What habits are keeping you from your goals?

We all have habits that contribute to weight gain and stifle weight loss. Here are 10 of the biggest ones, how many of them do you suffer from?

  

1) Eating mindlessly. Eating while multitasking or hurrying through a meal because of little time doesn't give our brains a chance to register that we have eaten anything, leaving us with either too large of a portion size or little satisfaction that leaves us susceptible to cravings

  

2) Fast Food. Wether its driving through because you are too busy or too tired to cook fast food is the fastest way to pack on the pounds and destroy your weight loss attempts.

  

3) Eating for pleasure. Going to lunch everyday with friends or eating for any other reason than pure hunger adds extra calories fast and builds a habit that is hard to break making the number on the scale stand still.

  

4) Big portions of healthy food. Most of us think on some level that if it is healthy it is ok to eat a lot of. Even healthy food gets stored when we eat too much of it. Not only that but bigger portions only enhances our tolerance of big portions meaning we need bigger portions to stay satisfied... see the trend?

  

5) Thinking exercise will burn off a splurge. It takes an hour of intense cardio for the average person to burn 500 calories. Some restaurant salads have 1500 calories in them. That means to burn off that one meal you would have to do 3 hours of intense cardio.

  

6) Alcohol. Sure alcohol adds extra calories but it also is absorbed into the blood as a simple sugar meaning that your meal that you have with or after your drinks get stored as fat.

  

7) Bulk Buying. The more we have the more we let ourselves enjoy. Shop on a budget (even if you do not need to) and get just enough for the week to reduce snacking and portion sizes.

 

8) Being a "garbage disposal" The philosophy of waste no want not tends to carry over into our eating habits. Finishing what our kids don't eat is an easy way to add lots of calories that we seldom count.

  

9) TV snacking. When we do this portions go out the window and our brains seldom register that we have eaten anything leaving us unsatisfied and with a larger waistline.

  

10) Sweets after a meal. Having a sweet treat after a meal is a nasty habit that is hard to break. Often once we start we don't register that we are full until we have that sweet fix and because dessert is a sugar at the end of the day it typically is stored every time.

  

So what habits do you fall into? This week pick a habit that you think has the biggest effect on your weight and detox from it for a week. It will take some discipline and motivation but your weight loss will go smoothly if you make the effort.