Often times when weight loss stalls we question ourselves as we wonder “Why can’t I lose weight?” It is very easy to settle on some external factor as the source of our weight loss frustration (currently “I have a bad thyroid” seems to be the most popular reason).
I just read a terrible article at WebMD.com called “Why Can’t I lose Weight?” In the article to author laid out several different reasons why you can’t lose weight. I think this article was terrible because while some of the reasons may have a smidgen of validity for the most part I believe that you are doing yourself a disservice if you buy into them.
The reality of the situation is if you really want to lose weight and refuse to give up, none of these reasons will come into play.
This article should be titled “Why it May Be Harder For You To Lose Weight”
Let’s look at the article (as always my commentary is in italics)
===================
1. You have a low resting metabolic rate, and high metabolic efficiency. If you have a lower resting metabolic rate, your body spends fewer calories maintaining your body at rest than someone your size with a higher rate. And, if your body is metabolically efficient, it burns fewer calories while in motion…
The number of people that are metabolically gifted is low. All this means is that the rest of us (myself included) just need to work harder at boosting our metabolism – metabolic resistance/high intensity circuit training, interval cardio, higher protein diets, more frequent meals…we need to pull out all the stops and not just accept that our resting metabolic rate is lower than the guy on the cover of Men’s Health.
2. You are female. First of all, men have more muscle mass, compared to women, and women have a higher percentage of body fat than men…men’s resting metabolic rate tends to be significantly higher than women’s….Further, because men tend to be larger than women, they tend to burn more calories doing the same exercise as women….
Apparently the person that wrote this article has not seen the last two seasons of the Biggest Loser as a FEMALE won both times. If you are a woman it may not be as easy for you to get lean (compared to your male counterpart), but that just means you need to work a little harder. Check out the picture of Rachel Cosgrove below and tell me that women can’t lose weight.
3. You experience hunger, satisfaction, and stress differently than others. Stevens [a scientist mentioned in the article] believes that differences in how people experience hunger and cope with stress are important in determining who becomes overweight and who doesn’t.
This is a real factor. But again it is not something that is going to prevent you from losing weight. It just is going to take a little more work – controlling stress, self-monitoring for situations when you have a tendency to over eat and/or emotionally eat, etc. If this is a problem for you, you still can do it.
4. You don’t like to exercise (it could be in your genes). According to Daniel Pomp, PhD, from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, animal research suggests that 25%-50% of an individual’s propensity for voluntary exercise is under genetic control. Pomp studies mice that genetically prefer to exercise because they were bred for high levels of wheel running. Expect more research in the next few years on “exercise genes” and how they might also be at play in humans.
If you want to lose weight and you don’t like to exercise (as apparently you can be genetically predisposed to not liking exercise)…tough. It is a must. Remember number 1. We need exercise to keep our metabolism cranking so that we can lose weight. I didn’t like paying my taxes last Wednesday but I did. So even if you don’t like exercise…you need to do it.
5. Your mother ate a high-fat diet while pregnant. There is some preliminary research in primates that suggests eating a healthy, moderate-fat diet is important for the future weight and health status of the developing fetus, regardless of whether the pregnant mother was obese or lean.
This is a concept known as fetal programming and it is becoming an increasingly hot topic in the scientific literature. While this may be another thing you can blame on your mother why lying on the couch in your psychologist’s office, determining the fat content of your mother’s pregnancy diet isn’t going to help you in your weight loss endeavors. As with the other excuses reasons, this may just make it harder to you to lose weight but not impossible.
===================
We all blame external sources for our weight loss struggles but it in the end it really comes down to us bearing down, exercising with a high intensity, and eating a clean and consistent diet.
You can do it.
Post a comment and let me know what you think of this article.
Why Can’t I Lose Weight? [WebMD.com]
