Losing weight is no walk in the park. Effective weight loss requires a lot of hard work and discipline, and even with a well-designed diet and exercise regimen losing weight can be difficult. Of course, this is no secret as many, many individuals have struggled with weight loss at some point.
Part of what makes losing weight such a challenge is the fact that there’s so many different ways to approach weight loss with so many people advising to do so many different types of things to lose weight. Such a wide variety of approaches and ideas exist when it comes to weight loss because there a ton of different factors involved when it comes to your weight. Each factor contributes to your weight in different ways and they can all be important, but it keeping track of everything can be extremely challenging.
Because of this, sometimes people work hard to lose weight and are let down when they step on the scale and realize they haven’t lost weight despite weeks of dieting and exercising. If this is the case for you, it’s important to stay motivated to keep going because desire, will, and drive are necessary to lose weight. Realizing your weight loss routines haven’t been successful can be quite discouraging, but your routines aren’t working for a reason, and finding these reasons can save your efforts.
Here are 5 of the most common reasons you’re not losing weight:
1. You’re Eating Things You Shouldn’t
Whenever you’re struggling to lose weight, you should make sure you’re eating right because you can almost never lose weight without fixing your diet, which is the primary battleground for weight loss. So, check your kitchen to see what you’re eating.
You want to avoid any excess amounts of bread or dough, sugars, and anything that’s processed. Learning about what you can eat can be extremely complicated, but there’s two general rules you can follow that will certainly help. First, try to eat foods with the least amount of ingredients on the label, and second, if you can’t pronounce it then it’s most likely something you don’t want to eat.
Otherwise, try to focus on eating most of the starchy carbohydrates on the days when you do strength training or any intense exercise. Starchy carbs are foods like potatoes, dark rice, and grains. Then, on your more relaxed days, whether they be rest days or light exercising days, try to focus eating mostly protein and vegetables and less starchy foods. Just by making sure your diets not violating these rules you can make your diet a ton better.
2. You’re Still Overeating
So, like we just said, always make sure things are set up well in the kitchen first to ensure that you’ll actually lose weight. However, many people do focus on their diet when they try to lose weight and still don’t see results. If this is where you are, you might want to check to see if you’re still overeating.
Even if you cleaned up your diet perfectly, losing weight ultimately comes down to a calorie deficit. So, you need to burn more calories than you consume. Obviously you still need energy, so never deprive yourself of food (it will usually backfire, anyway). Instead, do tricks to help you cut any calories you don’t need. Only eat if you’re hungry, and eat slowly when you do so you feel when you’re full.
The key here is slow and steady – you want a slight calorie deficit each day, but nothing more. The second you and your body feel like you’re missing out all of time, you’re going to want to give in. Treat yourself to healthy, whole snacks throughout the day, but cut all the unnecessary calories. Or instance, drink water instead of soda or juice.
3. You’re Not Exercising In The Right Way
This is a common mistake and an easy one to make. While you need to exercise, and most exercise is good, the type of exercise can make a difference in how good it is for you. Cardio, a necessary part of any workout routine, you want to limit cardio a little. Your workout should never consist of only cardio, and it shouldn’t have too much cardio even if there’s other workouts included. Too much cardio can eat away at your lean muscle mass (which you need for your metabolism to work well) and it can make you feel energy-deprived, leading to excessive eating.
On the other hand, many people don’t lift enough weights, or any at all. Strength training is the most effective type of exercise when it comes to burning fat and it gives you much more bang for your buck. Not only will it burn more fat quickly, but it will help you build lean muscle, which will increase your metabolism leading to more calorie burning all of the time.
4. You Need To Work Harder, Not Longer
People make this mistake often by doing too much of a relaxed exercise for too long. Effective workouts are intensity-dependent more so than time-dependent, so you need to intensify your workout. Unless you’re some type of athlete, you should never spend more than 60 minutes on your workout.
So, instead of doing a light run for a long while, do an interval workout by incorporating brief moments of intense sprints. Most of the calories you burn from exercising happens from the afterburn from your workouts, which is the 24-48 hours following your workout as the body recovers. The more intense your workout is, the more intense the afterburn is because your body needs more energy to recover.
5. You Need To Relax A Little
This sort of goes hand in hand with the last one, but this is another common mistake among people trying to lose weight but to no avail. Like we just said, rest days and recovery time is when the body’s doing most of the work and burning most of the calories, so you want to make sure your body has the sufficient time to do so. You can make sure you’re giving your body enough time to recover by focusing on different parts of your body each workout and putting rest days or light days after your harder exercise days. Getting enough rest will also help you work harder during your exercises, so this is very important, and often times it’s overlooked.
At the end of the day, losing weight comes down to an extensive, slow effort. There are many things that factor into whether or not you’ll lose weight, and how much, so you need to make sure you’re taking the proper time and balance to focus on all of the aspect. To learn about all of the factors, read about how to lose weight. Always remember, losing weight is a very long-distance marathon, so don’t be discouraged if it’s taking longer than you hoped for, just make sure you’re focusing on all of the different aspects.