If you have been intentionally making some changes to lose weight and nothing’s working, here are my top 5 reasons why you can’t lose weight. These may help to know as it could be one of these things that you’re maybe overlooking. Now everyone is different and everyone is individual, so it might not be these five things at all, and it might be something you need some further support with a 1:1 consult. 

You’re Eating Too Much

The number one reason people aren’t losing weight is they’re literally just eating too much.  I don’t mean that they’re eating too much and expecting to lose weight, it’s more, they are eating too much and they don’t realise it. 

When I first see clients for weight loss, my approach is not to start calorie counting. We change what they eat first, before we go into looking at any calorie numbers and with a lot of my clients, I see so much success just by changing what people eat without doing any calorie counting at all. But if you have intentionally changed what you’ve been eating over a period of time and you’re not seeing the results you want to, then that is a time to grab a food tracking app and have a look at how many calories you’re eating. Many people do underestimate the amount of calories in their snacks, the amount of calories in their drinks or they fail to take into account what they’re doing on the weekends. 

The best thing you can do at this point is track a couple of days. You want to check a couple of weekdays and then also a couple of weekend days, if they’re different for you. But just to reiterate, food tracking isn’t always essential. I don’t always start with that with clients. We definitely start with the what first, before we look at how much. But if you have been making some intentional changes for a period of time, then tracking a couple of days is good to know where you’re at. 

You’re Not Exercising

The research will tell us that dietary interventions alone can facilitate weight loss and can lead to weight loss. But, depending on how quickly you want to lose that weight loss and for your overall health, you really need to include some kind of exercise in that picture as well. Now the number one reason that people understand exercise helps with weight loss is it helps increase your energy expenditure, which it does, but there are other underlying mechanisms why exercise becomes beneficial for weight loss. For example, moderate intensity cardio exercise if you’re doing that for longer periods of time, your body will start to predominantly  break down more fat to fuel that activity. Resistance training, which is any kind of weight training, coupled with enough protein in your diet will help you build more muscle mass. Your body will then expend more energy trying to maintain that muscle mass, so that helps increase your energy expenditure.

Not Being Consistent 

Number three is people not being consistent, which mainly happens with weekdays versus weekends. We do what we can during the week and then when it comes to the weekend, we kind of just give up a little bit or things get a bit hard because we don’t have that same structure. 

When we’re looking to lose weight, the biggest thing we can do is be consistent over a longer period of time. Now, I don’t mean consistency is that you have to eat the same thing every day. I mean the consistency with the changes that you’re making. We can’t do it for a week and expect results. We need to be doing things for at least four weeks and checking in. 

If you need extra support with weight loss, check out my group coaching program, Weighing in Lighter.