If you’ve lost weight, chances are greater than not, that you’ve regained it plus some. This sad fact plagues so many people that have gone through incredible effort to lose weight. Then it seems like the deck is stacked against them and they watch helplessly as the scale climbs.
Is it something that you’re doing? What’s going on with your body that makes you gain all of this weight? Well it turns out, there are some biological factors at play that may be the reason you can’t keep the weight off.
Why Can’t You Keep The Weight Off After Losing It?
1.Stress
The antithesis of health is stress. There are many reasons that stress kills our bodies. One of these reasons is called cortisol. This stress hormone is released when we’re under pressure and can really wreak havoc on your metabolism.
Cortisol makes your metabolism work slower than it would if you weren’t stressed out. In addition to that, cortisol makes you crave fat and sugar-laden foods. This combination of cravings and slower metabolism helps you pack on pounds that you had previously shed. If you want to counter this, try stress management techniques. Meditation, yoga, and unplugging from technology are all recommended ways to lower your stress.
Free Report: Why You Can't Shift Your Belly Fat
2. You Crash Dieted
We all know someone who lost weight eating five hundred calories a day. While many of us don’t have the willpower to maintain this type of diet, there are plenty of very-low-calorie diets out there. 550 calories per day doesn’t give you enough nutrition or energy. So, your body fights against you.
According to Bistro M.D. losing weight at a slower pace and eating more calories will help stop the rebound effect that many people see on very-low-calorie diets. Ideally people want to eat between 1200 1500 calories per day when trying to lose weight. Eating at a sustainable rate will result in better and longer lasting weight loss.
3. Your Metabolism Slowed
NBC news recently reported that weight loss destroys our metabolism. The Center For Obesity Research And Education conducted a study about metabolic rates and weight loss. In this study a person who lost 10% of their body mass typically saw a reduction of 11 to 15% in their metabolic rate.
Now these numbers may not mean much to you, but what they indicate is that the smaller you get the less you can eat. And it’s not directly related to how small you are. Many times, the smaller your body gets, the less your body’s metabolism works.
If you want to help fight this, you can build muscle and pack on lean body mass. Muscle burns calories, fat doesn’t.
4. Hormones
If you’ve dropped some pounds and noticed that you are hungrier than you should be, you’re not crazy. CNN reports that hunger-related hormones are disrupted by dieting and weight loss. These hormones can remain disrupted for up to a year after weight loss. This means your hormones are telling you that you need to eat more and that you’re not full. It’s hard to fight nature when you’re legitimately hungry because your hormones were affected by your weight loss.
5. You Think You’re Eating Less
This is the reason you need to weigh or measure your portions. Web M.D. notes that people are not good at keeping track of how much they ate. Studies show that people who have lost weight, or were trying to lose weight, thought they were eating half as much as they were. If you think you’re eating 1500 calorie a day but you’re actually eating 3000, you’re going to see the scale climb. You can easily monitor what you eat with an app like My Food Diary.
Free Report: Why You Can’t Keep The Weight Off Your Belly
Some of these factors aren’t controllable. You can’t change your body’s biological drive to maintain a certain weight. But you can understand why you feel the way you do and help fight against the natural weight gain that occurs after a big loss. The more you’re aware of these physiological factors that cause weight gain the better able you are to work around them and keep the weight off.
Maybe you’re already eating healthy foods and going to the gym, but the change in diet and exercise isn’t making any difference. That’s the bad news. The good news is that it’s possible to lose fat even though you’re not having success right now. To discover more, download my free report, Why You Can’t Shift Your Belly Fat.
