Dropping weight can be an uphill battle! You may think that you will never lose weight and be in the best shape possible. This is something I hear people say when they have given up. The question I ask them is, why do you feel like you are struggling? Over the years of training people and myself, I have found out that it really is not hard. We just make it very challenging! Ask yourself, have I tried everything and during that time did you give 100% commitment into it? Let’s be honest, if you are not putting in your best effort into anything you do, do you expect 100% success? You can not expect to do the minimal and expect to drop weight. If you like to go out to eat and drink a lot, do you really think you are going to lose weight? Most likely not! If you are willing to make you change, here are some tips to getting over the hump and lose weight!
12 Reasons Why You Are Not Dropping Weight
1. You can not control your portions
When we talk about portion sizes, do we know how much a portion size is? A portion size is the size of your palm. As an American culture, we like to eat a lot of food. If you either cook at home or go out to a restaurant, most likely you are eating double the portion size that you should be eating. Even if you have the healthiest food known to man, if you eat too much of anything, you will gain weight. Do not get me wrong, I can throw down food like it is nobody’s business. When I decided to lose a lot of weight, I had to adapt to a much smaller portion size.
I am not going to lie, it took about 2 weeks to get used to smaller portions. What really helped me was making slow changes of dropping about 250 calories a day for a week and then the next week 500 calories less per day. There are 3,500 calories in one pound of weight, if we have a 500 calories per day decrease for 7 days, that will give you a 1 pound weight loss per week. Slowly build habits and losing weight can be less stressful.
2. You take in more calories than you burn
Weight loss is simply put as you burn more calories than you take in. If you eat too much, especially if you are not active, it will be challenging for you to lose weight. If you are super active, then taking in a good amount of calories will be just fine, but if you either do not work out that much at all, then your calories need to be down.
3. Understand what you are putting into your body
Understanding what is good for you and what is not is a huge problem for people who are trying to lose weight. Just because it says fat-free or sugar-free does not mean it is good for you! When you see fat free or sugar free, a lot of the time they add something else to replace what they are getting rid of. To be safe, you can not go wrong with making your own food. The reason why it is important to make your own food is that we know exactly what we are putting in your body. When preparing your own food, you are better off making good decisions on healthy foods to cook. If you go out to eat or eat pre-made meals, they can use a ton of sodium and/or high fructose corn syrup to make foods faster and give them a better taste.
4. You skip meals
Would it not be easy if we could just skip meals and lose weight. Sure, you might lose a few pounds here and there but over time, this can do more harm than good. When we skip meals, you are not only limiting yourself to the calories that you need for energy and building muscles, but your metabolism can slow down. In some cases, you can actually weight from skipping meals. Do yourself a favor and do not skip weights so you can get the proper amount of energy to get through the day.
5. You eat too little
I had a big problem with this when I 1st started dieting last year. I would eat too little and not only did my energy levels suffer, but with the lack of calories and proper nutrients, my body was actually eating my muscle. If you are somebody who is trying to get lean, the last thing you want is your body to start eating your muscles. Take the time to map out the calories and nutrients that you need a day so you can put yourself in the best possible position for dropping weight and body fat loss.
6. You are a Carbosaurus
Do not get me wrong, carbohydrates are not evil. They are very important when it comes to fuel to many vital organs, including the brain, central nervous system, and kidneys. When it comes to dropping weight and body fat loss, know what carbs to eat and when to eat them is going to put you in the best position to drop weight. It is very easy to eat a ton of carbs, but if we do not burn the calories then the food will be converted into fat.
7. Relax the stress
Life can be stressful, we all know that. Most of us may have our comfort food to help ease our stress. I have had my moments of over inhaling large amounts of crap food throughout my life, but I do not think I have ever had a go to food to ease my stress. If this sounds like something that sounds familiar, what else makes you happy besides crap food? Is it going outside to do yard work, folding laundry, picking up a sport? Get out of the house and go do something that is going to ease your stress
8. You eat with your hands
Have you ever noticed that when you eat with your hands, you eat more than you would with a fork? Think about it what you eat with your hands? Pizza, hamburgers, hot dogs, fries, nuts, fruit, vegetables. Out of how many of these have you stuffed yourself every time you ate them? Most of the time we eat with our hands, there usually is a large amount of food there for us to eat. These foods are already high in calories and if we are going hog wild with these foods, we could easy get a day’s worth of calories in one sitting. Limit your foods involving your hands on cheat days and you will notice a big change in your portion sizes per meal.
9. Drinking too many calories
How many people have drinks out there that are loaded with milk, cream, sugar, etc? If you are trying to lose weight, sugary drinks are going to destroy weight loss goals. A rule to think about her is that if a drink has more than 5 grams of sugar, then try your best to limit those. If you want to have a somewhat high sugary drink, then you have to earn it by drinking it after your workout. Just like we talked about, no exercise=no sugar
10. Lay off the fruity yogurts
Yes, we all know fruit is good for you, but fruits also contain sugar. Even though healthy sugar, it still is sugar and sugar turns into fat faster if not burned. If you know you are going to have a killer workout, before or directly after that you can have your yogurt. The reason why we want to have it before is to give your body an energy spike that we can use to fuel your workout. Eating after a workout will give you fast-acting sugar to replenish your energy and refuel your muscles. If you are not going to work out, then lay off the yogurt.
11. Time for happy hour
For those people that love to go out to the bar, you are human and you have the right to go out and have fun. If you did not know, alcohol has empty calories. Empty calories mean they have no value for muscle building or dropping weight. If you are somebody who goes out every weekend, here are a few tips that can help you out. Manage your diet around your drinking. This mean, if you are going to drink, alcohol has 7 calories in every gram. So this means that most likely every drink you have is going to have a moderate to high amount of calories.
To manage this, the food you eat leading up to your drinking needs to be low-calorie meals. Another tip is drinking 1-2 days a month. If you know you are going to have anything high calorie, please be aware of the calories leading up to your drinking!
12. You treat yourself too often
Have you ever had a great workout and you wanted to reward yourself with an unhealthy crap meal? We are all guilty of it, including me. Just because you kicked butt in one workout, this does not mean that you need to reward yourself for something you should be doing every day anyway! If you are going to reward yourself, save it for your cheat day!
I do not know how many times I have heard people say that they want to lose weight! You can say that you want to lose weight until you are blue in the face. Do you actually put every ounce of energy into it? Talk is cheap! Take a look in the mirror and really dedicate yourself to losing weight. In the beginning, it is going to be pretty tough. You will have to give up or cut back on foods and drinks that you enjoy. It will probably make you upset! All I can say about that is how bad do you want to lose the weight. If you are not willing to put in the hard work in order to lose weight, you need to look deep inside and find out why you are having a hard time with losing weight!