5 Reasons Why Weight Loss is Evading You
1. You really don’t know what to eat.
Healthy is not what it used to be. Packaging and labels are marketing that’s working. It’s convincing you that what you’re putting in your mouth is OK. Really, if it wasn’t recently alive, hormone-free, grass-fed, wild caught, organic… you can be assured you’re eating one of 10,000 food chemicals that’s been approved by researchers companies hire to then turn to the FDA for the seal of approval. It’s rigged!
What is healthy for you is another story. You may or may not tolerate dairy, gluten, grains, or oatmeal. They each have properties that for some of us either temporarily or permanently because of a leaky gut or low quality foods now harvested thanks to the fertilizer, pesticides, soil stripped of nutrients.. isn’t going to make you well and thrive.
The first step in finding out what is healthy for you is testing. There’s no guessing. Certainly what is going to help you is not going to come out of a box or or package. You don’t have to have an immediate bad reaction to a food for it to be wreaking havoc inside. It can even be a food you like! It’s often that it in fact is. And so daily, you’re making yourself sicker by eating what you think is healthy.
2. Your exercise is too little and too much.
You are most likely committing one or the other and potentially both of these errors. Too little of the right kind of exercise. The right kind is 1-2 short interval training sessions a week. Start with one. Add a second later after you’ve built a foundation and find you’re not making progress any more.
You’re doing too little weight. Do a heavier weight and fewer repetitions. Change the exercises on the two days a week you do them. Hitting a bootcamp 4-6 days a week drives women’s hormones out of control. Cortisol is elevated and there is never recovery. Muscles take shake between exercise.
You’re potentially doing what you’ve been doing for years and doing it the same speed, the same duration, and the same mode. That’s the too much. If you’re just in the mode of doing more to do more you are digging yourself into a hole. Hit a class you’ve never been to before at least once a week. Go for a long walk another day of the week. Do your interval training another day. You’ll find more fitness, more fun, and more results when you do.
You don’t have to do it all, all the time. Who has time to do cardio, weights, and Pilates and yoga? Your heart needs cardio, your muscles and joints need strength. Do yoga but consider practicing for a few minutes daily on your own or as a cool down. Throw in a weekly longer class on a recovery day. Or if Pilates is your mojo, do the same with that. Once you have established a base of good mobility, stability and core you are keeping it by staying active in other things you don’t have to continue to add another activity for every day.
3. You’re stressed.
Like it or not stress is going to keep you from optimal weight by making you weight loss resistant. Even if you love to exercise you have to add it to the list if you’re already struggling with an emotional issue, co-workers making you feel you live in a zoo, and a project deadline coming up. Your body doesn’t know the difference.
The inclination is to exercise to mitigate the stress. Yet it IS stress. So you have to adjust. Shorten, lighten up. That’s not what you do though if you love to exercise. And soon? You’re either up a few pounds or you’re awake at night, or or you’re injured. It will show up if you ignore it and in a much louder way.
4. Your gut is not absorbing nutrients you’re putting in.
If you haven’t done the testing you need to find healthy foods you’re nutrient deficient. In the richest country in the world we have the greatest obesity and eating disorder rate in the world. Between that the rest of us too are suffering from inadequate nutrients either because we aren’t eating them (it would be nearly impossible to eat that much each day) or because we aren’t absorbing them.
Vitamins and minerals compete with each other. If you take a loaded vitamin thinking “its all in there” there’s a good chance you’re not absorbing much of it. Then there’s habits of daily living that deplete your nutrients. Insomnia? Exercise? Sitting in front of electronics? Eating foods that are processed? Drinking more than 1 -2 glasses of alcohol or 2 cups of coffee a day?
And the big one… eating sugar? Whether it’s honey, agave, dates, raisins… it’s sugar. And not only does it spike insulin making it easier to store fat but it depletes you.
5. You’re meal and snack timing is all wrong.
Are you eating late in the evening? Less than two or three hours between supper and bedtime? Are you snacking before bed? Do you have a sugary snack on an empty stomach?
All of those are things that will increase your chance of poor digestion and increase your chance of storing fat.
It’s not hard to lose weight after 50 and it really has much less to do with age than it does how your habits have accumulated over time. It’s like running. If you started running at 48 you probably have a lot of good years left. If you started running at 18 you have more wear and tear on your joints. If you eat well and have for years but you’ve just recently picked up bad habits, it’s going to be easy to reverse. If you have had bad habits for years it will be harder to change and yet you may have the most to gain.
