Why Can’t I Lose Weight?

You look in the mirror wondering why your love handles are beginning to look more like 747 wings. You bitch and moan to your friends that dieting doesn’t work and it’s only for fools. You wonder why 3 sessions of cardio weekly is still not enough to burn those yucky fats away. “Why can’t I seem to lose weight even when I’m on diet?’ you ask yourself.

I’m pretty sure we have all asked ourselves that question during the course of our diet. If you have never gotten this problem before, stop reading this article now and leave it to us mortal beings.

Losing weight can be a tricky thing. There are times when you lose weight by just batting an eyelid. Other times it requires the will power and dedication of a Rhino. Just keep charging they say.

Let us examine some factors that might bring your diet to a standstill.

1. You are not eating clean enough

Many people on a diet think that they are eating healthily on a daily basis but in actual fact there’s still room for improvement. One way to really watch what you eat while on a diet is to keep a food journal. This way nothing that you swallow can escape being recorded down. Do it for a week and you might be surprised with your eating habits. It’s usually the small things that add up. You might be adding fatty sauces and dressings to your food. You might even be snacking on too much sugary stuff in between meals. You might even be drinking too much fruit juice thinking that it’s healthy.

Solution: At the end of each day, look through your records and exclude foodstuff that are high in sugar or provide little nutritional value. Do these for a few days and you will be able to streamline your eating habits to get you back on track. For me it was snacking on a tablespoon of peanut butter too frequently. It was a darn hard habit to break.

2. You are not eating enough

It’s confusing I know. First I’m accusing you of not eating clean enough and now I’m saying you might not be eating enough. In the world of dieting there’s a saying which goes “You need to eat to lose weight”. Our body requires a certain amount of calories daily to carry out all the important functions. You know, functions that keep you alive. Duh. For women it’s about 1200 calories per day, for men it’s about 1800 calories.

If you are eating much lesser that what is required for your body to function healthily, your body will put your metabolic rate in a lower gear to conserve energy. And we all know how important it is to have a high metabolic rate when it comes to burning fat.

Furthermore by restricting your calories by too much, your body might even start to break down your muscle tissue which is the last thing we want. Less muscle means lower metabolic rate = slower weight loss.

Solution: Make sure you roughly know how many calories you need on a daily basis and create a manageable calorie deficit from there. The Low Calorie Diet Plan will show you how to exactly do it. I initially thought that by skipping my meals I was doing the right thing. Not only did my weight not come off, I felt sluggish and irritable from the lack of energy.

3.  Your cardio is not intense enough

Exercising plays a very important role when it comes to losing weight. Any good diet should be made up of good eating habits and regular workouts/cardio.

You may think that just by doing some cardio your weight will automatically come off. But the question here is how intense is your cardio? Are you working up a good sweat after you’re done? Is your heart pounding so hard you can feel it in your throat? The bottom line is the more intense your cardio is, the more calories you will burn during and after your session.

Solution: Ramp up your intensity. Make every session count. Or like what how macho dudes like moi say it “Go big or go home!”.

4.  You are not sleeping enough

Our body rebuilds itself when we sleep. Without getting too much into the mambo jumbo scientific stuff, important hormones are secreted when we sleep that help to burn fat. So the less sleep you have, the higher the chance you are depriving yourself of such wonderful hormones.

Lack of sleep also brings about increased levels of cortisol. This is what is produced when you are stressed, tried or basically symptoms due to lack of sleep. Too much cortisol in your body can ruin your dieting efforts.

Solution: Make sure you are getting enough sleep at night. 6-8 hours should suffice for most people. With adequate sleep, you have the energy to increase the intensity of your workouts or cardio sessions. I had to learn this the hard way. For a good 3-4 years I survived on 4 hours of sleep. My concentration at work was affected, my moods were lousy, I didn’t have any energy to train and my eating habits went down the drain. Took my awhile to start sleeping properly. But when I started sleeping longer, my lifestyle improved tremendously.

5.  You are expecting too much too fast

If you think you can have rippling muscles and an noticeable abs just by dieting for 2 weeks then let me be the one to burst your bubble. Rome wasn’t build in a day so don’t expect to get the body you want that quickly.

Ask anyone who has gone from lard to lean and chances are they had to endure some long periods of strict eating habits and butt busting cardio.

If you are losing weight at a rate of 1lb per week then you are on track.

Solution: Just like most people I was super eager to lose the weight but when I didn’t see much progress within a short time frame I gave up and went searching for the next ‘holy grail’ of dieting. Needless to say it got my nowhere at all until I realized this is going to take a while so I might as well enjoy the ride. Took me 15 years to get from morbidly obese to my rather lean state. But I’m pretty sure you’ll take faster than me. Thanks to this website

Conclusion

With all that being said, the only way you can ascertain that maybe your body doesn’t react to well to your present diet is by being brutally honest with yourself. Honesty is indeed the best policy when it comes to evaluating your weight loss progress.

Let’s rewind to see if this was what really happened.

You looked in the mirror and sighed wondering why your love handles are still there while munching on a huge cupcake. You bitched and moaned to your buddies that dieting doesn’t work after polishing off a plate of fish and chips and buffalo wings. The effort you have been putting in your cardio has not been paying off. Maybe you should be running to the grocery store to get your usual 6 pack of beer and bag of chips for your weekly rerun of ‘Friends’ season 1.

Dieting isn’t rocket science like what more people or gurus would make it out to be. Eat healthy, create a deficit, exercise more intensely and you will lose weight.