Reasons Your Weight Loss Could Be Stalling or Why You’re Gaining Weight Even When Dieting or Trying To Maintain A Caloric Deficit
Many of us struggle to lose weight and keep it off. A simple understanding of the body and metabolism can help us get over that hurdle. Here are some things to keep in mind...
Metabolic Slowdown As An Adaptive Response
Down regulated NEAT (Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis) is greater with long term low calorie diets. Basically, this is a reduction in resting metabolism because of a chronically lowered calorie intake.
Incorrectly Estimating Caloric Intake and Energy Expenditure
Nothing overrides energy balance - CICO: Calories in, Calories out (check out this article explaining this). This is why it’s important to track because you won’t actually know unless you track in some way. You’ll just be guessing, likely be off on your estimates, and end up eating more than you thought.
When it comes to NEAT and/or energy expenditure, a new level of intensity during actual training could help and compensate to help increase TDEE (Total Daily Energy Expenditure) or actively taking measures to increase your NEAT (Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis) such as parking farther, walking more, sitting less (standing burns more calories), taking movement breaks, even eating more thermogenic foods (foods that burn hotter and take more energy to digest such as cayenne pepper or spicy foods and protein rich foods) can help with this.
Free oils, dairy and refined/processed carbohydrates have an extremely high caloric density (high calories in a small package and usually without a relatively high amount of nutrition). Dairy is an even more vicious animal as the combination of fat and carbs together make it so the caloric hit is exponentially increased vastly beyond what’s on the label and cannot even be calculated (check this podcast on the subject). The combination of carbs and fat in general, not just with dairy, has the same, almost unmeasurable, calorie multiplying effect. This makes sense for animals in the wild to grow as fast as possible to defend against or run away from predator.
Fun Fact: A Caribou—also known as a reindeer—can keep up with the herd a mere 4 hours after it’s born. That means soon after birth it can run about 40 mph (64 kilometers per hour).
Weight Stagnates or Increases Due to Water Retention
This is also why it’s important to be accurately measured on some sort of in-depth body analysis device that calculates and differentiates between water and the different types of tissues in the body. Even if the numbers on the scale go up, you may in fact be losing fat mass even though total body weight goes up due to water retention or muscle gain. You want muscle gain because this is what will in turn burn off fat mass and keep it off. If you’re not overly concerned or alarmed by body weight fluctuations then you don’t have to worry about this. However, If you are on a weight loss journey and have been for some time, then I would most definitely get your body composition analyzed in this way. Knowledge is power and mindset is everything. Doing this could, for some, mean the difference between sticking to a new fitness and healthy eating lifestyle or throwing in the towel. You need to actually know what’s happening inside your body.
Be happy, be healthy. Stay strong, stay fit. God bless.
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