I’m a weight loss coach — these 5 fitness habits do more harm than good

They didn’t work out.

Jenna Rizzo, a women’s weight loss coach from Georgia, is sharing five common fitness habits she says did nothing for her body or mind.

“When I first started, I literally knew nothing about fitness. I did what everybody else did and I turned to social media for guidance,” Rizzo revealed to her 77,300 TikTok followers in a clip last month.

“Over the years, I’ve picked up a lot of healthy habits, but there have been plenty that caused me a lot more harm than good,” she continued. “I’ll tell you what they are so you can make a lot faster progress than me.”

Rizzo’s no-nos include going too hard in the gym, assigning rules to food, trying to look like someone else, using shame as a motivating factor, and not prioritizing sleep.

Going too hard in the gym

“You do not need to go balls-to-the-walls crazy in the gym multiple times a week,” Rizzo assured. “It will not change your body the way you think it will, and you’ll probably get burned out really fast. So I tell my clients now [that] we want to stimulate, not annihilate.”

A 2021 study found that too much exercise can increase the risk of atrial fibrillation, which is an irregular heart beat.

It’s also been tied to rhabdomyolysis, a rare condition characterized by extreme muscle breakdown.

Symptoms include muscle aches or swelling, weakness or fatigue, and dark urine or little to no urine at all.

“Exertional rhabdomyolysis can occur after strenuous exercise and from high-intensity workouts during which the muscles are overused,” Dr. Niloofar Nobakht, an associate clinical professor of nephrology at UCLA, said last year. “You can also get rhabdo from direct trauma, such as a crushing injury from a motor vehicle accident or a fall.”

UCLA health experts recommend scheduling rest days, varying the intensity and length of workouts, eating a balanced diet, staying hydrated, and getting good sleep to promote optimal fitness.

Assigning rules to food

“Saying, ‘I’m not allowed to eat this because that’s bad,’ or ‘I didn’t work out today,’ or ‘I can only eat carbs in the morning and not at night,’ obviously, this is very harmful to your relationship with food,” Rizzo explained.

“This actually caused me to develop a binge-and-restrict cycle that took me a long time to break out of,” she added. “No food is inherently good or bad. There are some that are less nutritious, some that are a little bit more nutritious, go at it with that mindset instead.”

There’s no one-size-fits-all healthy eating plan, but experts agree it’s important to consume a variety of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, proteins, and dairy (or fortified soy alternatives).

Trying to look like someone else

“At the end of the day, no matter how much you can appreciate somebody’s physique and say they are body goals, you will not look exactly like them,” Rizzo said.

“You can eat the exact same way they eat, you can train the exact same way they train, and you will not look just like them,” she continued. “So get that out of your head — become the best version of yourself.”

Using shame as a motivating factor

“I would get really hard on myself if I ate something that I wasn’t supposed to eat or missed a workout that I wasn’t supposed to miss,” Rizzo recalled. “Over time, this just led me to have an overall negative perception of myself, fitness, eating healthy — it was bad.”

Instead of beating yourself up for straying from your workout routine, try to adopt the mindset that “any and all movement is worth it, and everything counts,” Dr. Michelle Segar, a sustainable-change researcher at the University of Michigan and the author of “The Joy Choice: How to Finally Achieve Lasting Changes in Eating and Exercise,” told The Wall Street Journal last year.

As laid out in the Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans, adults should try for 150 minutes of moderate-intensity physical activity and two days of muscle strengthening a week.

That doesn’t mean you have to hit the gym — walking briskly or raking the yard is fine, too.

Not prioritizing sleep

Adults should aim for seven to nine hours of sleep a night. Chronic sleep deprivation has been linked toobesity, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and diabetes, as well as depression, anxiety and poor mental health.

“You don’t need to work out seven days a week, like, three to four is perfectly fine,” Rizzo reasoned. “And you cannot expect to make really good progress only getting six to seven hours of sleep at night.”