Top 5 Reasons You Can't Lose Weight

1. You aren’t tracking calories. At the end of the day, the bread and butter of weight loss (no pun intended) is calorie tracking. Calories are units of energy and fat is predominantly stored energy. So even if you are “eating healthy” food that is nutrient dense it may still have high calorie/energy content and you may be consuming as much as or even more than you are burning off in a day. So, the easiest thing to do is start tracking calories. For women seeking to lose weight the math can get overwhelming so I try to keep it simple – eat no less than 1200 calories a day with unlimited greens (you don’t have to count the calories in the greens). And no more than 1600 with unlimited greens. And if you aren’t exercising 1600 calories may simply keep you from gaining weight. Because many women don’t have an inherently high calorie burn, which brings me to the next point.

2. You aren’t exercising at all or enough. Ultimately, you can’t starve off the weight. By controlling what you eat you can stop yourself from gaining and if you are diligent you can get the scale trending down, but it will be slow going. This is because if you burn 1600 calories in a day and you are eating 1500 calories in a day you only have a calorie deficit of 100 calories that day. It takes a deficit of roughly 3500 calories burned to lose a pound of stored fat. Therefore, at this rate you will lose a pound or so every couple of weeks to a month. But… exercise will change the game here. When we exercise we create an energy call, which boosts your daily calorie burn. So, you can take that daily burn from 1600 to 2000 with 30 minutes of focused exercise (resistance training and HIIT training). This helps you go from 100 calories burned a day to 500 calories burned a day, helping you burn fat 5 times faster. Try to incorporate at least 4 thirty-minute training sessions in a week. If you aren’t sure what to do check out The Fitness App’s free trial and explore all the different workout offerings in there.

3. You have a thyroid condition. Fatigue. Dry brittle hair. Constipation. Unexplained weight gain. If you have noticed any of those symptoms, it’s possible you may be struggling with hypothyroidism. This condition won’t cause significant weight gain (generally about 10lbs to 15lbs of extra bodyfat) but it will absolutely make it harder to lose weight. Talk to your doctor and ask him or her to run some routine thyroid tests. Generally, bloodwork to check your level of TSH (thyroid stimulating hormone, T4, and T3) is most common. You can also inquire about whether or not a thyroid scan and/or the radioactive iodine uptake test should be considered.  One thing you can do right now is ensure you have no nutrient deficiencies.  he key vitamins and minerals to be aware of are selenium, magnesium, zinc, iodine, b12, and vitamin D.   varied diet with plenty of whole foods will cover these bases, but a high quality multi vitamin will help too.

4. Your prescriptions are working against you. There’s no question that certain medications can make weight loss more difficult. If you are on one or more of the following: birth control, tricyclic anti-depressants, SSRI’s, antihistamines, beta blockers, corticosteroids, MAOI’s, antipsychotics – talk to your doctor about potential alternatives that will have a similar impact without negative effecting your metabolism.

5. Poor sleep. Sleep plays a huge role in pretty much every aspect of our health and metabolism. The key factors in which sleep impacts our weight is in the way it impacts our hormones. When we don’t sleep we have a tendency to over eat the next day because our body makes more ghrelin (hunger hormone) and less leptin (satiety hormone). Plus, lack of sleep inhibits the production of fat burning hormones like HGH and instead upregulates the production of stress hormones like cortisol that promote fat storage when elevated chronically. Make sure to prioritize your sleep by having a set bedtime every night. After the sun goes down make sure all your tech switches to “night shift mode” to block blue light, which can keep you awake and inhibit the production of another key hormone, melatonin. Get blue blockers if you are going to watch tv past 9pm and wear sleep shades at night to block out light. Keep your room around 66-70 degrees Fahrenheit as a cooler room helps keep you asleep. No caffeine after 2pm and no food at least two hours before bed.

If you pay attention to the 5 tips above it will effectively trouble shoot 90+% of anything that has been holding you back on your weight loss journey!