Eating healthy but not losing weight
Eating healthy but not losing weight ?
It can be incredibly frustrating if you’ve made positive changes to your nutrition by cutting back on the junk foods and improving your food quality yet your body fat remains the same. Here are four important reasons why this may be happening.
1. You’re still eating too many calories – weight loss requires you to consume less calories than your body requires. You may have cleaned up your nutrition and are now eating nutritious foods like avocados, coconut oil, nuts and drench your healthy-looking salads with olive oil but these foods also happen to be very calorie dense. This means you only need a little of them because they contain lots of fats. These are positive, beneficial fats but they should come with a disclaimer that says “I’m wonderful, just don’t eat too much of me”. The way to get around this is to weigh and measure how many you’re actually taking in as they’re extremely easy to overconsume e.g. how quickly can that jar of nut butter disappear? All of this also applies to gluten free, sugar free and dairy free foods that oftentimes contain the same if not more calories than the foods your trying to avoid. Read the labels rather than getting duped into thinking Healthy means free calories. For example did you know that one tablespoon of oil is approximately 90cals / 9g Fats , and most salad dressing portions are a lot more than 1 tbsp.
2. Taken in by Food Fads
The shelves of bookstores are chock full of so called clean eating and healthy eating recipe books and when you look inside them they have loads of beautiful looking recipes for cakes and brownies all with the word healthy in the title but there is no consideration or mention of the calories contained in these. It’s easy to be lulled into thinking these are better for you but a cake or brownie if made with Almond Flour, Coconut oil instead of wheat and butter is likely to have far more calories that its ‘less healthy’ cousin so you need to bear this in mind when eating them. A cake is still a cake but look at these comparisons:-
100gr wheat flour – 347 calories
100gr ground almonds – 629 calories
Butter – 100gr – 729cals
Coconut 100ml – 929cals
3. Are you testing – If you’re not regularly getting your body fat tested then the scales alone can be a poor way to reflect the progress you’re making. Getting a trainer to test your body fat with callipers will give you a much more accurate reading on your progress as you can be gaining some muscle and dropping fat at the same time which would show up on the scales as your weight remaining the same. If body fat testing isn’t possible then taking pictures of yourself in the same clothes and light every week or two can also work well and act as a progress log as well as a motivator if you are getting downhearted from the lack of scales movement.
4. It all goes wrong at the weekend – The real progress with fat loss tends to be made at the weekends or when people have time off. Temptation is thrown in your face and this is where resolve might be lost and the tracking and care you’ve put in throughout the week gets thrown out the window. The weekends count more than you think so if you want to get in better shape then you must realise that this isn’t a Monday to Friday approach, However, the fitter, stronger and leaner you become the more leeway you’ll have with your nutrition. Think of your weight loss journey as a full-time job until you see results happening and you will be able to have a little more of what you fancy on the weekend.
Finally, there are other reasons other than the ones mentioned that also come into play, such as, are you getting enough sleep, are you over estimating how active you are or are you continually on a diet? Similarly if you have been quite overweight for a while your endocrine and other systems can be out of kilter so it’s important to address these areas along with the ones mentioned so you can get in the shape you deserve.