Is Your Diet Derailing Your Diet?

Still struggling to lose those extra pounds, even though you're following your nutrition plan to the letter? Here are six well-intentioned weight-loss efforts that unfortunately may cause you to gain -- not lose -- weight, reports Prevention magazine. Saving most of your daily calories for a big dinner. This can throw your hunger hormones out of whack and set up a vicious cycle in which you're never hungry in the mornings, but starving when dinnertime rolls around, leading you to eat more in the evenings that you intended. Snacking instead of eating meals. Having fixed meal times and sizes not only helps with insulin and blood-glucose control, but also ramps up your body's ability to more effectively burn calories. Loading up on 'healthy' foods. Even foods that are good for you can be higher in calories than you realize, and overindulging in them may actually result in weight gain. Crash dieting to rapidly lose weight. While it seems like it should be effective, dramatically cutting calories actually slows down your metabolism and more effectively turns whatever you're eating into body fat. Setting only short-term weight-loss goals. Sure, it's great to aim to lose 20 pounds over the next six months. But what happens after that? If you don't have a follow-up goal or a long-term target, your old, bad eating and exercise habits will once again rear their ugly heads. Filling your meal plan with low-fat and sugar-free foods. Research shows that we tend to overeat products described as diet foods -- by up to 30% in some cases. And low-fat and sugar-free don't mean low-calorie!