Why you are not losing weight

Many women follow a strict diet and exercise every day, yet after weeks of hard work they have not lost any weight. That is a sign that something is wrong. Here are some of the reasons that may be stopping you from losing those kilos.

Compensating too much

After hours of effort at the gym, you go home and eat to make up for everything you burned. We usually overestimate the calories we burn during exercise and end up eating more than we used.

Not enough sleep

Not sleeping enough reduces the benefits of exercise and causes weight gain. Lack of sleep does not only affect your ability to exercise and the quality of your workouts; it also lowers your metabolic rate (the rate at which you burn calories), increases weight gain after meals and raises stress, which itself is partly responsible for weight gain.

Sugary drinks

If you are following a diet properly and not seeing the scales move, the sugar in your drinks may be to blame. Juices, flavoured drinks, energy drinks and alcoholic drinks are all high in energy that has to be counted.

Counting portions wrongly

This is one of the commonest mistakes dieters make. Besides miscounting the calories in each meal, dieters tend to eat more often. Six small meals can add up to a huge calorie intake that we never accounted for.

Eating too little

The opposite mistake: eating very little works for no more than ten days. When the body does not get enough food, its metabolism switches to fasting or emergency mode, burning less food and storing more fat.

Eating inconsistently

Stick to one diet and do not change the amounts you eat drastically. Eating few calories one day and many the next turns the body into a fat-storing machine. We see this often when someone has a small piece of cake after a strict diet.

Doing the same exercise

Repeating the same exercise is boring, which reduces the benefit and makes it harder to focus on burning fat effectively. The body also adapts quickly to an exercise, so its benefit drops with repetition. Variety is the key.

You do not need to lose weight

This may come as a shock to many, but quite a few thin women try hard to lose weight. This is not only ineffective but harmful to the body. See a doctor to find out your ideal weight. If you do not need to lose weight, you can keep exercising to strengthen your muscles and reduce fat, with a different diet.

Not knowing your body fat

It is hard to know how much of your body is fat and how much is water, and hard to estimate how much fat you lose through exercise. Yet this matters a great deal in judging whether a diet is working. Remember that turning fat into muscle does not show up as weight loss, but it is still a healthier state. On the other hand, a diet that leaves you weak and tired is destroying muscle and keeping fat, the opposite of what you want.

Health problems

A wide range of medical conditions can prevent weight loss. The most important and most common are thyroid and hormone problems, so see a doctor to make sure nothing is hiding behind the weight gain.