Why Can't I Lose Weight No Matter What I Do?
Choose a Lego Head above.
Any Lego Head.
And I imagine its pretty close to how you are feeling about your weight loss efforts…and how you happened to end up here…reading this Article.
And if you have been trying to lose weight for a while now…and you have ended up here, reading this, then I am sure you probably feel more like this:
To find the images of the Lego Heads I used two words:
“Angry” and “Frustrated”
This gives me one sole goal for this article - as your Coach - to remove your frustration and your anger about your inability to lose weight no matter what you do - and be able to set you up on a path to success.
Just like my friend Jenny who lost over 7kgs working with me online on the Strong and Confident Program.
She came to me at her whits end - having spent hours on the Gym floor, following every single piece of advice they gave her on diet and exercise. Sometimes she would exercise twice a day just to try and achieve a change on the scale, in her clothes or how she felt about herself.
And still couldn’t crack the “secret code” to weight loss.
Then we spoke on a video chat, she was very emotional and I held out my hand, told her to stop worrying, and together….we’ve got this.
She achieved this by just doing 10mins a day every day for 3 months.
Because she had a process that she could trust.
And that is what I am going to share with you today in order to make you feel empowered, strong and confident to finally Google the term:
“How to get strong enough to wrestle a bear in the woods”
Please remember this article is not from a Medical Perspective - it is a Coach’s perspective on why you aren’t losing weight no matter what you do.
I am presuming you have been to the Doctor, and got the all-clear from any severe Metabolic conditions, I am also going out on a limb and saying that if you have Hypothyroidism, PCOS, or are currently struggling with the symptoms of Menopause what I am going to share with you is still relevant, and will still work - it just is that much harder.
If you need help with PCOS and Weight Loss then read this:
The structure of this article is a little different from my “normal” ones. For each header, I am going to pose you a question for you to answer - from there I will hope to establish some holes in your approach to losing weight - and I will tell you the science-backed solution to fixing that hole in your approach.
By the end of this article, you will be able to reset, reapproach and feel reinvigorated to help make the changes you need.
All I ask from you, as you read this, is that you are honest with yourself in how you respond to these questions.
If you are able, to be honest, then I will be able to help you…and we can make you feel more like a Super Hero in your weight loss journey. We can literally get you eating ice cream and losing weight….
Which in truth is the ultimate goal anyway isn’t it?
Table of Contents for “I Can’t Lose Weight No Matter What I Do”
Are you in a Calorie Deficit?
Are you sleeping enough?
Are you blaming your Metabolism?
Are you making the most of your Metabolism?
Are you restricting your diet too much?
Are you being consistent?
Are you expecting your movement to do the job for you?
Are you on a plan that is making you unhappy?
Are you too stressed?
Are your expectations too great?
Are you comparing yourself to others?
Question 1: Are you in a Calorie Deficit?
If you have read any of my work before then you will know that a Calorie Deficit is the only way you can lose weight.
As in you need to burn more calories from your body than you are putting into it - and this is what a Calorie Deficit is.
Very simple to understand - but not easy to implement.
If you have found this article, and you have never heard the term Calorie Deficit before then this is the reason you are not losing weight no matter what you do.
You should probably watch this for further context on what a Calorie Deficit truly is and how to set yourself up in a Deficit:
If you have heard the term before, and believe it is what you have tried to implement - then keep reading because every single point I am going to explore in this article is literally going to be the best Coaching advice I have for you to investigate WHY you aren’t in a Calorie Deficit DESPITE your best efforts.
So lets get into it…
Question 2: Are you Sleeping enough?
I have laid out the correlation between sleep and weight loss in one of my more recent Blog Posts: Why Does Sleep Affect Your Weight Loss?
In writing that Blog, I came to the realization that Sleep is probably more important to a human in order to lose weight than a Calorie Deficit.
Because…
Without enough sleep, you simply will not be able to get into a Calorie Deficit.
In a nutshell…sleep helps you process your emotions like stress and anxiety. When we are deprived of sleep, there is greater activity in the part of the brain known as the Amygdala [1].
The Amygdala is responsible for your emotional responses to what is happening to you during the day.
In subjects who are more sleep deprived, the Amygdala is buzzing with activity, and therefore the sleep-deprived person is responding more emotionally than if they had their 8 hours a night.
And if your emotions are high and negative, your Caloric intake increases.
As the study ‘Modeling the Effects of Positive and Negative Mood on the Ability to Resist Eating in Obese and Non-obese Individuals’ [2] states:
“We also demonstrated strong associations between food craving and these eating behaviours, particularly after following a negative mood induction in obese individuals”
WOULD YOU LIKE A MONTH OF FREE COACHING WITH ME?
Question 3: Are you blaming your Metabolism?
Throughout life, you may have heard lots of different theories on your Metabolism. The two main ones are:
Your Metabolism slows down as you age
Your Metabolism is broken or Starvation Mode
Let’s deal with your slowing Metabolism first.
A new study called: Daily energy expenditure through the human life course [3] has found that your Metabolism is stable throughout your adult life from the age of 20 all the way up to the age of 60.
This is despite going through Menopause and Pregnancy.
This is good news. As it now clearly shows us that assigning blame when it comes to weight to something that is “out of your control”, ie; your Metabolism, is not a useful strategy.
You can now look past this, and start investigating other reasons you may be unable to lose weight - more than likely one of the other points in this blog.
And as for your Metabolism being broken from a history of eating too little…that is also not relevant.
You can’t break your Metabolism.
The thoughts on this stem down into something known as Starvation Mode; the idea that if you eat too little over your life then your body goes into a “survival mode” or a “starvation mode”.
This does not exist.
Your body metabolically adapts but does not stop as the study Metabolic slowing with massive weight loss despite preservation of fat-free mass [3] concluded:
“RMR declined out of proportion to the decrease in body mass, demonstrating a substantial metabolic adaptation” .
in 1944 the University of Minnesota wanted to find out what extreme Famine does to a population and crucially how to rehabilitate people out of extreme famine in the wake of World War 2.
The study [4] started with, starving people. For real. In study conditions.
36 participants were recruited and were put into Prisoner of War conditions. Made to do manual labour, walk 22 miles a week and were fed 50% of their caloric needs.
Oh, it gets worse…
They did this for 6 months.
One participant cut off his fingers just to get out of the study early…
And as you can imagine it got pretty rough for them. On average each participant lost 25% of their body weight. Here is a photo from the experiment:
But crucially what happened to their Metabolism?
Their metabolisms were performing about 20% lower than predicted after losing weight - their metabolisms adapted.
But this was a two-fold experiment. Participants were put into a “recovery diet” to help them regain the weight they had lost, and after 12 weeks their metabolisms were re-assessed. In 12 weeks their metabolisms were only underperforming by 10%. And in some cases - there was no Metabolic damage at all.
So after being put into Prisoner of War Camp-like conditions, given just 5o% of their caloric needs each day and being forced to do what can only be described as a fuck tonne of exercise, their Metabolisms were not “broken”.
And if you look at this study it would suggest that if you followed the recovery of the subjects in the Minnesota Starvation Experiment for longer than 12 weeks - their Metabolism made a full recovery.
And…
Each participant continued to lose weight throughout the whole experiment.
Question 4: Are you making the most of your Metabolism?
Your metabolism (Total Daily Energy Expenditure) is made up of four components.
As you can see in the chart above, your Basal Metabolic Rate which is 70% of your Metabolism is the largest portion of your Metabolism. But it is also largely out of your control. This 70% is determined by your Sex, Height, and Weight. It's how your body just keeps your body functioning to get the most out of your Metabolism, as in, to burn the most amount of Calories each and every day, you should focus on your NEAT.
This makes up 15% of your Daily Caloric burn.
It outranks your time in the Gym by 10% and outranks the food you eat by 5%.
So how do you increase your Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis?
Aim for 8-10k steps a day
Stand up when on the phone
Stand up when at work
Have walking meetings/social events
Park further away from the shops
Fidget more
Stand up on Public Transport
Use the upstairs toilet, not the downstairs toilet
Stand when you brush your teeth
Many people when they want to begin to lose weight will prioritize in this order:
Exercise in the Gym
Nutrition
Daily Movement
Even to the point that 2 and 3 sometimes don’t even get thought of.
But in truth it should look like this:
Nutrition
Daily Movement
Exercise in the Gym
Question 5: Are you restricting your Diet too much?
Restriction of calories can lead to weight loss.
That’s basically what a Calorie Deficit is.
But there is a dark side to this as well - and this dark side is probably the number one reason people yo-yo diet AND just can’t seem to lose weight no matter what they do.
This is what occurs:
You decide to lose weight
You jump onto a Calorie Calculator and get an arbitrary number of calories to lose say 1kg a week
That number is a very low amount of calories
You manage to stick to this very low number for a brief period
The hunger and the restriction gets too much
You stop restricting but you don’t go into a balance
You go into a Binge
This binge lasts two months because now you feel like you failed
You gain weight again
You repeat the cycle
And what happens is you spend more time out of a deficit than in one which will lead to short and sharp results with the weight loss - but ultimately you will feel like you are constantly failing and unable to ever lose weight because it’s just too damn difficult to do.
This is what I describe as a classic Binge and Restrict Cycle.
You blame yourself for not being able to stick to it.
When in truth you were always set up to fail from the start.
When you over restrict - you have to compensate for that at some point down the line and this creates a swing of too much restriction and too much indulgence.
Then over a year, you have spent more time out of a deficit than in one - which is why you seem to never be able to lose weight.
It always comes down to sustainability and giving yourself a much longer-term view of your goals rather than trying to achieve what you want in a couple of months.
You need what I call…a wide angle lens….
When really you just need to be more level with everything to begin with. Drop your expectations of losing weight on a set schedule, because scale weight doesn’t work on a schedule, and give yourself a smaller deficit - which is wholly more sustainable.
To figure that out you can download my Free Fitness Goodies which includes a personalized calorie calculator which makes sure you set yourself up for success with sustainable methods.
Question 6: Are you being consistent?
It’s an infamous word, isn’t it? Consistency. I feel we all know what it means - and we all believe we are executing on it.
But much like the binge and restrict cycle outlined previously, when it comes to consistency what occurs is perfection and abstention - and often the perfection part of the pendulum is confused for consistency.
Many many many people tell me they are being consistent:
By going to the gym every day
By avoiding processed foods every day
By cutting out sugar all the time
By tracking their food every day
Whenever you use the words “every day” or “all the time” you are not being consistent.
You are striving for perfection. And perfection is impossible.
And then when you can’t keep up the perfect routine you are excusing for consistency the feelings of failure begin again…and you eventually give up.
You don’t need to do it every day. You don’t need to work out every day. You don’t need to track your calories every day. You don’t need to eat salads every day to have success.
You do need to do it consistently - a good guide for this is the 80/20 rule which would dictate that in a month you need to be hitting your goals around 25 days of the month.
As the study “The Effect of Adherence to Dietary Tracking on Weight Loss: Using HLM to Model Weight Loss over Time” [6] states:
“Successful behavioural interventions should emphasize the benefits of consistent dietary tracking for participants, motivating individuals to track for at least 5 days of each week for sustained and clinically significant weight loss"
Not 7 days, not even 6. At least 5 days.
That sounds like an 80/20 rule to me.
To find out more about how to implement consistency in your fitness journey head here: How To Stay Consistent With Your Fitness
Question 7: Are you expecting your movement to do the job for you?
Now I am sure you have heard the old saying:
"You can’t out-train a bad diet”
And this is pretty much true - although I detest over simplifications and cliches like this.
On an average strength training workout, you are burning maybe 300 calories.
At a real push.
You could try and get a bigger calorie burn in by doing some cardio or HIIT but these exercises increase your appetite - so any gains you might make in the Calorie burning department are going to be negated by your hunger increasing.
And for women, that increase in hunger can occur 3-5 days after you have actually worked out meaning it can become really unclear on what the root cause of that increased diet is.
You may well be reading this section and thinking:
“When I work out my watch tells me that I burn 600kcal a workout”
Well, again, your watch is lying to you. There are many studies like this one [7] that shows a wristwatch can be up to 25% inaccurate when looking at calories burned from exercise.
This isn’t to say that being in the Gym isn’t useful for your health and wellbeing - especially when you are wanting to lose weight - it is vitally important to help you get a sense of wellbeing, of strength and achievement.
But you need to get into the mindset of going to the Gym to “get strong enough to fight a bear in the woods” and you need to get into the mindset of your controlling your calories to try and help you lose weight.
The gym isn’t for burning calories, its for getting strong and proving to yourself that you can do hard things and repeat behaviours over time that will lead to your long term success elsewhere in your life.
Question 8: Are you on a plan that is making you unhappy?
This again is a very common behaviour and it doesn’t matter how great the plan is in terms of results, you will never be able to do it for long enough to actually see these results if you aren’t enjoying what you are doing.
I can think of many examples of Exercise regimens and Diets that do not prioritise balance and enjoyment - and sadly they are the ones that have a lot of marketing behind them and promise “fast results”.
When it comes to diet and exercise - enjoyment is the sole driver of success.
If you don’t enjoy what it is you are doing, but do see results, that’s great. But it just will not last. The results will be temporary and the inevitable weight regain will occur on the back end.
Now sure, we would all enjoy eating doughnuts all day long…
But that too would soon become unenjoyable, just like it did with Homer.
The key to successful weight loss is getting into a process.
The last thing you want is to reach a goal and realise it was all about the process in the beginning.
By focussing on the process, you also focus on the behaviours that will change your life - and get you to your goals.
If those behaviours don’t inspire you, don’t excite you and don’t drive you to take action each and every day then you will never be able to sustain what you are doing.
If you can learn to focus on the process of looking after yourself in this manner, then my friend, you have already won.
Question 9: Are you too stressed?
Stress is very underrated in terms of how it affects your ability to lose weight.
A point beautifully demonstrated by Homer. Again.
Stress will create two behaviors in your life that make a Calorie Deficit very hard to stick to.
The first is that it will disrupt sleep - now I covered that in Question 2, however, you cannot be reminded enough that you need a better sleep regimen to be able to stay in a Calorie Deficit.
The other role stress plays is its link to emotional eating.
Now firstly we all emotionally eat - please do not think that you are “broken” because you respond to emotions with food. We all do it. The biggest difference here might be the quantity or frequency upon which we do it.
Personally, my emotional eating reveals itself in chugging a beer or two.
For others, it can be hours of eating Haribos or hours upon hours of drinking alcohol - my emotional eating binges last for the duration of the food I am consuming - whereas, for other people, it can last whole evenings, possibly three to four times a week.
Often when it comes to emotional eating, we try to fix the emotions with food - however in truth, the only thing that will fix the emotional eating is learning to process the emotions correctly - and dealing with that head-on.
Stress is proven to cause an increase in caloric intake in someone’s life.
As the study: “Stress-induced obesity and the emotional nervous system [8] concludes:
“Stress also induces secretion of glucocorticoids, which increases motivation for food, and insulin, which promotes food intake and obesity. Pleasurable feeding then reduces activity in the stress–response network, reinforcing the feeding habit. These effects of stressors emphasize the importance of teaching mental reappraisal techniques to restore responses from habitual to thoughtful, thus battling stress-induced obesity”
As you can see there is a need to help reduce your stress in the best way possible.
These are my top recommendations to help you reduce stress:
Get enough sleep regularly. If you need help with that listen to my Sleep Stories here: Three Medatitive Sleep Stories by Adam Berry
Exercise regularly. Exercise has been proven to reduce stress and help you sleep, as well as process your emotions.
Eat more nutritiously - make choices that align with your goals and you will feel like you are achieving as opposed to constantly failing.
Meditate. I don’t mean sit on the floor humming, I mean take time to connect to your breath and actively relax - that’s all meditation is. To get some free meditations from me head here: Centering The Breath: A YouTube Playlist
Question 10: Are your expectations too great?
I’ll let you in on a little secret:
Expectations are the number one reason people fail in fitness.
Forget everything else.
The issue is without a doubt expectation.
Many people start with an expectation that is wholly unrealistic - and usually based on an arbitrary human they have seen on Social Media as opposed to what is realistic for them, in their given circumstances.
And then when these expectations are seldom met, you start to feel like a failure….which inevitably results in giving up.
Let’s say you set up a goal to lose 5kgs. You aim for 0.5kgs a week and expect this to take 10 weeks.
Seems reasonable enough.
But over a 10-week period…you will inevitably have a few nights out….maybe a weekend away with your partner and let’s face it, a few missed Gym sessions.
You decide to weigh yourself weekly (more on why this is not a good idea here) and let’s say you only lose 200g one week….you have fallen behind your expectations, and go into “catch up mode”
The more this happens, the more drastic the behaviours come for you to get back on track.
The more drastic the behaviour the more unsustainable the whole thing becomes.
The only expectation you should have when it comes to your Fitness Journey is to simply try your best, do your damnedest, and get your strongest.
These are goals within your control, and they will result in your success becoming inevitable.
Question 11: Are you comparing yourself to others?
Ever heard the phrase “comparison is the thief of joy”?
Well, it’s true. By trying to live up to what someone else has achieved will only result in you not enjoying what it is you are doing.
You aren’t them. You don’t live their life. You don’t have the same abilities, genetics, finances, health, and support they have.
You are simply yourself.
You are simply only ever in competition with yourself. When you can try to just be better than you were yesterday you will build momentum, and momentum can be very very powerful.
But if you compare yourself to others, your momentum will stop immediately because you will only ever compare yourself to someone who is doing better than you - because that is all you will see.
The brain finds what we focus on. If you only want to focus on people who are thinner than you, lighter than you or more confident than you….then that is all you will ever see.
Nay.
That is all you will ever compare yourself to. When in actuality you have done better today than you did yesterday.
This is the last question in this Article. But I want to truly leave you with one thought.
One thought that will be the biggest game-changer you can imagine - an attitude that if you can adopt will allow you to stay focussed on what you are trying to accomplish and will allow the results you crave so much to come.
And it is this:
Adopt this singular thought - and your confidence will soar.
If we all just realized that nothing compares to ourselves…we will all become superheroes.
And being a superhero for yourself is what you should want to become.
Did You Find This Useful?
Thank you so much for reading my article - I really hope you found it helpful.
As I mentioned earlier in the article, I would love to work with you if you need help with any of the above.
If you would like to apply to work with me then just click here:
Thank you so much for being here.
Speak to you again soon.
Coach Adam
References:
Walker, M. P., & van der Helm, E. (2009). Overnight therapy? The role of sleep in emotional brain processing. Psychological bulletin, 135(5), 731–748.https://doi.org/10.1037/a0016570
Udo T, Grilo CM, Brownell KD, Weinberger AH, Dileone RJ, McKee SA. Modeling the effects of positive and negative mood on the ability to resist eating in obese and non-obese individuals. Eat Behav. 2013;14(1):40-46. doi:10.1016/j.eatbeh.2012.10.010
Johannsen DL, Knuth ND, Huizenga R, Rood JC, Ravussin E, Hall KD. Metabolic slowing with massive weight loss despite preservation of fat-free mass. J Clin Endocrinol Metab. 2012 Jul;97(7):2489-96. doi: 10.1210/jc.2012-1444. Epub 2012 Apr 24. Erratum in: J Clin Endocrinol Metab. 2016 May;101(5):2266. PMID: 22535969; PMCID: PMC3387402.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Starvation_Experiment
Zinchenko, Anastasia & Henselmans, Menno. (2016). Metabolic Damage: do Negative Metabolic Adaptations During Underfeeding Persist After Refeeding in Non-Obese Populations?. Medical Research Archives. 4. 10.18103/mra.v4i8.908.
Ingels JS, Misra R, Stewart J, Lucke-Wold B, Shawley-Brzoska S. The Effect of Adherence to Dietary Tracking on Weight Loss: Using HLM to Model Weight Loss over Time. J Diabetes Res. 2017;2017:6951495. doi: 10.1155/2017/6951495. Epub 2017 Aug 9. PMID: 28852651; PMCID: PMC5568610.
Shcherbina A, Mattsson CM, Waggott D, Salisbury H, Christle JW, Hastie T, Wheeler MT, Ashley EA. Accuracy in Wrist-Worn, Sensor-Based Measurements of Heart Rate and Energy Expenditure in a Diverse Cohort. Journal of Personalized Medicine. 2017; 7(2):3. https://doi.org/10.3390/jpm7020003
Mary F. Dallman, Stress-induced obesity and the emotional nervous system, Trends in Endocrinology & Metabolism, Volume 21, Issue 3, 2010, Pages 159-165, ISSN 1043-2760, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tem.2009.10.004