Why Am I Not Losing Weight?

One of the most common questions or frustrations we hear from both clients and friends is the question, “Why am I not losing any weight?”

This question is usually followed up with a long list of everything this person is currently trying or has tried to use to lose weight, and most of the time, they are all fine things.

However, losing weight and really chipping away toward the body composition of your dreams isn’t easy, and there are many roadblocks for most of the population in trying to achieve these goals.

Instead of trying to provide a quick cop-out answer to all of the people asking this question, I’ve decided to list 7 possible reasons why you may not be finding the success you are working so hard to achieve.

For those looking for THE solution to your own weight loss struggles, be careful while making honest assessments about your situation. For example, it is highly unlikely someone who already exercises extremely intensely, daily and moves around a lot throughout the day needs to exercise more to lose weight.

Let’s dive in!

1. You Are Still Eating Too Many Calories

One of the most important pieces of any intelligent weight-loss plan is being in a caloric deficit. All this means is that you must consume fewer calories than you burn over the course of a day to lose weight.

So the first natural thing to check are your calorie intake numbers!

I know people can be hesitant about tracking their caloric intake, but if you truly want to be sure that you are in a caloric deficit, tracking your calories is a fantastic tool we have in our toolbelt.

A Quick Summary on How to Track Caloric Intake

The best way to figure out if you are in a caloric deficit is to weigh yourself multiple times per week, and track your daily caloric intake. If the scale continues to stay the same OR it increases, you must either eat fewer calories, or expend more energy.

Continue to track your calories and weight adjusting your activity level or calorie intake until the scale begins to go down. Once you’ve reached that point, then you know about how many calories you need to be eating to lose weight.

The process is a bit more nuanced than that quick explanation, but this explanation gets the general idea across.

One thing to keep in mind before you decide to cut more calories are your hunger levels. If you already find yourself very hungry throughout the day on the amount of calories you’re eating, I probably wouldn’t suggest lowering your calories any further as you will likely not adhere to the plan.

Instead, maybe take a look at the composition of foods you are eating and sub in more non-processed, satiating foods into your diet.

2. You May Be Incorrectly Tracking Your Calories

Maybe you read the previous section and said to yourself, “but I am tracking calories and I’m STILL not losing any weight.”

The simple fact is that you may be incorrectly counting calories.

This is where investing in a food scale might be a beneficial investment for my trackers out there that don’t have one, or for those people who want to try and better hone in on their calorie numbers.

Using apps like MyFitnessPal (which is a fantastic free tool) can be great, but adding things like “medium banana” or “serving of broccoli” don’t tell the most accurate story of what you just ate.

If the banana is only 20 calories off from what you actually ate, it may not seem like a huge deal. That being said, if every single entry into MyFitnessPal is 20 calories off, then your calorie numbers could be off by a few hundred come the end of the day.

This isn’t ideal.

When using tracking apps, it’s important to be as detailed as possible when entering the foods your are consuming on a daily basis, and a food scale will tell you exactly how much you are eating.

3. You Aren’t Exercising Enough

In our current American culture, there isn’t much movement that occurs throughout the course of our day unless we force ourselves to do more via some activity.

Think about the average American life: you wake up, go (mostly) sit at work for 8 hours, maybe run to the store, make or order dinner out, sit and watch Netflix. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

I’m clearly diminishing the actual human experience here to make a point, but the message is important: Unless we purposefully add some sort of movement or exercise to our weekly routine, we likely aren’t getting enough from our current lifestyle.

Some people may read that and get a sense of dread thinking about that treadmill that they used to be a slave to, but there are so many options that you can probably remain active without needing to use that specific tool that you despise.

Here at IVRY, we think that weight lifting is the best option because we both subscribe to a bodybuilding routine and find that this is the most enjoyable type of regular exercise that fits our goals.

Here are some other activities that could also work:

• Running

• Biking

• Rowing

• Walking

• Hiking

• Throwing the frisbee with the dog

• Playing with your kids

There are plenty of other great activities that would help any person become more active, but those are just a few things many people have access to.

For those who already have pretty regular exercise routines and are still struggling, it may not be the exercise. I would suggest however taking a hard look at your exercise program to see if you could push yourself a little harder.

4. You Are Relying TOO Much on Avoiding Certain Foods

Some people set really unattainable restrictions on themselves when trying to diet, and those sorts of restrictions can really backfire on your progress.

A lot of people when beginning a diet will categorize many foods as foods to avoid. Problem is, those foods are tasty and even some of our favorites.

By totally restricting yourself like this, you may eventually find yourself in a moment where you lose your self-control and just go on a tear, eating all of those foods you were restricting yourself from.

The problem may not manifest itself THAT intensely, but avoiding certain favorite foods altogether for long periods of time is likely to lead you have a mindset of, “well I already messed up, so I may as well keep going…” and this mindset it what can lead to those moments of binging.

Instead of totally avoiding certain foods, learn to eat and enjoy them in moderation!

Some practical examples on how to enjoy your favorites in moderation:

• Instead of ice cream nearly every evening as dessert, save it as a treat for one night

• Instead of eating 4-5 pieces of pizza, have two slices and maybe tack on a salad

• Instead of binging 10-15 drinks on a Friday night, have a one or two drinks a couple nights per week

• Instead of going out to eat or ordering takeout for nearly every meal, try and cook a few of those meals at home instead

One of the most important things you can do for your relationship with food is to learn how to enjoy the foods you love while having the self-control to consume them in moderation.

This is a skill that really does take practice and discipline to achieve, but everyone is probably capable of reaching that point in their relationship with food.

5. You Aren’t Getting Enough Sleep

From my personal experience, I think that sleep is a highly underrated topic of discussion for an overall healthy lifestyle, and a lot of us just don’t quite get enough of it.

I’m not going to pretend I’m a scientist with a PhD, but there is a ton of scientific data detailing how sleep deprivation affects the systems in our body. A lack of sleep can diminish recovery times, leave us with little energy, and can lead to chemical imbalances.

These chemical imbalances can lead our bodies to think they are more hungry or require more calories than they actually need which is something you probably don’t want your body confusing when trying to lose weight.

Along with the chemical imbalances, our bodies aren’t optimally recovered on little sleep which can lead to decision making skills and willpower being diminished.

If for no other reason, getting enough sleep leaves most people feeling better and more alert/energetic throughout the day, so why not add this to your routine?

6. You Aren’t Drinking Enough Water

This is another one of those things we all get told but most of us never follow through with.

A pretty general recommendation for most people is to drink half of your bodyweight in ounces of water per day. So that means a 200 lb. dude should be drinking around 100 oz. of water per day.

That’s a lot of water!

Our bodies are mostly comprised of water so it makes sense to most people that we need to drink it in order to stay healthy, but the amount of water most people should be drinking is a number that they rarely reach.

I’m not qualified enough to dig into the science behind why consuming water is a good idea, but again, there are plenty of studies done by reputable and respectable sources that explain why water is so important at a cellular level.

Here are some things I can speak on in regards to water:

• leaves us feeling more satiated (natural appetite suppressant)

• flushes waste out of our system

• limits the amount of other liquids you drink that are likely higher in calories

• helps lubricate our tissues and joints

In general, drinking more water is likely not going to hurt you, so if you already don’t consume enough water, then this could also be an easy adjustment to your daily routine.

7. You Sit Most of the Day

I hit on this a little bit in point 3, but most American jobs require people to be on a phone or in front of a computer all day which means that most people are seated for almost 8 hours a day at their workplace.

For those people that sit most of the day at work and get little movement outside of that, a daily one hour exercise may not be enough movement to expend enough calories.

Here are some things you can do to move a little bit more throughout the course of your workday:

• park further from the entrance

• get a standing desk to do work

• get up and walk down the hall every 30-60 minutes

• stretch every so often

• walk around the room while on the phone

• go for a walk between meetings

A lot of little movements over the course of the day can add up to a meaningful amount of activity.

In Summary

Today we examined 7 possible reasons why you may not be losing the weight you are wanting to lose:

1. You are still eating too many calories

2. You may be incorrectly tracking your calories

3. You aren’t exercising enough

4. You are relying too much on avoiding certain foods

5. You aren’t getting enough sleep

6. You aren’t drinking enough water

7. You sit most of the day

I warned readers earlier to be careful when trying to diagnose your own issues because each situation and person is different. With that though, there could be one or more reasons on this list that are inhibiting your current fat loss goals.

---

When it comes down to losing weight, we do believe that being in a caloric deficit is the most important aspect of the process.

That being said, it can be really hard for the average person to confidently diagnose their issues and exact calorie numbers to see progress.

One of the benefits of having a coach is that we help you throughout that entire process. Not only do we provide the necessary accountability to stick to your goals, but we have the experience to help you hone in on the things you need to be doing to reach those goals.

Both Andrew and I are currently adding clients to our rosters and would love to be the support that helps you reach your goals!

If you read this article and think it might be time to hire a coach to help meet your needs, click here to learn more about what it is we do, and if you are already prepared to get started on the process, just say hello by heading here to give us some more information.

Until next time-

Josh

Deceptively "Healthy" Choices That May Hinder Your Fat Loss Goals

It’s funny how my concept of “healthy” has evolved and grown over my lifetime. I can remember grouping foods into “healthy” and “not healthy” in my head for a long time. For example, I used to think of the following foods and food groups like this:

• Fast Food = “Unhealthy”

• Salad = “Healthy”

• Pizza = “Unhealthy”

• Fruit = “Healthy”

And, you can probably see where I’m going with my list.

This is how I thought about “healthy” and “unhealthy” for a long time. To be fair, learning to categorize foods to some extent is a great educational place to start, but as I personally learned more about nutrition, my definition of “healthy” evolved into something much more specific (for the better).

The reason that my view of “healthy” vs “unhealthy” foods evolved is because:

1. Whatever I had been practicing for my nutrition for a long time was not working. How did I know that? Because I wasn’t getting the results I wanted.

2. I wanted a more wholistic view of the word “healthy” from an educational perspective.

3. My goals became more specific, and thus my nutrition had to be more specific as well.

What I learned about my assumptions between “healthy” and “unhealthy” was striking - especially regarding some of the apparently “healthy” choices I had been making that actually turned out to be setting me back in a powerful way.

My goal with this write-up is this: I want to present a consideration of a handful of diet choices we commonly make that appear “healthy” on the surface but might actually be a hindrance to our diet goals when misapplied.

#1: Ordering or Buying Products that Contain “Superfoods” or are Ambiguously Thought of as “Nutritious”

This was a big hurdle for me personally.

When I was in high school, I remember starting to care more about my diet choices for the first time. I was an athlete and I wanted to make choices that wouldn’t “slow me down” on the field.

At least that’s how I thought about it.

So, I would put avocado on everything when given the option because the internet said avocados contain healthy fats, which they do, but that was my only thought about avocados at the time. Healthy foods will make me a better athlete, right?

I had also heard that nut butters were a good source of healthy fats, so I gave myself the green light on those as well.

Now, this increase in fat intake was great for me in high school because I looked like a scrawny alien twig, but if I were to implement that same viewpoint now as an adult while making a focused effort to lose body fat, it would most likely be setting me back due to the excessive caloric intake alone.

For that reason, it’s always a good idea to know the macronutrient content of your foods along with the micronutrient breakdown that may qualify a food as nutritious.

Because in my opinion, the last thing you want to be doing when trying to lose body fat is eating foods you think should be helping you when they are actually slowing down your progress or even pushing you in the wrong direction. Unfortunately, plenty of well-intentioned people unknowingly make that mistake all the time.

On a coaching note, part of what Andrew and I do with our clients is educate them on basic nutrition while providing structured macronutrient goals so that we can be as optimal as possible with their body recomposition goal. In other words, we try to guide you through a calorie-controlled approach to your goal without ignoring the overall importance of eating nutrient-dense foods.

#2: Blindly Ordering Salads at a Restaurant as Opposed to Another Entrée

Back when my novice definition of “healthy” sat on the nutrition throne of my brain, I began to order salads out at restaurants.

Because salads are healthy, right?

Actually, yes! Salads can be amazingly healthy for us, but that doesn’t mean you can’t get fat from eating too many nutrient-dense salads.

Think about it. When most of us order salads at restaurants, we cover them in things like:

• Croutons - Mostly carbs and extra fat

• Cheese - Contains protein, but generally an equal amount of fat or more

• Fatty Dressings - Most salad dressings contain a LOT of fat.

• Avocado - High fat content, even though they are nutritious

• Fatty Meats - A lot of salads (especially Italian salads) can pile on heaps of salami, pepperoni, bacon, prosciutto, etc.

• Nuts (especially candied/glazed) - While nutritious, these nuts contain a lot of fat. And, if they are candied or glazed, they will also include a lot of sugar which equals extra carbs.

Realistically, if you have a caloric plan in mind or are keeping a mindful eye on your macronutrient intake, you could add a few of these to your salad and still reach your goal.

But, these toppings become a problem if you decide to add three or four of these to one salad because it dramatically changes the caloric total of the entire meal. It’s the cumulative calorie effect that results in weight gain.

Some things to add to your salad instead of some of the ingredients above to add another element could be:

• Grilled Chicken - high in protein and will help fill you up with a much needed macronutrient, especially if trying to hold onto hard-earned lean muscle tissue

• Vegetables - For me personally, texture is a big deal, so adding veggies with a little crunch to them is great! You could even try chipped cucumbers, celery, broccoli, carrots, and/or peppers next time.

• Egg Whites - Whole eggs can be great as well, but I prefer hard-boiling an egg and then chopping up the whites for some easy extra protein

• Beans - Rinse out a can of your favorite beans and add some extra protein to your diet. This is a great option for those that eat plant-based diets.

• Fresh Herbs and Spices - Talk about taking flavor to another level without adding any unwanted fats! Try using some basil, mint, dill, or cilantro with your salad. Just make sure you know the herb you choose will pair well with your other flavors.

• Lemon Juice - I like using just a little bit of oil and then squeezing fresh lemon juice onto my salad as a dressing. As it turns out, a little bit of citrus can go a long way.

Again, depending on your goal, any of the options above could be a good substitution or mindful addition.

#3: The Misapplication of Intermittent Fasting

I have been effectively using intermittent fasting in my current fat loss phase, so I’m certainly not making intermittent fasting the enemy here.

I still consume three to four large meals during my “eating window” (which is 10 hours for me instead of the commonly recommended eight-hour window), and I also consume several high-protein snacks.

But, where does it go wrong for some people?

In my opinion, here are two common ways intermittent fasting is frequently abused:

1. You’re narrowing your eating window to less than eight hours and only giving yourself time for one or two large meals.

   • When we do this, we can sometimes negotiate with ourselves and eat foods that are less nutritious or have unfavorable macronutrient compositions since we are sacrificing an entire meal. In other words, we lose sight of nutrition in favor of a game of calories and calories alone. Just because you could eat a plate of nachos and cheese for 1500 calories doesn’t mean that is going to lead to the body recomposition outcomes you want.

   • I’ve also found that intermittent fasting can lead to more snacking, and generally the snacks we tend to pick aren’t as nutrient-dense or macro-friendly as something we might cook for a proper meal.

   • Eating one large meal can also make people feel sluggish and lethargic.

2. Your protein consumption might not be as optimal as it could be.

   • If your goal is to lose fat while maintaining lean muscle tissue and you choose to enter the intermittent fasting world, you may not be able to eat all of the protein you could benefit from according to most evidence-based guidelines.

     • And, as I mentioned above, typical snack foods tend to be high in carbohydrates and fats and generally low in protein. So, if you tend to be a snacker while practicing intermittent fasting, your snacks may be a limiting factor in your progress.

     • If you need more clarity about how you could go about calculating your own protein intake, check out this blog.

Again, intermittent fasting doesn’t have to be the enemy, but it is often touted as a very healthy diet strategy even though it can easily be misapplied.

---

Feeling Motivated?

Like I said at the beginning of the article, it’s probably a good idea to be very careful about making sure that the “healthy” choices we are making are actually choices that help us move toward our goals rather than push us further back.

I also mentioned that part of a coaching relationship with an IVRY Fitness coach is a personalized macronutrient goal to help you reach a specific body composition goal. So, if you have always wanted to make a change but have continuously felt stuck because nothing you have ever tried in the past has worked, consider reaching out to us.

We have open coaching slots and are looking for highly motivated clients that want to make a significant change in their body composition.

Click here to learn more, The journey always has to begin somewhere, so why not here and now?