Why Your Diet May Be Making Weight Loss Harder

I work with a lot of women who, like me, have struggled with their weight for a long time.

And it's not for lack of trying.  They are trying, in fact they’re working hard trying to do all the right things, eat healthy, exercise…but yet that damn scale still won’t budge!

More often than not, when we dive in and look at what they’re doing, what their diet looks like and their lifestyle it often turns out they’re eating too few calories

Often they are trying to get by eating 1200 calories or less per day and still trying to keep up with all the demands of life.

Let's get this straight 1200 calories is about the amount your body expends just to keep you alive in a coma - that's without adding in all the basics of life - going to work, caring for yourself and your family exercising, stress…etc…etc..etc..that's just not enough for a busy woman doing everything she can to get through life!

If you look at the FDA Calorie recommendation charts 1200 is appropriate for a 2-3 year old child.  Not a full grown adult.

If you’re over the age of 35 you probably grew up thinking eating around 1200 calories a day is the norm for weight loss - somewhere along the way that became the magic number for weight loss.

Most of us have tried that… over and over again.  We may lose some initially but 99.999% of the time that loss is fleeting and we end up gaining it back and usually it brings friends.

This also often involves being hungry (A LOT!), feeling deprived, eating foods you don’t particularly enjoy…trying to white knuckle it through your day while barely giving your body what it needs to survive.

Then you wonder why you can’t stick to it - you blame yourself - it must be you right?  Because this is what we’re supposed to do to lose weight - right?

We keep trying over and over again because we think the reason it didn’t work or that it didn’t stick was because of something we did…I didn’t try hard enough…I gave up too soon…I just need more willpower…I can never stick to anything…

When in reality it just wasn’t something that was realistic for the long term - at least not if you want to actually be healthy, have energy, feel good, and thrive!

When you repeatedly try to lose weight with super restrictive low calorie diets you end up making weight loss a lot harder than it needs to be.

Your body is smart - its whole goal is to keep you alive and it will adapt to what you give it.

That means when you severely restrict your calories - your metabolism will adapt to that - it's very efficient like that. It will learn to adapt to the low calories that you’re giving it.

Over time, it will start to conserve energy for those systems of your body that are essential to keeping you alive.  It will turn down the energy it expends on those things that aren’t totally necessary.  

This is called metabolic adaptation.  

When your metabolism adapts to the lower end, that's when your weight loss starts to stall, you start noticing you feel hungrier, have more cravings and your energy taps out.

Then you have to lower your calories even more to get the scale moving again…this becomes a very slippery slope.

This also means that if you go back to trying to eat “normally” you’ll likely re-gain weight faster and it can also make it harder for you to lose the weight again the next time you try.

That's why we need to get out of the diet mindset to lose weight!  It just doesn’t work.

To lose weight successfully - meaning you can actually keep it off without it feeling like another full time job - you need to do things that you can keep up for the long haul.

That means starting slow and with small steps - so you can easily incorporate them in your life.  Starting where you are now (not where you think you should be) and making it doable.

Giving your body the nutrients, building blocks, and energy that it needs to not just survive but to thrive.  Focus on real whole foods and not forcing yourself to push through hunger.

Sleeping like your life depends on it - because it does!  Sleep is the time for your body to rest and recover ( it's also when you burn fat).  If it isn’t able to do that properly it becomes a huge stressor on your body and will affect your weight loss and overall health.

As I always say you can have everything else all dialed in, but if you're not getting enough sleep your progress will suffer.

Another key piece that most diets don’t take into account or teach you is that you need to get your mind right.

This is vital.  Especially if you have a long history of dieting, you also probably have a ton of thoughts and stories that run on repeat through your head about your ability to lose weight.

Those thoughts and stories can creep in at the worst possible time and keep you stuck or completely throw you off track.

We need to get away from diet extremes.  We flip from overeating and stuffing ourselves to severely restricting calories and starving ourselves.  That's not good for us physically or mentally.