9 Reasons Why Your Diet Isn’t Working
It’s January and everyone has made resolutions of some kind to start the new year, but the majority of us will fall off in the next couple of weeks. One of the most popular New Year’s Resolutions year after year is to lose weight or get into better shape. It’s the perfect time to make a change after overindulging and getting thrown off our normal routines throughout the holidays, and we get to start fresh because there’s a new number at the end of the date! The problem with dieting is that many people fail to really make a plan that includes how to deal with the many roadblocks associated with successfully dropping the pounds. You’ll start off super motivated with a new gym membership and new Tupperware for your meals and slowly but surely, you’ll fall off. Why is that? Well, there’s a lot of reasons and we’re going to talk about those reasons, and how to fix it here in this article!
Your Diet Doesn’t Mesh Well with Your Personality
This is quite possibly the most overlooked aspect of embarking on a weight loss plan. Eating habits tend to be a product of our personality, and if you’re entering into a way of eating that doesn’t mesh well with your personality then you’re probably going to fail. From paleo, to keto, to vegetarian, to carnivore, and even flexible dieting there are a TON of proven ways to successfully lose weight, but they’re not for everyone. If you’re someone who needs structure, flexible dieting probably won’t work for you. If you’re someone who really lacks structure and planning isn’t really a priority, calorie counting is probably going to be a struggle for you. If you don’t really like meat, a carnivore or even ketogenic diet is going to be incredibly hard for you to follow, and on the flip side if you really enjoy eating meat being a vegetarian is probably off the table. All this being said, discipline is still going to play a HUGE role in your success, we just need to make sure we put ourselves in the best possible position to succeed. Do your homework on the various ways of eating and be brutally honest with yourself about the likelihood that you’ll be able to follow it.
Your Apple Watch/FitBit is Grossly Overestimating Your Output
Wearable technology has been around for a while now. Everything from heart rate monitors to step counters and even things like WHOOP Bands that can measure your recovery rates and sleeping patterns have been all the rage for a few years now. There’s a ton of valuable information we can get from this technology, but they still have problems when it comes to accuracy. Believe it or not, the studies show that they’ll accurately measure heart rate but they tend to fall short when it comes to activity calories. There was a study done in the Journal of Personalized Medicine back in 2017 that found these wearable technologies were all off by at least 20% when it came to calories burned throughout the day from activity. If you’re factoring these calories into the output part of your calories in vs calories out, you’re more than likely going to be overeating, and your weight loss will stall as a result.
You’re Not Sleeping Enough
Sleep is an important factor in weight loss for many reasons. Lack of sleep can cause numerous problems, the most obvious one being lack of motivation and the feeling of being tired all day. While we feel those effects there’s a lot of effects we can’t really see or feel. The Current Opinion in Clinical Nutrition and Metabolic Care published a review titled “Sleep and Obesity” back in 2013 that was able to categorize a lot of the problems associated with lack of sleep. They were able to conclude that a lack of sleep can cause the following:
Decreased glucose tolerance
Blood glucose is raised beyond a normal level throughout the day, this can lead to weight gain and the development of Type 2 Diabetes.
Decreased insulin sensitivity
This puts pressure on your pancreas to increase insulin production and can also lead to weight gain and the development of Type 2 Diabetes.
Increased concentrations of cortisol levels in the evenings
This can lead to insulin resistance, and in turn higher blood sugar and weight gain and the development of Type 2 Diabetes. It has also been understood to cause cravings for high-fat and sugary foods.
Increased levels of ghrelin
Ghrelin is a hormone secreted by the stomach, small intestines, the brain and the pancreas. It is often called the “hunger hormone” as it stimulates appetite, and higher levels can lead to increased caloric intake.
Decreased levels of leptin
Leptin is a hormone made and secreted by fat cells and the small intestines and works to inhibit hunger, or suppress your appetite. When leptin levels are low, it signals the body that there is no fat, and thus stimulates hunger causing you to overeat.
No matter how in check your plan is, if you’re lacking sleep you’re going to put yourself behind the 8 ball. You can still have successes without getting great sleep, but they’ll come slower and be much harder to obtain.
Cheating is Killing Your Deficit Eating
Eating at a caloric deficit is really the only way you’re going to have success at losing weight as thermodynamics cannot be ignored. The amount of caloric deficit you eat at is also going to play a huge role in how quickly you drop the pounds, the higher the deficit the faster the weight loss to a degree. Let’s say you’re eating at a 500-calorie deficit each day bringing your total daily calories to 1500, over the course of a week that would yield roughly 3500 calories or about a pound of fat. Now on the weekends you decide you’re going to have a cheat day where you can engorge and stray away from your diet because you’ve earned it, right? You wake up and decide to go to brunch where you drink two mimosas and eat chicken and waffles for a whopping 1300 calories. Later on in the day you decide hit a movie and grab a medium popcorn, candy and a large soda for another 1300 calories (on average). But the day isn’t over you’ve still got to eat dinner and you decide you’re not going to deprive yourself of that pizza you’ve been craving all week (only half a pizza though) and we’re going to finish off that half bottle of Riesling in the fridge to go with it for another 1400 calories. On this cheat day you’ve now consumed roughly 4000 calories which is double your typical total daily energy expenditure (how many calories you burn per day). That’s an extra 2500 calories you didn’t factor in (from the 1500 you’re eating with the deficit) and now your weekly deficit is 1000 calories, or about 1/3 of a pound of fat. While cheating is a good thing within a diet after the first month or two, it still needs to be planned and well thought out or you’ll find yourself not losing the weight.
You Had Initial Success, But Failed to Make Further Adjustments
The majority of people who embark on a weight loss journey will utilize a calories in vs calories out model (because that’s how weight loss works). The calories in is what you eat while the calories out is something called your Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE). This TDEE is comprised of your Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) which is how many calories you burn at rest, plus your total daily activity. To get your TDEE you’ll use one of a few formulas, but they all have two things in common: your weight and your height. As you start off, your TDEE will be the best representation given your height and weight, but what happens as you lose weight? That’s right, your weight changes which means your BMR will change as well leading to improper inputs. As you lose weight you’ll have to go back to these formulas and recalculate how many calories you’ll need in any given day. If you try to eat to lose as a 200 pound person, your 180 pound body is going to struggle! You don’t have to recalculate every time you lose a pound, but if you plateau instead of getting frustrated go back and recalculate your caloric needs.
Your Protein Levels are Too Low
Proteins are the building blocks of life and every single cell within your body contains proteins. Far too often people think of protein as just something that’s necessary for building muscle, but it’s so much more than that. Your body utilizes the amino acids found in protein for a lot of life’s essential functions. Amino acids make up immunoglobulins essential for your immune system, they make up collagen used in your skin/hair/nails/tendons/ligaments, there are hormones like growth hormone made up of amino acids, and they help with muscle growth and repair as well. Protein has a lot of functions and believe it or not muscle growth is pretty much last in line when it comes to utilization of amino acids so we have to make sure our intake is high enough for not only homeostasis but growth! Protein also has the highest thermic effect of all the macronutrients that we eat which means it costs more energy to break it down into the amino acids we use for growth, repair and every day function than carbohydrates or fats do. Approximately 20-30% of the calories found in protein are burned by the breakdown of those proteins. While 1 gram of carbohydrates and 1 gram of protein both contain 4 calories as far as energy is concerned, the gram of protein is only going to yield 2.8-3.2 calories after breakdown. If your protein intake is too low, you’re going to miss out on this thermic effect, in addition to a lot of other functions.
You’re Counting Net Carb Calories, Not Total Carb Calories
If you’re following an Atkins or ketogenic type diet you’ve probably heard of net carbs, BUT are you aware of what these carbs are other than just ones you don’t count? Net carbs are pretty much just the carbohydrates left over after you subtract sugar alcohols and fiber. Sugar alcohols and fiber don’t tend to have the same effect on blood sugar that other carbohydrates do so they might not kick you out of ketosis and thus aren’t considered carbohydrates as far as those diets are concerned. The problem is that these carbohydrates still contain calories! They don’t cease to contribute to energy consumption just because they don’t raise blood sugar levels, and the total calories need to be considered when enjoying these foods. Take sugar free gum for instance, on average sugar free gum still contains upwards of 5 calories per piece and most packs of gum have 15 sticks of gum in them. That’s 60 calories that you may not be including in your daily totals and 1 pack a day could be an extra 420 calories per week. While it doesn’t seem like much think about this: if you over eat by an apple’s amount of calories (95 calories) per day, you’d gain 10 pounds in a year. Make sure you’re including these calories in your daily totals!
You’re Not Training to Gain Muscle
Muscle is unique in the fact that it’s what we call metabolically active tissue. It literally costs energy just to maintain it. The more muscle you have, the higher your basal metabolic rate is, the more energy you have to consume just to keep it. Each pound of muscle gained will burn an extra 50 calories per day at rest! If you can gain 10lbs, you’ll burn an extra 3500 calories per week! In addition to that, weight lifting has an “afterburn” called Excess Post-exercise Oxygen Consumption (EPOC) just like every other form of exercise does. The recovery process continues to burn extra calories via EPOC for upwards of 48 hours after a training session, far longer than the training effects of cardio sessions which may last another 20-30 minutes. If you want to lose weight and improve your body composition, you need to lift weights!
Alcohol Consumption
It should go without saying but alcohol can be detrimental to your body composition goals. While in small amounts it’s one of the many ways God shows us he loves us, in excess amounts it’s pretty much poison in your body. If you’re not aware (and I’ve had many clients who weren’t) alcohol contains calories. Every gram, or mL of alcohol contains 7 calories in addition to the carbohydrates found in most alcoholic beverages. Alcohol metabolism is a lot different from the other metabolic processes in our body in that it switches the body from burning glucose or ketones to something called acetate. In the liver, alcohol is broken down into alcohol dehydrogenase then into acetaldehyde and finally down into acetate and the body will do everything it can to burn this substrate prior to switching back to glucose or ketones from broken down fats. We tend to drink alcohol in the evening which also happens to be the time that we’ll mostly breakdown body fat for fuel since we’re at rest, so switching our energy production from the breakdown of fat to the elimination of alcohol substrates will almost always stall fat loss. Outside of that there’s a laundry list of the negative effects of alcohol, which while outside of the scope of this article, shouldn’t be neglected. Indulging in alcohol from time to time isn’t the end of the world, but if you’re looking to drop the pounds, you should limit in volume and in frequency.
Deciding to make a change isn’t always an easy decision, and we need to make sure we’re putting ourselves in the best possible position to succeed when doing so. Make sure to take these suggestions into account to make sure you put yourself in a position to excel, and lead a better life!
