7 Reasons Women Can’t Lose Weight
Most of us already know that eating less and moving more are the keys to dropping extra pounds. But if you’re already doing everything right and can’t seem to lose weight or are even gaining it you may have a hidden health condition that’s sabotaging your efforts. And the symptoms may be so subtle that even your doctor can miss them.
Everyone can lose weight with the right balance of calorie intake and exercise. The trouble with most diets and weight loss attempts is a lack of information about how to continue losing weight and maintain a healthy lifestyle. Furthermore, many people are surprised to learn that the seemingly insignificant choices they make every day can negatively affect their goal of losing weight. Are you guilty of any of these behaviors?
7 Reasons Why You Can’t Lose Weight
Here are seven reasons you can’t shed those excess pounds or are inexplicably gaining weight, along with some easy solutions.
1. You Don’t Pay Attention to Portion Size:
The portion size of many carbohydrates and meats is far smaller than the eye perceives it should be. A deck of carbs is the perfect visual tool when choosing proper meat portions. The calories, fat, protein and carbohydrate amounts listed on the packaging are for this 3 ounce portion only.
2. You’re Eating Late at Night:
If you’re juggling a job and a family it’s hard to eat at regular times. But eating late at night means that whatever you eat isn’t given a chance to be burnt off, so it turns to fat. Sit down to eat with your family or eat something before everyone else has their dinner.
3. You Eat Way too much Fat:
Just one-third of American women limit their consumption to a healthy 30 percent of daily calories. Most of us get all we need daily (about 67 grams) just from added fats like margarine, salad oils, butter and those used in cooking. Any other fat we eat (ice cream, meat, cheese) is extra – and likely to pad our butts, hips and thighs. While we’ve cut back on butter and margarine, we’re still consuming record quantities of salad dressing, which is now the leading source of fat in our diets.
4. You Drink High Calorie Coffee Drinks:
Choosing to consume coffee as the primary source of morning nutrition may feel good, but it can be a high calorie choice. A grande mocha latte at Starbucks, with nonfat milk and no whipped cream, contains about 290 calories. A healthy alternative for coffee lovers could be a hot or iced coffee with non-fat milk and sugar free flavored syrup and a breakfast meal high in fiber and complex carbohydrates.
5. You’re Eating the Kids’ Leftovers:
No-one likes waste but finishing off everyone else’s dinner will give you a waist you don’t like! Instead of throwing food away make a bit less than usual, start a compost heap for your leftovers or see our leftover recipes for ideas.
6. Too Much Sugar and Fructose:
As the genes we carry today were being coded thousands of generations ago, sugar was virtually nonexistent, and fructose from fruit was a rare treat which bore little resemblance to the highly cultivated sweet fruit we buy on store shelves today. From a metabolic perspective, our body has difficulty processing the great amounts of sugar we consume, and most is converted into triglycerides (blood fat) and then stored as fat.
7. You Get Food Cravings Resulting in Calorie Creep:
The types of foods consumed are just as important as eating a morning meal. With the metabolism in starvation mode, the food (or energy) fed to the body will be immediately converted to energy to use right now. If the morning meal consists of simple sugars and fast converting carbohydrates, energy levels will spike through the roof, but food cravings will return very shortly leading to snacking and calorie creep.
