Why Can’t You Lose Weight?

By Dottie Drake, RN, CPFT, Owner of Miracles Fitness
Every action you take in life requires energy, just like your car needs good fuel. But instead of pulling into a gas station, you pull up to the table and eat your fuel. You can’t just throw a pizza or a banana directly into your engine. The carbs, proteins and fats need to be broken down or metabolized in order to be used by the body.
Under most conditions, the body’s primary source of energy is carbohydrates. However, in an emergency situation, it can use proteins and fats. This energy is measured in calories. The rate at which food is burned is Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR). Your calorie requirement and BMR increase in times of activity, stress, fear and sickness, and decrease when you diet. When the metabolism is working well, there is a balance between what goes in and what burns up, and weight stays pretty consistent. Your energy needs will increase or decrease based on activity.
When food is plentiful and available, your body will store fuel for times of lack. It stores approximately 1% as carbohydrates in blood, muscles and liver, about 15% as proteins, mostly in muscles, and 84% as fat.
When you drastically decrease your fuel intake, the brain tells the thyroid to slow down (starvation mode) and reduce the amount of calories needed for fuel. Your body will then burn protein, resulting in muscle loss. This is the problem for people who have been on multiple diets.
When you diet, you lose protein (muscle) first and burn fat last. This muscle loss decreases your metabolism so that each and every time you diet, you lose more and more muscle and gain more fat. Once you go off the diet, you gain weight back quickly, mostly in the form of fat. Each time you try to diet in the future, it is harder and harder to lose weight due to the muscle loss and fat accumulation. The more fat you have in proportion to muscle, the fewer calories you burn and the easier it is to gain weight. Your metabolism and the chemicals needed to support it are severely reduced or even depleted. Once this happens, you can’t lose weight even following a strict diet, or you lose so little weight that you get frustrated, give up and regain.
Causes of muscle loss include crash dieting, lack of exercise, chronic stress, toxins, gender and genes. But there is a solution to the problem: burn fat and build muscle.
How do you burn fat? Eat healthy foods, exercise properly, and build muscle with weight lifting. Stop dieting and give your body the necessary fuel it needs to get healthy. Eat only clean, unprocessed foods like meats, seafood, poultry, fruits, vegetables, dairy, whole grains and nuts, and stay away from packaged foods, frozen meals, hydrogenated oils and high fructose corn syrup.
Insulin is the body’s store-fat hormone and glucagon is the body’s burn-fat hormone. When the insulin-glucagon balance is ideal, your body will build muscle while burning fat. Many dieters have lost the ability to know when they are hungry or full. People who struggle with weight often eat when stressed, bored or pressured socially. Eating refined carbs (white bread, flour, sugar and most processed snack foods) causes the pancreas to release too much insulin, which will store food as fat. Instead, resort to protein.
You should also avoid processed sugar, which is in cakes, doughnuts, breads and processed cereals. Processed sugar is considered poison as it causes harm to cells and leads to diabetes. Every time you eat sugar, your blood sugar is elevated and insulin is released to lower the sugar level. Remember, insulin is a fat-storing hormone! Read the labels. Any word ending in “ose” as an ingredient is a sugar. Avoid juices “made from concentrate,” artificial sweeteners and fat free foods loaded with sugar (fat does not make you fat, sugar does!), as these cause your insulin to spike. Instead, get natural sugars from fruit. The only safe sweetener is a little bit of organic sugar or stevia.
Metabolism can’t happen without the liver. The liver supports the digestive system, controls blood sugar and regulates fat storage, breaking down everything that enters your body. Your liver’s job is to distinguish between healthy nutrients that need to be absorbed by the body and dangerous substances that poison the body. When the liver gets clogged with toxins like artificial sweeteners, it loses the function to get rid of those dangerous substances, therefore it stores fat and you gain weight.
You can turn your unhealthy lifestyle around today. Stop putting poison in your body and start exercising, and your body will respond. Healthy foods, anything made by God, are your best medicine.
Stop by Miracles Fitness and let us help you be healthy again. For more information, call (609) 886-7070 or visit www.miraclesfitness.com.