You’ve been trying to lose weight, but you never seem to reach your goals. Where do you go wrong? Are you cursed to be overweight or you are focusing on the details and overlooking the important, key points?
Below I will discuss 8 key reasons that might be the problem!
1. Food quality
If you’ve been reading my blog, you know that I am not a fan of the theory about weight being determined by calories in vs calories out! That means, you have no excuse to eating crappy food, no matter if it is just a little! Crappy food equals crappy results. That’s why you need to focus on eating real, healthy food!
2.Food quantity
Even if you eat really clean, you could be eating way too much for your activity levels and body composition. You know the first law of thermodynamics: energy cannot be created or destroyed, merely changed from one form to another. What that means is that when you eat way too much food, no matter how healthy that food is, it can’t just evaporate. It will be conserved as energy for later on, which in terms of body composition means- stored as fat! So make sure you are eating clean but still enough for your frame.
The opposite aspect of food quantity, is that you are not eating enough. That could also be an issue. I won’t go in details what happens when you starve your body, but I will just mention that this could lead to messing up your hormones, and you don’t want your hormones to go wild, if you want to be healthy and fit!
3. Food intolerance
Food intolerance is a big issue nowadays. Many people don’t realize it but food intolerance is a cause for many healthy issues. Food intolerances such as gluten or dairy intolerance, leads to the activation of your immune system fighting against the foreign bodies. Thus, your immune system produces antibodies to it. These antibodies combine with the food antigen and create a complex. Your body is trying to get rid of that complex but sometimes your body falls behind and that leads to that complex being deposited in your tissue, which leads to inflammation. Inflammation leads to tissue damage. On the other hand all that disturbs your health and digestion. Poor digestion, means bad absorption of nutrients, which leads to imbalances in your biochemical processes and hormones, which leads to weight gain!
4. You are full of excuses
You always have a good excuse why you are not eating right! You always find a reason to eat one more muffin. You always have a reason to skip work outs. It all adds up day after day…excuse after excuse! Every excuse gets you a little further from your goal! So better suck it up and get right on track!
5. You are exercising too much
You know who I am talking about! Yes, the cardio queens. You think that by spending all your free time, running, biking, jumping and so on, you are gonna burn a bunch of calories, and that will make you lose weight! Wrong! Your body is not designed that way. Try to exhaust it and it will activate mechanism that will make sure you are not at risk! The more you exercise, the more signals you send to your body that it will need energy for the next exhausting work out. Your body is smart, so everything you eat gets stored as energy for later use. Thus, you were thinking you are working to lose weight, and in reality you are just storing more fat!
6. You are not moving enough
If every time somebody asks you what you did today, and the only memory you have is sitting in a chair watching TV, sitting on the computer, sitting on the table…then you have a problem- you are not moving enough. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want you to be obsessed with exercising. But you should try to move as much as possible. In a slow pace- like walking, hiking, doing chores and stuff like that.
7. You are keeping junk food in your house
Do you get tempted by junk food? I know! You can’t resist it! Then, why would you buy it? It is logical that if you have it in your house, and you see it every time you pass by the pantry, you will eventually end up eating it! If you don’t want to eat it, it’s that simple- DON’T BUY IT! What you put in your fridge, will be the food you fuel your body with. And you are what you eat. If you buy real, healthy food, you will eat real healthy food and you will be healthy and fit! So be smart when you go shopping!
8. You don’t have enough patience.
When you change your lifestyle, you will need time to adapt. Results don’t come overnight. You’ve been eating junk, storing fat your whole life, and you think everything is gonna change in a week. Things don’t work out that way! You will have to be patient. You have to give your diet some time! Don’t get discouraged, just keep eating real food and eventually you will see it happening- your weight shedding off!
Bonus reason: You might have never thought to resist temptation as Eileen Schreiber on the picture above did! 😉
I think you may have missed one reason – a big one! You may not be losing weight because of hypothyroidism or other hormonal condition. I trained hard for an entire year, 4 to 5 times per week and lifted heavy. I have hypothyroidism and even though I take medication I didn’t have my thyroid levels tested regularly to account for the increased activity. As such, even after working out for a whole year I lost zero weight and, in fact, gained a pound from my pre-workout days. Having my thyroid checked regularly has helped keep on top of this and I’ve found increasing my protein has gone a long way towards helping to slowly shed the pounds.
@Kris You are totally right!Thank you for the comment! I also think that with an adequate nutrition, you could really keep hypothyroidism under control! Keep it up!
I love what you guys are up too. Such clever work and reporting!
Keep up the good works guys I’ve added you guys to my own blogroll.
After looking into a number of the articles on your site,
I honestly like your way of blogging. I bookmarked it to my bookmark site list and will be checking back in
the near future. Take a look at my website as well and tell me what you think.