Are you watching what you eat, or exercising madly, but you are still struggling to lose weight?
I have been a Naturopath for over 10 years now, specializing in weight loss and fatigue. I find that there are consistently a few main reasons why people don’t lose weight. The article below highlights the 3 Top reasons why people don’t lose weight and fail to reach their health goals.
Here are the Top 3 reasons why people don’t lose weight.
Exercising too much
Exercise is excellent for your overall health and has been proven to reduce cardiovascular risk factors, improve strength, reduce stress and improve how well we feel.
We all feel excellent after a run, gym session, yoga or pilates class … but in terms of weight loss exercise doesn’t deliver the results that you can achieve from a good weight loss diet. I commonly hear of clients who have been to the gym 3 – 4 times per week for 6 months and have only lost 3-4 kgs of weight. On the HcG diet for example you should typically lose around 1kg of fat per week and therefore over a 6 month period you should lose between 20 – 25kg of fat.
This is because body will normally either be building or reducing. It doesn’t do both at once. Exercise is a building form of activity while weight loss is a reducing form. It is therefore better to work in sync with the body and follow its lead. In other words use a weight loss diet for size reduction and then use exercise, a building form, for increasing strength and maintaining your health.
Don’t get me wrong, I love exercise, and do the gym twice a week and yoga twice a week but I don’t use exercise as my primary weight loss method. If I need to lose weight I use the HcG diet to lose weight and then exercise to maintain my weight and to improve strength, flexibility and muscle tone.
Eating the wrong foods
I’m a big believer in using our body’s ability to burn fat as a means of weight loss as opposed to using calorie restrictive diets. These diet’s are called mechanism diets and often use survival based mechanisms that we all have but don’t often use in our current world of abundance. Historically we went hungry for large periods of time and our body had to initiate mechanisms to burn our energy stores (fat) to keep us alive. The HcG diet and the Shake it (ketogenic) diet are two successful mechanism based diets that I use in the clinic.
Mechanism based diets are very successful and people typically lose between 0.5 – 1 kg of fat per week. Unfortunately eating the wrong food on these diets turns off the fat burning mechanism and the diet ceases to be effective. I once saw some research on the shake it ketogenic diet. People were consistently losing 0.5kg per week while eating the right food and maintaining the fat burning mechanism. They then introduced a single slice of bread to the diet. This had the effect of turning off the bodies need to burn fat instead of carbohydrates and the people stopped losing any weight. Some people actually started gaining weight … just from one piece of bread.
The reason I use the HcG Diet and the Shake it (Ketogenic) diets in the clinic is due to the consistent success that they deliver. I’m confident that every people who follows the diet well will lose weight and achieve their weight loss and health goals.
Confusing the body
The main job of the body is to keep us alive and it’s pretty damn good good at it generally. It’s incredible the lengths that the body will go to in order to preserve life. The mind on the other hand messes without us constantly.
If we are looking at weight loss from the body’s perspective most mechanism based diets such as the HcG diet or Shake it (ketogenic) Diet work by telling the body that you are starving and forcing the body to suppress your appetite and to burn fat for energy. The body is very good at this. When the right environment is created, by sticking to your diet as prescribed, it gets the signal that it is starving and it activates the appropriate survival mechanism. The results are consistent and replicatable … which is why I love these diets so much.
If however you activate these mechanisms and then break your diet by eating too much or the wrong foods you’re body gets confused. It doesn’t know if you are starving or not and therefore doesn’t know whether to activate its mechanisms or not. More often than not it will do nothing and you won’t lose weight. In some circumstances though the body will think it is protecting you and it will actually start storing fat as a survival protection.
The best way to ensure that you lose weight is to stick to the diet as prescribed so that this gives your body very clear messages as to what you want it to do … Burn fat!!!
The Top 3 reasons why people don’t lose weight was written by Award Winning Naturopath and Weight Loss Specialist Tony Daniel from Capalaba Natural Health.
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