Are you failing to lose weight? We’d all want to be 20 pounds lighter, thinner, trimmer, and just overall more attractive!
However, most of the time, weight loss programs and resolutions go bust only after a few days of trying, or at least, a few weeks. We all lose a few pounds initially, some people more than others, but everything comes to a standstill after a while. Either we stop after reaching our goal or we give up halfway, but the result is always the same. No fad diets or crash diets are sustainable in the long run, for a number of reasons.
So, why do we failing to lose weight?
These are the reasons why you are failing to lose weight:
- Too Much Too Soon
Most of our weight loss diets are started on an urgent basis. We want to lose a significant amount of weight within a very little time, i.e. 10 pounds in a week, or 30 pounds in a month, just before a wedding, a presentation or a vacation. We starve ourselves and only eat a tiny portion just enough to live on, and ultimately reach our weight goal. However, not a lot of people keep on their weight loss journey after they’ve reached their goal.
What happens next is that we ultimately gain back the weight we’ve lost, immediately after the wedding is over, the presentation was a success and even during the vacation. All that pain and suffering our body went through eventually becomes pointless.
This is simply a case of “too much too soon”; we want to lose too much weight too soon, and we give up too soon. Immediately after we reach our desired weight, we make no more attempts to maintain it, mainly because it was hard to reach the goal in the first place. Our body has to starve and suffer a lot to lose weight in a very short amount of time, and it doesn’t want to do this for a long time. Proper weight lose regimes take a long time to take effort, and are also sustainable.
- Not for the Right Reasons
This reason for losing weight is somewhat more connected to women than to men.
Women, mostly, has all the wrong reasons for wanting to lose weight. They want to lose significant amount of weight in a very short time because they want to fit into a special dress, lose a few pounds for a date, look good for their college reunion, or slim down for their own wedding. They try very hard to lose a few pounds for a few days and then give up, either because their special reason for losing weight has come and gone, or because it’s too hard.
The first and foremost reason to lose your excess pounds would be not just to look good, but to be healthy and fit on the inside, as well. When you are concerned about your outer looks only, you would want to lose some pounds by any means possible, no matter how much it negatively affects your health. This will lead to weight loss surely, but with consequences. The wrong reasons for losing weight can only take you to a certain distance, because it is easier to give up on them after a while.
- Taking the Wrong Approach
When it comes to trying our new eating habits, we often take the wrong approach. Instead of finding out the right amount and type of food to eat, we simply reduce our servings to eat tiny portions of food that are not even enough to live on. This results in loss of weight in a very short time, but also loss of muscles and energy. The less you eat, the less energetic you feel; exercising can be quite out of the question when you are going to feel dizzy all the time from lack of enough food.
With the loss of muscles, you also lose mitochondria – which are the cells present inside muscles that burn fat. When you lose your mitochondria reserves, it actually slows down the fat-burning process. Starving and reducing your portions drastically may show changes in your weight on the scale, but you’ll also be losing important muscles in the process.
On the other, if you take the right approach to weight loss, i.e. a combination of protein-based diet and exercise, you will burn fat and nothing else. Fat takes up more space than muscle, even when they weigh the same. When you are burning fat with exercise and careful calorie intake, you can see the changes on your scale as well as on yourself.
The right way to lose weight is by a careful balance of high-protein, high-fibre, low-carb diet and exercise. The more you burn fat, the more you lose weight and thin down, which is much better than starving yourself to lose a few pounds. Choosing the right way to lose weight will also make it sustainable, so there’s less chance of you failing midway.
- Not Moving Forward After a Mistake
When you are eating healthy, there will be some be a few mistakes. You might accidentally end up finishing off your child’s Nutella-sandwich or binge on a few slices of pizza while hanging out with your friends, or even eat an entire pack of chips when you are in a particularly bad mood. If you decide to end your healthy food regime after a single mistake, you might not be able to stick to your resolution at all.
What you need to do is to move past your mistakes and get on with healthy eating from the very meal. Even if you have binged on a buffet, finished an entire cake by yourself or forgotten to exercise for a whole week, these are no reasons to stop eating right. You can reduce your portions slightly for the next few days or increase your exercise routine, but what you shouldn’t do is to give up.
- Sacrificing Too Much
Most healthy eating routines follow a low-carb, low-sugar diet which can be a disappointment if you have a very prominent sweet tooth. For someone who loved fried food, chocolate bars and pizzas, eating healthy can be a tough start. However, when you feel like you’re sacrificing too much of your favourite foods to lose weight and eat healthily, it might be difficult for you to go on for long.
You might have to sacrifice some of the delicious, tempting but unhealthy food for you, but you can still prepare and serve your favourite meals. There are healthy and fat-free, low-carb substitution ingredients for everything that you want to eat that will not add to your weight much.
For example, did you know that you can make a healthy version of pizza using ground cauliflower or zucchini slices as a crust? Or that baked sweet potato, apple or beet slices can be a healthy alternative to store-bought deep-fried potato chips? Dark chocolate bars have almost no sugar in them, and they are even good for your heart! In the same way, you can find healthy alternatives for everything you like, so there won’t be much need to sacrifice.
- Being Influenced by Others
When you decide to lose weight, it should be your own decision. Deciding to lose weight because someone else had criticized you or because you were jealous of others, won’t take you very far. If you decide to lose weight and start eating for others, you’ll probably give in halfway.
If and when you start eating healthy and exercising, it should be from the love of your own self. Whether you are close to your ideal weight or 70-pound overweight, you still need to love your body. When you are eating healthy, it should be because of your own improvement and the betterment of your health, not influenced by the criticisms of other people of your body.
- Making Mistakes Unknowingly
You might be breaking rules of healthy eating without even knowing it, simply by adding one spoonful of sugar in your coffee, not substituting whole-milk for skimmed milk, eating white rice instead of brown rice or quinoa. The mistakes may be simple and something you’ve missed completely, but they may be the reason you are not losing weight, or at least, not losing as much weight as you want to.
It is therefore important that you keep a track of everything that you eat every day – every single calorie and every single mistake. Note down if you’ve had a beer with your friends or a slice of pizza by yourself, or even when you’ve mistakenly added too much oil to your salad. This will help you keep a track of the mistakes you are making in your diet.
- Expecting Too Big a Change
Everyone loses weight on their own pace. You might know someone who has lost 10 pounds in a single week, whereas you can only manage two pounds in a week. This could mean that you need a change in your new eating habit or just that it will take you longer to reach your desired goal.
So don’t give up in the middle of your new eating habit just because you are not losing weight as fast as someone else you know, or if you can’t see the changes on your body. Continue so that you don’t just lose weight in the future, but also stay fit and healthy.
- Focusing Too Much on Food will make you falling to lose weight
Even if you are making drastic changes to your food habit, you cannot lose a lot of weight unless you are also focusing on exercise. Beside a high-protein low-carb diet, you also need to live an active life, move around as much as you can, and exercise regularly.
You cannot just focus on your food and spend all day thinking about what you can and cannot eat. Exercising should be a big part of your life as well, whatever physical activity you chose – running, power walking, jogging, strength training or yoga. Your body needs to sweat and work in order to lose weight properly.
- You’re Binge Eating Healthy Food
You cannot binge eat anything when you’re trying to lose weight, even when it’s healthy food. Just because low-carb low-fat foods like yogurt and apples are allowed, it doesn’t mean you can eat more than what’s adequate for you. Although high in fibre and low in fat, apples and yogurt still have some calories in them, and they will still make its way into your body.
If your diet isn’t working, it can be because you’re eating more than what should be enough for you. Nuts, seeds, nut butter, yogurt, dark chocolate are harmless in moderate amounts but will add to your weight if you overdo them.
There can be a number of reasons why your diets aren’t working, or why they are not working as fast as you’d want them to be. You can’t expect to lose weight within a few days magically, just because you’ve stopped eating everything bad. It might take some time to adjust to your new eating habits and there will be mistakes along the way – but they are all to be expected.
It will take you some time to understand what foods work the best for you, and what foods are making you lose weight effectively. Ignore all the blunders and slipups you make along the way and go on trying to make your life a better one, and one day, you will surely reach your desired weight with the right balance of good food and exercise.
