Deciding to lose weight and take your health back is a huge step towards living the life that you truly want to live. Understanding that it will be hard and that there will be obstacles is all part of the process.

One often overlooked part of this process is your own ignorance or even flat-out cope. That may sound crass, but it’s the truth, and today, we’re going to dive in and ask the question, “Why am I not losing weight?” (Hint: it’s not your genetics).

Losing Weight: Change is Hard

My first job after graduating college was as a personal trainer in a very upscale part of Tampa called Hyde Park. I had gone to school with the intent of working with athletes, and I had a ton of internship experience with athletes, but alas, there were no real job openings in the area working with athletes. So, I figured I would spend a few years working with the general population while I was in grad school, and see how it went. I lasted about four months before I called it quits. I have some gen pop and weekend warrior type clients now, but the vast majority of my clientele are athletes and that’s the way I prefer it.

The reason I prefer to work with athletes most of the time is because most athletes “get it.” They’re coachable, they tend to do the right things outside of the gym, and they’re usually incredibly motivated to get better.

The hardest clients to work with are those chasing body composition or weight loss. The reason for this is because there is so much of their lifestyle that has to change in order for them to be successful. Most people become overweight due to poor eating habits, and a general disdain for exercise. Those are both incredibly high hurdles to overcome.

In addition to that, when you’re overweight it’s really hard to actually see progress initially. Sure the scale will go down some, maybe even a lot. But when you look in the mirror you’re mostly going to see the same person staring back at you that you saw before for a good while. They’re also not really seeing or feeling the “pump” during their training initially, and the pump is a big motivator during training.

All this to say, training is hard and dieting is even harder for most people, especially those who have completely let themselves go. We’re talking about huge, world-shattering change for many people, and a lot of them are just unwilling to do it. Imagine being the woman in this TikTok. If you were to go to her page you’d see video after video of what she eats in a day, and while there are some things that could be misconstrued as healthy from time to time thrown in the mix, the vast majority of it looks like this video.

She’s done two things here:

1. She’s created both a personality and a way to earn income based on the fact that she’s morbidly obese

2. She’s created possibly the worst possible eating habits

These two things are going to be almost impossible to overcome. The habits that you develop during your worst seasons are going to be completely exhausting to try to change. Many people are like this woman, and won’t seek help until they get to the worst possible place. This is why I prefer my athletes, lol.

All that being said, we’re here to talk about the copes we cling onto in an effort to explain why we’re not losing weight, and we’ll start going over that list now.

You Underestimate Your Caloric Intake

Believe it or not, you more than likely underestimate your caloric intake, by a whole lot. There was a study published back in 1992 in the New England Journal of Medicine titled “Discrepancy between self-reported and actual caloric intake and exercise in obese subjects” that looked at why obese people on diets seemed to not lose weight.

The study aimed to see if obese subjects with and without a history of diet resistance could accurately track their caloric intake. Diet resistance is a term used to describe the process of “doing everything” to lose weight (counting calories, cutting out sugar, cutting out processed foods, exercising regularly, etc.) without success. These subjects also had a perceived genetic cause for their obesity and described their diet/eating behavior as normal.

This study found that these subjects under-reported their actual food intake by 47% on average with a standard deviation of +/- 16. This means the outliers were as off by as much as 63% on the high end, and 31% on the low end, but they were all off. This particular study didn’t go into whether the subjects were lying, or just ignorant of how much they were eating but my assumption is that it’s a little bit of both.

Now, this study is from a while ago, so you might be thinking that it’s outdated. I can tell you from my 16 years of personal experience this is often the case. I’ve had clients who didn’t know wine had calories or didn’t realize every Oreo has over 50 calories. Most of the general public is incredibly ignorant when it comes to nutrition and how it affects their lives.

The subjects in this study were supposedly restricting their eating to 1200 calories per day. A 61% underestimation would put them at 1956 calories, which is 756 over their target calorie count. This is an enormous overestimation when it comes to weight loss and I’ll give you an example.

Believe it or not, overeating by an apple per day can yield a 10 lb weight gain per year. On average, each apple has about 95 calories. We’ll call it 100 to make the math easy here. And in saying that, I can appreciate the irony here but just bear with me. 100 calories over your maintenance number would give you about a 36,500 caloric surplus per year. A pound of fat consists of roughly 3500 calories. We’ll divide 36,500 by 3500, and we end up with a little over 10. This 10 represents the number of pounds that those calories will inevitably become. That’s how an apple day can make you 10 lbs fatter in a year.

That 756 calories over maintenance will yield roughly 79 lbs over the course of a year. Now, there’s a lot more that goes into this equation, but just understand that you’re going to gain weight if you overestimate your intake. You may not be losing weight because you’re eating too much.

You’re Overestimating Your Caloric Output

In that same study, the researchers found out that those obese test subjects not only underestimated/underreported their caloric intake, but they overreported their physical activity by 50-75%. There are a ton of reasons for this overreporting/overestimating, and we’ll go over all of those now.

You’re Relying on Your Wearable Tech

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 Lying To Yourself

This isn’t going to be fun to hear for some of you, but you’re overestimating on purpose in an effort to be able to eat more. How many times have you told yourself, “I worked out today so I can eat this"? Changing your lifestyle. is incredibly hard, and oftentimes, we’ll lie to ourselves and attempt to convince ourselves that we’re doing better than we are. But at the end of the day, as much as you can lie to yourself, that scale won’t.

You’re Unaware of How Few Calories You’re Actually Burning

I wrote an article about cardio a while back, and while it’s a fairly long read I think it’s a really good read. It’s called The Running Red Pill, and if you’re someone using cardio as a tool for losing weight, you should check it out.

The article lays out the diminishing returns of cardio and how the adaptations you’re chasing through cardio are going to give you worse and worse returns over time. The gist of it is that when you first introduce cardio, you’ll see huge returns. You’re out of shape, the demands on your body are high, and you’re completely unprepared. Your body has to work incredibly hard to get through it. As you continue to do cardio over time, you’ll become more efficient at it. This is by design. This is a great thing, but it means that you’ll burn fewer and fewer calories over time.

Many people will take the average calories burned for an exercise that is found in a Google search, and continue to use that same caloric output even though that number is now well off from what it costs their body to perform the task. Many will also fail to progress with either volume or intensity, which leads to the same outcome of an overestimation of caloric output.

You’re Just Completely Unaware of Your Caloric Output

I often forget that I do this for a living, went to school for this, and am bound to do continuing education over the years. I take what I know and understand for granted. The average person doesn’t understand the nuance and complexity of calories in vs calories out or CICO.

Many people believe that if they’re sweating and tired, they burned a lot of calories and this just isn’t the case. Your heart rate increasing and you becoming out of breath is just a byproduct of your body being inefficient at transporting oxygen and nutrients throughout your body. It’s not necessarily a reflection of how many calories you’re burning.

I’m Doing Everything, But I’m Still Not Losing Weight

Here’s the thing, you’re not. With the exception of extreme cases and outliers, you’re either overeating, not moving around enough, or a combination of the two. You might see studies that say 80% of your weight is due to your genetics, but I would implore you to not seek out these copes.

Not everyone is dealt the same hand in life. Some are shorter while others are taller. Some are born into affluence while others are born in poverty. And some have slower metabolisms while some have faster metabolisms. Such is life and chasing equity when it comes to body composition is a total exercise in futility. If you have a slower metabolism, I’m sorry but you’re going to have to work harder. There’s no virtue in fat acceptance. Ben Shapiro likes to say “Facts don’t care about your feelings” and it’s true. The laws of thermodynamics and the science of calories in vs calories out don’t care about your fat acceptance, and neither does your health.