{"id":3743,"date":"2015-03-10T06:40:46","date_gmt":"2015-03-10T02:40:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rachaelattard.com\/?p=3743"},"modified":"2019-11-11T14:27:36","modified_gmt":"2019-11-11T10:27:36","slug":"mistakes-ive-made","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rachaelattard.com\/mistakes-ive-made\/","title":{"rendered":"Mistakes I’ve Made & What I’ve Learned"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I’m always pretty honest about mistakes I’ve made in the past. And this is because I know they are common mistakes that many other girls make. So if I can help you avoid these same mistakes and learn something then my work is done!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So here are my mistakes and a bit of my story:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

1. Starved myself to lose weight<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

I think a lot of us have been here. You want to lose weight so you think you need to cut back your food intake and feel hungry. It is one of the things I struggled with the most.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There was a period in my early to mid-20s when I wanted to lose a few kilos so I didn’t eat dinner. I thought that I shouldn’t eat after 5pm<\/g>, even if I’d been to the gym after work. I’d come home, have a shower, and go to bed hungry. My housemate must have thought I was crazy!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The result? I lost a little bit of weight but struggled to get my weight down past a certain point. A little while later when I did some research on healthy eating and healthy recipes, I tried again. I exercised but tried to eat a better diet most just by cutting out junk food. I still ate bread, oats, dairy, etc. And I ate 3 meals and 2 snacks per day. The result? I lost MORE weight than when I wasn’t eating dinner.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When you starve yourself, your body doesn’t know when it is going to eat again so it actually holds on to fat stores – not what you want! The trick for me was knowing when to eat. If I thought I felt hungry but wasn’t quite sure, chances were that I wasn’t really hungry. Knowing when you are actually hungry and need to eat is important and only you can figure that out. Another thing that helped me was to eat a moderate amount of food at each meal. I didn’t stuff myself so that I was so full and wanted to lay in a food coma. I ate until I’d had enough and then that meal usually kept me going for the next 2-3 hours.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

RELATED POST: HOW TO CALCULATE YOUR IDEAL CALORIE INTAKE<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

2. Being underweight <\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

OK, so there was another time in my life when I was about late teens to<\/g> early 20s where I also wanted to lose weight even though I was already quite small. I lived at college so the food options were limited. I pretty much went down the starvation route again and this is what I ate on a daily basis: muesli and yoghurt for breakfast, a ham and salad wrap or salad for lunch and dinner was usually pretty yuck so I would eat dessert instead – something like ice cream or cookies. Three smallish meals per day. I was always hungry. I also did a lot of walking to university and back to college (around 6-10kms per day).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My weight dropped to about 46kgs. I was skinny but I did not look healthy, especially in my upper body. During this period I think I did some damage to my metabolism<\/a> and am paying for it now. Overall what I learned from this experience is that:<\/p>\n\n\n\n