Dieting, losing weight and getting healthier are the top resolutions for the New Year. But it seems to also be one of the hardest to fulfill resolutions on the New Years list. Has it been on your list in the past few years? Did it work out for you? If not, let’s discuss three common hazards to avoid in dieting and their effects.

One of the first big hazards in dieting is that you might fall for one of the quick and easy off-the-shelf diets. These diets come as pills, liquids or recipes in magazines. Most of these diets promise that you will drop a pant size or more within a few weeks. “Fit in that bathing suit by summer”, is what they are catching you with in spring. The soup will get you to loose weight or so they say. These diets are nothing more than a good sales pitch and because many of us are trying to loose some pounds or to slim down drastically, these sales pitches actually work. Dieting needs consistency, hard work, exercise and most of all a strong willed person. Unfortunately, many of us lack in these categories and fall for the calling of candy and other high calorie comfort foods whenever we walk through the supermarket. So therefore, a pill that will help us loose weight and we do not have to cut down or change too much, that sounds good, doesn’t it? The truth is, this is a common dieting hazard, falling for the sales pitch. These diets do generally not work and even if you loose some weight, it will most likely come back.

Another very common hazard when dieting is trying to eat nothing, cutting drastically down on food or avoiding food altogether. First of all, holding through such a diet is hard. Going from enjoying food and indulging to no food does not work for the body. Starving yourself is not the solution. Also, when cutting out most foods altogether, you will miss out on healthy nutrients for your body. Vitamins and minerals are essential for the body as well as many other nutrients that are found in healthy foods. Instead of not eating, go for cutting down the amount. The best way to avoid this dieting hazard is to exchange unhealthy foods with healthy ones, changing your lifestyle. Go for a fruit, vegetable and grain rich diet and cut out all the high fat and high calorie foods.

Last but not least, there is the so-called yo-yo effect. Once you have lost a certain amount of weight due to using maybe one of the sales pitch diets mentioned above, you stop the diet or can no longer see soup and therefore go back to your old eating habits. At this point, what happens is, you put actually on more pounds than you had before. Certain insulin and glucose reactions in the body, that actually helped you loose weight, get hit hard by all the sugar and calories being put in and therefore your body thinks that after a period of starvation, where it seemed to your body that there were bad times, there is a period of indulging and rich in foods. Therefore your body will switch over to store more fat, just in case those bad times are going to come back. Our bodies are designed for hard work with limited amounts of food. Certain mechanisms are built into our system, just like the instinct for survival.

To overcome any of these hazards, do some research on the topic of dieting; find out what works and maybe even talk to your physician. Your physician might have some recommendations as to where to start and what might be the best way for you to loose some weight the healthy way.