3 Reasons You’re Not Able to Lose Weight & Keep it Off

If you’re like most, I bet you’ve found yourself dieting to lose weight and after a being successful for a little while you start to find the weight creeping back on – you’re not able to lose weight & keep it off, for good.

Here’s the good news I get tell my clients and program participants: this probably isn’t your fault and it’s not about will power! 🙂 (Did that give you some hope?)

Why Diets Fail

Most popular diets today are designed only to help you lose weight in the short term, not to help you keep it off over the long term. These ‘fad diets’ diets, as I call them, can often have the opposite effect of what you desire.

Dieting is usually about restricting the calories eat on a daily basis. This restriction causes some a series of shifts in the body and according to Traci Mann, who teaches psychology at the University of Minnesota and has been studying eating habits, self-control and dieting for more than 20 years, it makes it “practically impossible to keep the weight off” she says.

There are three of the biological changes that can occur when you diet, neurological, hormonal and metabolic*.

1. Your brain becomes HYPER AWARE OF FOOD.
“Your brain becomes overly responsive to food, and especially to tasty looking food,” says Mann, “so the thing you’re trying to resist becomes harder to resist.” Basically, your brain becomes overly responsive to food, and especially to tasty looking food. But you don’t just notice it — it actually begins to look more appetizing and tempting.

2. Your HORMONE LEVELS CHANGE, often making you feel hungrier.
As you lose body fat, different hormones in your body changes. The hormones that make you feel hungry (ghrelin) increase and the ones that make you feel full (leptin), decrease. This can have you feel hungry and unsatisfied all the time.

3. Your METABOLISM SLOWS DOWN, and more of what you eat gets stored as fat.
When you fad diet without addressing lifestyle and behavioral changes, you’re really telling your body that it is starving. Your body responds by being as efficient as it can and burning a few calories as possible (not a good thing when trying to lose weight).

Please don’t take this as a reason to give up losing weight and understand it doesn’t mean that long-term weight loss is impossible.

What it says is to start a weight loss program that is not overly obsessed with food or being a gym rat – and choose one that looks at behavioral and lifestyle changes for long-term weight loss success.

*Resources: Washington Post & PubMed

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