Common Mistakes That Can Ruin Your Diet Plan

By Jonathan Uphoff

Choosing healthy and nutritious foods for your diet is just half the battle. On the surface, it may seem like you are well on your way to living a healthier lifestyle. While I applaud you for making the correct choices, mistakes such as ignoring serving sizes and being misguided by certain labels can ultimately destroy your diet. Puzzled? Take a deep breath and relax as I will clear the confusion and help guide you to establish a successful diet.

The most common mistake I encounter with my clients is that they are unaware of the importance of serving sizes. What is a serving size you ask? Serving sizes are the recommended amount for a particular food in a single serving. They are found on the nutrition labels of every product you buy and inform you of the nutritional values of that particular item. The importance of understanding what a serving size is will assist you in knowing exactly what you are putting into your body. Ignoring this information will cause you to intake more calories, fats, carbs, and protein and eventually lead to weight gain. While this is a big problem, it is one that we can easily remedy. Buying measuring cups and a digital food scale will insure proper accuracy when measuring your foods and ultimately lead to a successful diet. It’s shocking to compare the difference in a serving size to one that wasn’t measured. Measuring your food will also cut down on portion sizes and eliminate over-eating at one meal.

One other mistake I often encounter is being misguided by labels on certain foods you buy. We’ve all been attracted to the “low-fat” labels or this product is a certain percent fat free. While that makes the product sound healthy, unfortunately it’s a way for companies to lure you into thinking you’re eating foods lower in fat. I know it sounds unfair and you wonder how these companies get away with it. This is why it is important to educate yourself on how to correctly read nutrition labels. Understanding what to look for on the labels can help eliminate the confusion set forth by the manufacture. While many of us habitually look at the nutrition labels of the foods we buy, more often than not we don’t know what it is we’re looking for. Is it the total amount of fat? How much sugar and carbs it contains? I can go on for hours discussing nutrition labels, but let’s stick to the topic at hand. When comparing regular foods to low fat or light foods, the key is to look at the calories in a single serving and compare it to the amount of fat calories that serving contains. Most of us only check the total amount of fat and assume because it’s a lower number, it is healthier. This is where companies deceive you. Let’s compare ranch dressing to light ranch dressing. Many people think that because they use a low fat or light dressing on their salad, they are making a “Healthier” choice. Of course, there could be worse selections, but I’ll show you why this still isn’t the best option. Two tablespoons of regular ranch dressing contains 140 calories and 14 grams of fat. Of the 140 calories per serving, 126 of those are fat calories. If you do the math, two tablespoons of ranch dressing is 90% fat. Now let’s compare light ranch dressing. Two tablespoons of light ranch contains 80 calories and 7 grams of fat. Of the 80 calories per serving, 63 of those calories are from fat which equates to 79% fat. While it’s obvious that light ranch dressing is the better choice, it still not considered a healthy option. In addition, because the term light or low fat is on the label, people assume that they can use as much as desired. This of course leads to an increase of fat calories and in hindsight, would actually be better just to use a serving of regular ranch dressing.