The 5 biggest mistakes people make when trying to lose weight

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Mistake 1: Trying to eat as little as humanly possible

This is the big one. It's the foundation almost every failed attempt is built on, and it feels like the most obviously correct thing in the world.

The logic seems airtight. Fat loss requires eating less than you burn, so surely eating much less than you burn means losing fat much faster. People take that to its conclusion: skip breakfast, tiny lunch, "be good" all day, and run on coffee and determination.

For about ten days, it works beautifully. The scale drops fast. You feel like you've cracked it.

Then it all comes apart, and it comes apart for reasons that have nothing to do with your character.

Your body stops cooperating. When intake drops steeply, your body responds sensibly: it gets more efficient, you fidget less, you move less without noticing, and the energy you have for everything quietly declines. The deficit you created starts shrinking on its own.

You start losing the wrong tissue. In a steep deficit with not much protein coming in, your body breaks down muscle for fuel alongside fat. Muscle is the tissue that keeps you strong, keeps your shape, and keeps your metabolism ticking over. Losing it is the single most expensive thing that can happen during weight loss, and it's invisible until months later when you're lighter but somehow softer.

And then there's the hunger. Not the polite kind. The kind that arrives at 9pm and doesn't take no for an answer. Nobody out-wills that signal indefinitely, because it isn't designed to be out-willed. When it eventually wins, people call it a binge and blame themselves, when really it was the predictable end of a plan that starved them.

So the cycle completes. Lose quickly, lose muscle, get ravenous, eat, regain, and have slightly less muscle than you started with. Do that a few times across a decade and you understand exactly why so many people feel their body has turned on them.

The fix: aim for a gentle deficit you barely notice, with plenty of protein, and let it run for months rather than weeks. Slower isn't the lesser option here. Slower is the only version that actually keeps what you lose off.

Mistake 2: Making your food boring on purpose

Here's a belief almost everyone absorbs without ever examining: that healthy food is supposed to be a bit miserable.

Plain chicken. Steamed broccoli with nothing on it. Dry salad. Low-fat everything. There's an unspoken sense that if it tastes good, it must be undoing the point, and that enduring dull food is part of the price.

So people eat sad meals for a few weeks, white-knuckling through every lunch, and then sit down one evening with something delicious and can't stop eating it. Which gets filed as a willpower failure.

It isn't. It's a design failure.

Food is one of the genuine pleasures of being alive. You're going to eat three or four times a day for the rest of your life. Any plan built on the assumption that you'll permanently accept less enjoyment from something you do four times daily is a plan with an expiry date stamped on it.

And the irony is that the enjoyable version is usually the more nourishing one. Olive oil poured over the vegetables makes them taste good and helps you absorb the vitamins in them. Garlic, onions, lemon, herbs and spices cost almost nothing, carry beneficial compounds, and are the entire difference between food you tolerate and food you look forward to. The fat you removed to make it "diet food" was part of what made it filling.

The fix: if you don't look forward to your meals, you've already lost, you just don't know the date yet. Make the healthy version taste better than the alternative. That's not a compromise with your goals, it's the mechanism that lets you keep them.

Mistake 3: Eating in a way that leaves you hungry two hours later

Most people trying to lose weight are not overeating at meals. They're grazing all day because their meals don't hold them.

Here's the typical shape of it. Breakfast is toast, cereal, or nothing. Lunch is a sandwich grabbed between things. Both are almost pure carbohydrate, with very little protein, fibre or fat, which means both empty out of your stomach fast. By eleven you're foraging. By four you're in the biscuits. By nine you're back at the cupboard, genuinely baffled at yourself.

Then that person concludes they have a snacking problem, or a self-control problem, and resolves to try harder.

They don't have either. They have a meal construction problem.

Three things make food actually fill you up. Protein, which is far and away the most satiating thing you can eat. Fibre, which adds bulk, slows digestion and feeds your gut bacteria. And fat, which slows everything down further and makes food satisfying in a way that low-fat versions never manage.

Build a meal around those three and something quite striking happens: the constant background hum of food thoughts dies down. Not through effort. You're just actually full.

And this is where the "eat as little as possible" mistake from earlier compounds, because the person trying hardest to cut calories is usually the one skipping precisely the protein and fat that would have kept them full.

The fix: stop trying to eat less and start building meals that hold you. Protein at every meal, something with fibre alongside, and enough fat to make it taste good. Eating less then happens by itself, which is the only sustainable version of eating less there is.

Mistake 4: Treating it as a project with a start date and an end date

Notice the language people use. "I'm starting on Monday." "I'm being good this week." "I'll get back on track in January." "Once I've lost this, I can go back to normal."

Every one of those sentences contains the same hidden assumption: that this is a temporary state you pass through, after which real life resumes.

But think about what that means. If you lose weight by doing something you intend to stop doing, then the weight comes back when you stop doing it. That's not a failure of the plan, that's the plan working exactly as designed and then ending.

This mindset also creates the all-or-nothing spiral that does more damage than any single meal ever could. If you're "on" a plan, then one slip means you're now "off" it. One biscuit becomes a ruined day. A ruined day becomes a written-off weekend. And since you're restarting Monday anyway, why not enjoy Friday and Saturday too?

Run the maths on that. One off-plan meal is around a tenth of a percent of your eating year, which is mathematically irrelevant. The fifteen meals that follow it because you decided the week was ruined are not irrelevant at all.

The guilt isn't protecting you from anything. The guilt is the damage.

The fix: stop starting. Make small changes you're willing to keep forever, and judge yourself on the average rather than any single meal. There's no on and no off, so there's nothing to fall off, and nothing to restart. The people who stay lean for decades aren't the ones with the most discipline. They're the ones who stopped treating it as a project a long time ago.

Mistake 5: Relying on willpower at the worst possible moment

This is the quiet one, and I think it decides more outcomes than the other four combined.

Picture your day. In the morning you're rested, motivated, and full of excellent intentions. Of course you're going to eat well. It's obvious. Easy.

Now picture 6:40pm. You've worked, commuted, dealt with people, made several hundred small decisions, and you're tired and properly hungry. The fridge has some unconnected ingredients in it. Cooking a proper meal means thinking, chopping, and twenty-five minutes you don't feel you have. The phone is right there and it is extremely easy.

Every single day, your plan gets tested at the exact moment you're least capable of defending it. And every single day, people lose that test and then blame the morning version of themselves for not trying hard enough.

Willpower is not a character trait. It's a resource, and it's lowest precisely when the decisions matter most. Which means any plan that depends on you being strong at 6:40pm is relying on the one thing guaranteed not to be there.

The people who eat well consistently haven't solved this with grit. They've solved it by removing the decision. They know what dinner is before they're tired. The ingredients are in the house. The meal takes twenty minutes and doesn't require a recipe or a thought. The easy option and the good option are the same option.

The fix: stop trying to be stronger at the hardest moment of the day. Make the right thing the easy thing instead, so that when your willpower is gone, it doesn't matter.

What all five have in common

Read them back together.

Eating too little. Making food boring. Meals that don't fill you. Treating it as temporary. Depending on willpower.

Every one is a plan problem, not a person problem. And every one of them has the same solution sitting underneath it: eat food that's satisfying, that fills you up, that you actually enjoy, that's easy enough to make on a bad day, and that you'd be happy eating for years.

That's not a weight loss strategy in the way the industry sells it. There's no phase, no reset, no list of forbidden foods. It's just good eating, repeated.

Which turns out to be the only thing that's ever worked.

This week

Pick the one mistake you recognised most.

If it's number one, eat a proper breakfast tomorrow instead of skipping it. If it's number three, get protein into every meal this week. If it's number five, decide tonight what Wednesday's dinner is and buy what it needs.

One mistake, one correction. Not all five, because trying to fix everything at once is its own version of the all-or-nothing trap.

The thing that fixes four of these at once

Here's what I've noticed after years of writing about this: nearly all of these mistakes dissolve the moment someone has a set of meals that are genuinely satisfying, high in protein, quick to make, and enjoyable enough to eat repeatedly.

That's it. That's the whole intervention. It's not knowledge, it's not motivation, it's having the right food to make on an ordinary tired evening.

Which is exactly why I put together 100 Healthy Recipes for Weight Loss.

It's 100 complete recipes: 25 breakfasts, 25 lunches, 25 dinners and 25 snacks and sides. Every single one is built around protein, fibre and healthy fats, which means they keep you full instead of leaving you foraging two hours later. Most take 30 minutes or less. No weird diet products, no expensive superfoods, no separate sad meal while your family eats properly.

It's the opposite of a restrictive plan. Comfort foods made better rather than banned, with meal planning strategies, batch cooking and prep guides, emergency meals for the days that fall apart, portion guidance that doesn't involve weighing anything, and a 30-day challenge to turn it into a habit.

Mistakes two, three, four and five all come down to the same gap: not having good enough food, easily enough available, to make the right choice the obvious one. This closes that gap.

👉 Grab 100 Healthy Recipes for Weight Loss here 
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