking spray cans can be fat-free when they only contain oil? One word: serving size. According to the law, a food can be sold as fat-free when the recommended serving size contains less than half a gram of fat. So what do the marketers do? They reduce the recommended serving size to ridiculous amounts!
Another way is the total weight. Fat can be shown as a percentage of total weight. What often happens is that meat is made wet to increase volume, and since water contains no calories, the percentage of fat in a serving size decreases, even though the total fat content has not changed!
Marketers are incredibly smart, and you shouldn’t blindly believe everything they put on a label.
7. Making bad food choices in restaurants
If you have the choice between a salad or a hamburger with fries at a fast-food restaurant, which one do you think is the healthiest? The hamburger with fries? Wrong!
While it’s true that a salad is a better choice than a hamburger with fries, the difference is much smaller than you might think. For example, many salads contain hidden fat and more calories than you think.
A salad with tuna, for example, can contain up to a thousand calories if the tuna is in mayonnaise! Topping it with bacon, cheese, or crispy noodles can add a few hundred extra calories. And what about salad dressing? Fat and calories also lurk in this, believe it or not.
You’re better off eating a hamburger with fries every once in a while than eating a salad every day.
But then again, it’s still better to make the right choice.
8. Eating when you’re really thirsty
People often mistake thirst for hunger. When they’re thirsty, they start eating. And when they’re eating, they drink a sip of water. Not only does this cause you to eat more, but it can also mess up your thirst mechanism. The solution? Drink enough water, so you don’t mistake thirst for hunger.
9. Not planning
Planning is the key to success. If you don’t plan, your diet is doomed to fail. You’ll start the day full of good intentions, but as the day progresses, you’ll get busier and busier, and before you know it, you’re eating a pizza. Or, even worse, you’re at a party and you can’t resist the chocolate cake.
The solution? Plan your meals in advance. Write down what you’re going to eat and stick to it. If you know you’re going to a party, eat before you go so you’re not tempted by the food there.
10. Lack of variety
Absolutely no discussion about diets is complete without talking about insulin and carbohydrates. Carbohydrates and insulin in our sport are surrounded by more mystique than anything else.
Even if you don’t learn anything else from this piece, remember at least that the primary function of insulin is to store food in your body, not to clear glucose (blood sugar). Yes, partial clearance of glucose is a result of insulin secretion, but by understanding insulin’s role as a storage mechanism, you can begin to understand the truth behind this mystical hormone and apply that understanding better for fat loss and mass gain.
Just a little technical piece…
Previously, everyone was told that simple carbohydrates (sugars) were bad for you and complex carbohydrates were good. However, that was rather simplistic. Also, very little was said about the role of insulin and its muscle-building capacities. Now it’s particularly relevant to know more about the timing of your carbohydrate intake, the amounts you eat, and insulin’s response to the types of carbohydrates you eat.
Additionally, you should also understand that, unlike proteins, vitamins, minerals, and essential fats used for growth and repair, carbohydrates are mainly used as short-term fuel. The basic fuel for sports is ATP (adenosine triphosphate), and your body makes ATP much easier from carbohydrates than it ever can from fat.
You can train your body to use energy from fat once you’ve depleted your glycogen reserves, but in terms of performance, carbohydrates are the undisputed winner. On the other hand, poor knowledge of carbohydrates can do a lot of damage to your body.
Although it’s made easier for you to know which carbohydrates enter your blood quickly by the Glycemic Index (GI), research has shown that some foods that score well on this index still cause explosive insulin secretion. Additionally, the GI only shows the values of individual foods and not food combinations, which meals usually are.
Furthermore, the GI is based on portions of 50 grams, which is usually not the way food is eaten.
The GI has been the forerunner of the Insulin Index (II), which is a measure of insulin’s direct response to food. This makes the II better suited for determining the insulin response to meals.
For example, suppose you eat whole grain bread. That scores low on the GI, but how do you think your body reacts when you eat five or six slices at every meal? So, it’s also about the total amount of carbohydrates you eat.
When you use the GI and II together in planning your meals, you can much better control insulin secretion. However, the amount of carbohydrates you eat per day still depends on your individual needs; there are no fixed rules for that. You can only find out by keeping a food diary and seeing what works best for you.
A few things to remember (easier than dry technical explanation…):
- Diets that present foods in ratios like 40-30-30 or 30-30-40 are only relevant when considering total calorie intake.
- Repeated intake of too many carbohydrates leads to many insulin spikes, which negatively affects insulin sensitivity and can lead to insulin resistance (and later a big butt).
- Insulin resistance leads to higher internal insulin production when carbohydrates are eaten, making fat burning almost impossible.
- Carbohydrate intake during weight loss will be between 20% and 30% if you still want to perform. If you’re willing to sacrifice performance to lose more fat, it can fall below these percentages.
- Carbohydrate intake during weight gain is between 40% and 50% of daily food intake (generally).
- Untreated carbohydrates like fresh vegetables, fruits, oatmeal, whole grains, and sweet potatoes are tops for health and long-term insulin control.
- Treated carbohydrates like white flour, candy, sodas, and sweetened fruit drinks make your insulin levels skyrocket.
- As always, you need to adapt all these rules to your unique situation.
In conclusion: carbohydrates are tricky. Eat them wisely and at the right times based on your goals.
Of course, there are many more ways to screw up your diet, but ten is a nice round number. You can figure out the rest yourself when you use your common sense!
