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MBG 10 Reasons You Aren’t Losing Weight and What to Do about it
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Weight loss is often a tedious, lifelong struggle for millions of Americans. Many people will try anything and everything to drop those pounds; fad diets, pills, crash diets, even those magic powders that you sprinkle on your food and the pounds are supposed to melt away. Fat chance!
There are a million books and TV programs that will tell you that it’s really just a matter of mathematics, calories in versus calories out. Unfortunately, for many people, that’s just doesn’t work. We all know people who seem to eat everything in sight, yet they are thin as a rail; while others are eating nothing but lettuce for lunch and resemble Santa Claus.
Losing weight can be much more complicated than it seems. If you have tried just about everything to shed pounds- from jogging endlessly on the treadmill to cutting out all carbs, to counting those points- and you still can’t make anything more than a dent, it might be time for you to start looking for some of those hidden reasons as to why that scale won’t budge.
1. Only Counting Calories
If you believe that counting calories alone is sufficient to lose weight, you might be in for a surprise. You need to consume nutritional content; by this we mean vitamins, minerals, and healthy fats. Otherwise, even though you are eating, your body might believe its starving and cut way back on its metabolism in order to protect itself. When you dump nutrition for those low calorie, but also, low nutrient processed foods, you are interfering with your efforts to lose weight as well as sabotaging your health. Stop focusing so much on every calorie and start eating more nutrient-dense foods that will make you feel full yet give your body what it needs.
2. Leptin Resistance
You might think of your fat cells as an ugly, jiggly, lump part of your body that you hate but your body doesn’t see them that way. They actually are part of your body’s hormone system. Leptin is one of the hormones that fat cells create and leptin tells your brain to use that fat if it needs energy. We can develop leptin resistance, which means that leptin is not recognized, and your body continues to store more fat instead of using it.
3. Insulin Resistance
In the same way leptin resistance keeps our bodies from using stored fat, insulin resistance is a hormonal resistance pattern. When most people hear the words “insulin resistance” they think of diabetes but there are possibly millions of people who have this resistance but have not yet gone on to develop the disease. This resistance to insulin is called pre-diabetic metabolic syndrome. How does this affect your weight loss attempts? Insulin is a hormone that tells your body to store fat, so this would make losing weight extremely difficult for many people.
SEE ALSO: 10 Reasons WHy You Can’t and Won’t Lose Weight
4. Estrogen and/or Testosterone Imbalances
Everyone has these two hormones in their bodies but when they are not imbalanced, it not only leads to weight gain, but it will make it nearly impossible to lose weight, even if you do all the right things. If you think that hormones might be a problem in your battle to drop those pounds, ask your doctor to check your levels. While you are waiting to see your doctor, eliminate as many refined carbs as possible, while increasing the protein and healthy fats in your diet. Even this, though will only go so far until you balance your estrogen and testosterone.
5. Gut Problems
We aren’t referring to the size of your gut, but the problems within your gastrointestinal system. This is a truly miraculous system contains as much as 80 percent of your immune system while hosting trillions of bacteria. It’s almost impossible to understand weight loss until you understand how your gut works. This is a growing field of interest that is looking into how our bacteria relates to how we manage our weight.
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Hannah
Aug 11, 2014 at 10:04 pm
My friend and I started a 30 day weight loss challenge last month and I
am proud to say we are kicking butt so far! We have both managed to lose
an average of 2 pounds/week, which would be considered healthy weight
loss. All thanks go to her sister for recommending this awesome new
program: http://www.antiaging2014.info