7 Not So Obvious Reasons You’re Not Losing Fat

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Are you dieting and not losing weight?

Wait, let me ask that in a different way.

Are you doing “all the right things” like exercising, counting calories, tracking your steps, and maybe even drinking smoothies…and NOTHING…NADA….ZILCH…?

You feel a little better, stronger, and a tiny bit happier, but you WISH the scale would just give a little?

This is the MOST common problem I see when it comes to weight loss. You’re so focused on “doing the right things” that you forget to realize you are UNIQUE.

In this quick article I’m going to help you realize that your “right thing”, might not be your “right thing.”

In fact, how it could be contributing to your inability to lose the weight you want.

There are a million and one reasons weight loss isn’t happening for you, so I’m only going to give you the 7 most common.

Being mindful of these reasons, or mistakes, if you will can help you bust through any plateaus or more importantly shift your thinking from a “dieting” and “weight loss” to “habits” and “fat loss.”

Check out our list of common reasons women aren’t losing weight, and see if any make sense to you.

Click HERE to learn how the Flat Belly System can help you lose stubborn fat.

1.) More Emphasis on Exercise Than Your Diet

You’ve probably heard or seen the internet meme that says “You can’t out train a bad diet.” Well as much as I try to avoid clichés, this one is true.

Yes, exercise is a critical component to weight loss. Our bodies were meant to MOVE, why do you think you have muscles, tendons, and joints?

It’s not to sit on your butt, swipe your phone, or walk to the pantry, those magical movers are there for you to CHALLENGE them.

But, as awesome as you can make your body look with a good fitness routine, if you don’t have your nutrition dialed in, you’ll eventually hate exercise.

I’m a fan of short high-intensity workouts, in fact I created my own method of training called HIMT (High-Intensity Metabolic Training). 20-30 minutes, 3-5x per week, depending on your goal is all you need to see results. (Grab 7 videos by clicking the button below):

Before you start these workouts, make sure you’re starting your meal with protein, healthy fats, vegetables, fruits, and digestible grains (rice, beans, quinoa, etc…) Food first, then fitness.

2.) Low Quality Living Leads to Low Quality Results

You better sit down for this: If you aren’t healthy, your body is not going to help you lose weight.

Being healthy isn’t just about eating good foods and exercising regularly. True health comes from ALL areas of life.

Just like you can’t out exercise a bad diet. You can’t out eat lack of sleep. You can’t overeat vegetables to compensate for being stressed out all of the time.

Stress is a vicious cycle, so you wouldn’t have the mental capacity to try to eat better or exercise smarter if you’re constantly stressed out.

A low quality life comes from too much stress, lack of sleep, a sedentary lifestyle, poor food choices, and no balance.

If this sounds like and you are expecting to see weight loss results, you’ll eventually go insane, because expecting anything from these habits will lead the strongest woman to frustration, disappointment, and overwhelm.

The solution? Identify your BIGGEST, ugliest, stress troubling you daily and FIX IT. Sounds easy, it’s not, but if you want to lose weight, it’s necessary you fix your stressors holding you and your body of your dreams down.

3.) You Aren’t Eating Enough

Nope, not a typo.

I’d say 90% of the food diaries I read, have this problem: not enough food.

Here’s why: DIETS!

When you go on calorie restrictive diets your body goes into survival mode, saving energy by lowering your body temperature, reducing pulse, and slowing thyroid function.

ALL things that cause eventual weight gain.

Typical signs you can’t lose weight because you aren’t eating enough are feeling stressed out all of the time, food cravings, cold hands and feet/below 98.6 body temperature, low energy, and of course, stubborn fat.

Remember, every day you eat fewer calories than you should, your fat cells become stronger, healthier, and less susceptible to being released/burned.

4.) Post Metabolic Damage From Dieting Past

Speaking of diets.

I feel the need to elaborate on a specific consequence of a past full of low-fat, low-sugar, and skipping meals, a severely slow metabolism.

Because you’ve been lead to believe the only to lose weight is to be in a calorie deficit, most women start dieting, then slash their calories and add a large amount of exercise to their daily routine.

All of a sudden you have an extreme calorie deficit that is working against you. This leads to:

– Slowed thyroid production

– Decrease in muscle mass

– Increase in stress hormones

– Overall decrease in energy levels

While the symptoms of a damage metabolism are obvious to you, since you are experiencing them daily, this “reason” for lack of weight loss probably hasn’t crossed your mind.

It’s a tough pill to swallow to accept that your dieting past has negatively affected your healthy present and future weight loss.

While it may be very difficult to recover from a past full of yo-yo diets, it’s NOT impossible

It starts with acceptance and eating food.

5.) You Haven’t Given Your Program Enough Time to See Results

Patience is a vir…hurry up! I don’t have time to read your quotes.

We live in a “I want it NOW” world. We instantly receive phone calls, messages, tweets, and more… We can fly across the world in a few hours and have a full-course meal delivered to our door step.

We can literally have almost anything we want, with the click of a button.

Except for weight loss.

Because your body doesn’t understand RIGHT NOW.

Did you gain the 30 pounds you want to lose in 30 days? No? Then why do you think you can lose 30 pounds in 30 days?

Give your program a chance. Especially if your program is focused on HEALTH and fat loss, instead of short-term weight loss.

6.) You’re Exercise Program Is Calorie-Dominant Instead of Muscle-Focused

If your exercise program burns more calories DURING the workout versus AFTER your workout, you need to re-evaluate your exercise choices.

Workouts like treadmill, Zumba, cycle, cardio-based boot camps, and elliptical sessions all burn plenty of calories, BUT have 2 tragic flaws:

1.) They fail to provide you a metabolic boost that give you an EXTRA boost of calorie-burn, this effect is referred to as “After-Burn.”

2.) Cardio focused workouts lead to increased stress hormone production, specifically cortisol. Excess cortisol destroys lean muscle mass, your only tissue that burns fat.

It’s understandable you’ve chosen workouts that claim to burn calories in the “fat-burning zone,” because you’ve been lied to and heavily marketed to.

It’s time to break the cycle of doing what the masses do and start doing what your intuition says.

Click HERE to learn about how this one type of exercise is causing you to GAIN weight.