Why aren’t you losing weight, even though you watch what you eat?
Why aren’t you losing weight, even though you watch what you eat?
Piles of articles and books have been written about weight loss. Everybody has an opinion. However, despite the growing online and offline info available, more and more people have weight problems and are still looking for miraculous solutions.
What do you have to do to lose weight?
Eat unprocessed, natural, seasonal foods
That means vegetables, fish, meat, whole, unprocessed, naturally gluten-free cereal, walnuts, fruit, dairy products. In this order.
Eat unprocessed, natural, seasonal foods
You may expect that food and exercise is everything, but do not forget that you need to have the right mindset.
- Monitor your proteins intake – you need at least 0.8 g of protein per kg of body weight per day. If you want to lose weight, you should make sure the body gets about 1.5 g or protein/body kg. So make sure you eat enough healthy protein (fish, farm animal meat, naturally grown ecological eggs).
- Monitor your sugar intake – about 40% of your daily required calories should come from glucides. About 20% of these should be simple glucides – cereal, potatoes, sweet fruit. The rest should come from vegetables.
- Monitor your daily physical activity – this includes trainings and physical activity intervals that increase your pulse – which helps you modify the reactions in your body.
Any other form of movement (walking, yoga etc.) that does not increase your pulse to at least 65% MHR (maximal heart rate – calculated as 220 – age) does not significantly influence weight loss.
In other words, walking is OK, but it doesn’t help you lose weight – unless you walk fast and do it for at least 35 minutes without any break.
Also, keep in mind:
- Sleep at least 7.5 hours every night
- Drink at least 2.5 liters of water every day
- Spend at least 3 hours on gym every week (medium and high-intensity sessions)
- Calculate 10 days for each kilogram you want to lose, so that you maintain your figure in the future
- Learn to cook and to juggle with flavors and spices – otherwise, you’ll get hopelessly bored
Do not forget that the calories level required for your target weight will have to be maintained constant in order for you to stay at that weight, otherwise you will gain back weight whenever you return to an unhealthy, unbalanced diet.
Why Aren’t You Losing Weight?
You may be eating more than you think
“Nibbling” between meals may increase your daily calorie intake by up to 75%, even though it doesn’t seem too much of a deal to you. It also triggers metabolic processes that enable fat deposits.
You may be eating less healthy than you think
‘Know those fiber biscuits you eat at the office, without any worry? They have less than 2% fibers and a whole lot of sugar. Those adds about gradual sugar elimination are nothing more than commercial deception.
In the same vein, the mixture of walnuts and dried fruit is still a kind of a cake (you know, fats and sugar…)
Your canteen lunch with salmon and rice has about 4 times more rice than you need, and that one harmless candy your coworker gives you has about 100 kcal of sugar content.
Canteen lunches have about twice more meat than we should eat at one meal, and the rice/potato servings are usually 4 times larger than our necessary intake of simple glucides.
Moreover, you need much more vegetables than you can find in any daily canteen menu – and dishes are super-oily, especially borsches and second dishes with sauce.
You don’t exercise as much as you think you do
If you spend one hour in traffic, 8 hours at the office, 2 hours watching TV and 1 hour exercising, you are not an active person. You are a sedentary person who does sports one hour per day. In this case, the required calorie intake is calculated for a sedentary person; then, you add the calories used while exercising.
This is the major difference: active people spend most of their day on the move (waiters/waitresses, bike delivery staff, construction workers). The rest of us are sedentary people who sometimes exercise. Last, but not least, if you go to the gym, only take into account the actual time when you’re exercising.
If, out of your 1-hour gym session, you check your phone for 3 minutes, drink water for 2 minutes, warm up for 5 minutes, stretch for 5 minutes at the end of the session, check yourself out in the mirror for another 2 minutes and talk to a roommate on the phone… You’ve had 40 minutes of exercise, not one whole hour.
Also, out of those 40 minutes, you are not closely following the required movements, which further reduces their effectiveness.
Remember: it’s better to go to the gym and correctly complete an easier one-hour session, than going to an intense workout and giving up every five minutes.
You keep your focus and patience only for short amounts of time
When you weigh yourself daily, only focus on your latest meal, you just add more salad to your meat, you lose focus of the crucial issue: what you eat today triggers changes in your body that may last up to 2 weeks. Your body fat deposits need time to regain their normal circuit through the liver and to be eliminated via fecal matter.
Did you really think the Fairy Godmother charms your fat off your bottom with her magical wand? No. What you do every day is much more important than your short-term actions. Once you start a weight loss diet, it may take you about two weeks to actually lose weight.
And that cake you eat on weekends might trigger the fat deposit process in your tissues for several days – especially if you’re not quite friends with sports.
There is no shortcut
Weight loss tea is nothing but a travesty meant to enrich the ruthless. There are no pills that activate our metabolism. As we advance in age, our calorie consumption becomes lower.
So get your bum off the couch and move, eat healthy foods and ignore the nonsense. If special creams, teas or pills worked, we’d all be showing off our six-packs on the street, because nobody wants to look deformed :).
I hope this article is useful to you.
JoinCrave is a diet and well-being mobile app where nutrition coaches are by your side every step of the way.
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Meet Cori
Hi! I'm Cori
I'm a nutritionist, coach, fitness trainer, and entrepreneur. But above all, I am a curious human being, a part-time geek, and a full-time dreamer. I love to study, passionate about cooking, and do my best to understand the underlying emotional layer that keeps us going.
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