Maintaining a healthy weight is important because it protects the body from chronic illnesses, lowers stress on the joints, and improves daily energy levels. Many people stress over why they are not losing weight despite exercising and eating healthy.
While helping you live a fulfilling life, managing your weight also has the following benefits:
- Prevents Disease: Staying at a healthy weight lowers your risk of heart disease, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, and stroke.
- Protects Joints: Less body weight reduces extra strain on your knees and lower back, which helps prevent osteoarthritis.
- Boosts Energy: Proper weight management improves how your body circulates blood and uses oxygen, leading to higher daily stamina.
- Improves Sleep: A healthy weight reduces the chances of sleep apnea and promotes deeper, more restful sleep.
- Enhances Mental Health: Managing your weight can boost your self-esteem and lower symptoms of anxiety and depression
Sometimes, no matter what you do, you are not losing weight. Why is that? Let’s figure it out by exploring the 6 most common reasons you are not losing weight.
1. Not getting enough sleep
When you sleep, your body naturally slows down and uses less energy. Sleeping for ten hours will probably make you feel in the morning. But if you do not eat or drink for ten hours, you’d be thirsty and hungry.
If you’re having trouble sleeping, then your body tends to go into stress mode. Stress hormones such as cortisol are naturally low at night, but will rise again if we’re awake. Cortisol makes our bodies lay down fat reserves ‘just in case’.
Also, if you happen to be awake, chances are you head to the kitchen and snack more often–because of which you are not losing weight.
If this is true of you, think about why you have trouble sleeping.
Read What Is the Sleep-Stress Cycle and Why You Need to Break It to Stay Healthy
2. Feeling anxious, stressed, or depressed
Stress is a two-fold process. Some people feel so anxious they can’t eat, while others tend to binge eat. When you feel stressed, your body releases cortisol to free up sugar into your bloodstream. If you don’t burn off that sugar it gets converted to fatty acids, which makes you put on weight, especially around the tummy rather than the arms or legs.
Scientists have also found a potential link between carbohydrates and serotonin – the hormone that helps with mood regulation. They theorize that without realising it, by eating carbohydrates you are attempting to boost your serotonin levels when you feel depressed. This is why we love ‘comfort food’ when we’re feeling down – such as pizza, mashed potato, toast.
All that carbohydrate makes you put on weight.
Addressing anxiety, stress, or depression could help mitigate this hormonal response and prevent weight gain.
3. Working night shifts or long hours
These days, working through the night is quite common, especially among nurses, factory workers, delivery drivers, and office cleaners. Your body wants to be asleep, but if you’re awake and working then your cortisol production kicks in.
This is similar to what we see in people who are stressed or anxious. Cortisol frees up sugar, which – if it isn’t burnt off – gets converted to fatty acids and stored as fat. Working nights increases the chances of not losing weight and affects health adversely.
Another issue with working nights is the tendency to eat unhealthy foods, especially during the late hours. This is not ideal and results in weight gain as the body cannot digest food as efficiently at night as during the day.
If you can’t avoid working nights, try regular small snacks that are high in protein or fibre. Examples include grilled meat or fish, a salad, and drink plenty of water throughout your shift. This can help sustain you and counteract the tendency for unhealthy eating patterns at night.
4. Skipping meals or ‘yo-yo’ dieting
Let’s say you have dinner plans with a friend. Do you skip lunch? This does not lead to weight loss, as you might imagine.
Skipping meals puts your body into self-defense mode. Low food intake slows the metabolism. When you go back to eating normally, you’re putting food into your body but not burning it off as quickly. You end up gaining the weight back and often even more than before.
Skipping meals followed by binge-eating, rather than ‘intermittent fasting’ for weight loss, is not a good way to manage weight. While intermittent fasting actually works, it is tougher for most people to follow. And it’s not a good idea if there is a history of eating disorders.
5. Too much time in coffee shops
With the work-from-home culture quite popular these days, we see people working in coffee shops. It’s normal to order a coffee. The problem is, though these coffees or hot chocolates may taste great, they are not the best choice if you are trying to lose weight. The white coffees or hot chocolate in cafes have more milk and sugar than you would add at home.
In particular, coffee shop ‘mixed drinks’ such as a mocha or blended iced coffee tend to have a lot of sugar in too. Trying to lose weight, but love your coffee? Try black, no sugar.
6. Overeating without realizing it
Studies that go back to the 1990s have consistently shown that we underestimate how much we eat. If you’re having trouble keeping track of what you eat, take a photo of everything you eat or drink over 24 hours. The results might surprise you.
Getting to the root of these 6 reasons can help you figure out why you are not losing weight and put you back on track with your healthy weight goals.
Stay healthy!
