Monday, December 5, 2016

Some Simple Reasons Why You’re Not Losing Weight As Quickly As You Had Hoped!

woman disgusted looking at her scale.jpeg
This beauty may be blaming herself when there could be other reasons those pounds linger.


Following a diet can be rough.  This is especially true when you keep checking the scale and that number doesn’t seem to move, leaving you frustrated and confused since you are doing all the right things.  Though as disciplined as you might be, there are others factors that may be to blame.

Two pounds a week is usually what a doctor-recommended 1200 calorie a day diet for a woman will help you achieve.  Nonetheless, you might need to make an appointment with your primary care doctor because your hormones could possibly be out of whack and not properly be absorbing glucose as it should.  Instead, your body could be working against you and storing it as extra fat.  In fact, the likelihood of this occurring increases the older we get. 

How your body handles that insulin is also very important to those that like a daily glass a wine or other alcoholic drinks with dinner, to unwind or after work.  If your body is insulin resistant and can’t manage the glucose as it should, it spurs estrogen, which goes straight to your liver as fat.  To make matters worse, this fat produces more estrogen that keeps on reproducing more fat in a chain reaction that you could find yourself bound too.  Therefore, you could try to eat more fiber and attempt to keep your blood sugar more stable by changing some of your food choices away from sugars and starches, but you really should consider visiting your doctor about that blood test.

Something else that you may think about is how your body handles the nourishment that you take in.  Each of us is unique in our body’s makeup.  Thus, the same foods that you feed the family may fuel your body differently, resulting in less of some vitamins and minerals than another family member.  Therefore, it is always possible that you could be lacking magnesium, the mineral that helps the body turn that food into energy.

Wonderful sources of magnesium come from foods like spinach, beans, nuts, and whole grains.  You might want to try eating more foods such as those or resort to a supplement. The daily recommended allowance for magnesium is 320 mg.   

Please look for one that has some sort of regulatory oversight by the vitamin/pharmacy industry on the label to stay safe.  Otherwise, you don’t know the world of trouble that you could be swallowing because vitamins and minerals are not regulated. Trust me, but I personally went through this and it nearly killed me.

The bacteria in your own gut could also behind the problem.  Since you’ve been good and giving up fatty, processed foods and the regular baked sweets and desserts that can destroy good gut bacteria, you might be turning to something else to replace that missed sweetness.  Ask yourself if you’ve been using a lot of artificial sweeteners to satisfy your sweet tooth?  If so, they can backfire and rile up bad bacteria in the gut causing inflammation, problems with regulating that insulin and add to the fat problem.

Another reason that could be stalling your dieting efforts is the amount of sleep you get. Eight hours is what you really need to function at your best.  When depriving your body of that rest, levels of the appetite-suppressing hormone called leptin drops down and triggers another hormone that increases appetite known as ghrelin to go up.  

One last thing comes to mind that could be accidentally causing those pounds not to drop off as fast you like.  This involves exercising more just to balance extra food that you may want to eat.  While it is always possible that you worked out the calorie count to match the activity so it would still be within the restrictions of your diet for the day, the choice of food itself could be playing with your insulin levels.  

What I’m sharing here are just some reasons that could be slowing your weight loss down.  I hope these tips help give you more to think about because they are just a starting point and not a medical diagnosis.