5 Common Reasons You're Not Losing Weight

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Eating too many calories

First and foremost, if you're not completely sure what a calorie or kilojoule is, or you don’t know how many calories your food has, see my post on learning to read nutritional panels, entitled Know Thy Label.
This is by far the primary reason most people struggle to lose weight. It’s most likely the reason we’ve gained the weight in the first place. The good news is that there is a simple solution. Eat fewer calories. While the solution may be simple, understanding it and using it properly is a bit more of a challenge, so lets clarify what ‘fewer’ calories is.

Your food is your body’s energy source, this is what calories or kilojoules measure, the energy of your food. Your body needs a certain amount of energy daily to maintain itself and perform its daily functions. This is your basal metabolic rate (BMR). It’s the amount of food energy you need when you’re at rest. You really don’t need to understand this, other than to know that you don’t want to eat fewer calories than your BMR.

The Free Dieting Website has a great calorie intake calculator. http://www.freedieting.com/tools/calorie_calculator.htm. Plug in your personal details and use this calculator to give you an idea on your required calorie intake for both weight loss, and maintenance. I would suggest that if you've gained weight, you're eating more calories than is listed in the maintenance section. If you're having trouble losing weight, its likely that you're eating more than the fat loss section. Ideally, find out how many calories you need for fat loss and eat around this number. This calculator allows you to work out your BMR, find out what it is and always eat above it. It takes a bit of work to become familiar with how many calories certain foods have, but over time you develop a bit of a feel for it. Again, you may want to read my post on Know Thy Label, understanding the nutritional panel is necessary here.

Easy tips to reduce your calories

-         Reduce portion size – If you struggle with the idea of less, use smaller plates, it’ll look the same, just smaller.

-         Skip desert – hard, yes, but worth it for your weight loss goal

-         Forget adding sugar or milk to your tea and coffee. Try it black and use coconut sugar or stevia instead

-         Pass on the sauce with your meal – they’re usually calorie dense

-         Go the grilled option rather than fried

 Consuming too many carbohydrates

Carbohydrates are foods like bread, pasta, grains like rice, starchy vegetables like potatoes and dried fruits. They are also our sweet foods like pastries, muffins, cakes and lollies. Most people know they shouldn’t eat junk food if they’re trying to lose weight, but will happily eat huge bowls of pasta, or have bread at breakfast lunch and dinner. The carbohydrates in these foods cause our body to store excess calories as fat. Simply reducing our intake of carbohydrates from these foods should help you to lose weight.

Wiki

Tips for reducing your carbohydrate intake
      
 Reduce the portion size of carbohydrate foods. Halve what you would normally eat and fill the rest of the plate up with green vegetables (no, not potatoes, pumpkin and sweet potatoes which would defeat the purpose)

-         I personally would suggest removing bread all together although I realise the thought gives many people heart palpitations. If that’s you, relax, breathe and just have one slice instead of 2.

-         Obviously bypass the junk food

-         Don’t add sugar to anything. Use stevia instead.

-         Don’t eat foods that say ‘low fat’, ‘lite’ etc. Where do you think the flavour comes from? When they take the fat out, they have to replace it with something else to make it taste so yummy. They replace it with sugar. Read my post on food labelling and then go compare some ‘low fat’ labels against some normal fat labels. You’ll see.

-         Look at the ingredient list – if sugar is near the start of the list, skip it

 Not eating enough food

I touched briefly on basal metabolic rate (BMR) earlier in the article. Many people think that by skipping meals or drastically reducing their food intake, they will lose weight. And yes, certainly at first, they might. The problem is that when you eat fewer calories than your body needs to sustain itself, you end up burning important tissue, like muscle, as energy. As muscle itself uses up food energy, the more muscle you burn, the less food energy your muscle will be able to burn in future. That’s why people lose weight then put it back on, plus another 5kg’s. They have lowered the amount of energy their body needs to function by reducing their muscle mass.

Your body is also a very clever, very adaptive organism. It wants to survive. If you begin starving it, by not giving it the energy it needs to operate, it will adapt. It will begin to store all the energy (food) you put into it. Why? It wants energy reserves. Evolution says that occasionally we go through tough times. There’s a drought, there may be a plague and no one to plough the field. Occasionally there is no food. Your body wants to know that it will be able to sustain itself into the future, so it stores what it can as a reserve in case the plague lasts a while. This is the reason people often plateau. Their body has adapted. If you keep eating fewer calories than you need, you’ll lose muscle and store fat. You’ll end up all squishy.

Point

- Use the Free Diet calculator to work out your BMR and always eat above it.

 Not moving enough

Exercise burns calories. You don’t have to go crazy; you can just try moving a little more than you do now. Walking is perfect and easy for all of us. If you’re quite overweight, you may just walk around the block, rest assured it all adds up and something is certainly better than nothing.

Wiki

Tips for exercise

-         Just walk – Body and Soul have a great campaign called March for March. They're asking people to walk 10000 steps a day. Could you do it?
-     Take the stairs

-         Get off the bus a stop earlier

-         Make it fun

-         Exercise with a friend

Cheating too often

Now, when we are trying to lose weight, we often like to reward ourselves. We have functions on, it’s a friend’s birthday, I mean really, there is a plethora of events and reasons for breaking our commitment ‘just this time’. I’m eating paleo at the moment and I had a donut the other day because I didn’t want to say no and have to explain why. Silly? Yep. I did, however, say ‘no’ a couple of days later when I was offered yet another donut, and that is the key. Do you know how often this week you’ve eaten something that isn’t in your plan? It may surprise you.

Solution for cheating

-         Keep a diet diary, or a diary where you write down your cheat foods.

-         If you have a weekly planner filled with functions, go back and write down what you ate at that event. Before you head to the next event, have a quick flick through the past week and see whether you really should relax that night or look for weight loss friendly options.

Any combinations of these will help you lose weight. Good luck and let me know how you go.

Chris