There are times in exercise, as in life, when it can seem like you’re doing all the right things but still getting no results. Most of us have experienced that frustration. You’ve stuck to the diet, trained regularly, but that fat only seems to cling tighter the more you do. For those of us facing these difficulties, there’s good and bad news. The good news is that you often only need a little more education and a simple, easy change or two to your diet or routine and that fat will start peeling away. The bad news? For some of us our weight control problems are not a problem with what we’re doing but result from metabolic or hormonal imbalances in our bodies that keep them from functioning the way they should. These are much harder to deal with and often require the assistance of a medical professional.
Here are 8 tips that will help you fix those simple mistakes and identify those biological problems:
Tip #1: Weight Training
Any fat loss program should incorporate a high intensity weight training regime with the goal of maintaining muscle mass and strength during the weight loss phases. When you greatly restrict the amount of calories you consume, if you are not utilizing your muscles on a regular basis, your body will begin to break them down instead of fat. When this happens, not only do you stop burning fat, but a decreased muscle mass means a decreased metabolism.
Generally, try to keep to compound, multi-joint lifts at around 70 to 85 percent of your one rep maximum range. Try for a high volume with rest periods in between 30 to 60 second intervals.
Tip #2: Interval Training
Interval training has been proven over and over in scientific studies to provide considerably more gains in weight loss, aerobic, and anaerobic capacities, then your traditional “steady-state” cardio. This type of training alternates intervals of high-intensity exercise, such as sprinting, with intervals of low-intensity, such as jogging. This type of training also helps with metabolic efficiency, which makes it even easier to keep the weight of in the long-run as opposed to steady-state cardio.
Tip #3: Low-Carb Diet
While everyone agrees low-carb diets are effective for fat loss, “low-carb” is an astonishingly vague term. For instance, the USDA recommends an average of 300 grams of carbohydrates a day, so technically, 150 grams could be considered low-carb. However, a review in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition suggests that 150 grams a day is still way too high for fat loss.
According to their study, 50 grams or less a day is the ideal intake for carbs. These should come from vegetables and high-nutrient fruits whenever possible. They absolutely should not come from grains, whether whole or processed.
Tip #4: Eat Small, Frequent Meals Throughout the Day
While diets such as intermittent fasting work for many people, they don’t always work for everybody. If you’re on an IF diet and finding you’re just not losing any weight, or if you’re a woman pregnant or trying to get pregnant, eating smaller, more frequent meals throughout the day may help you achieve better results.
When you eat more meals across the day you keep your blood glucose levels more stable over time. The problem with eating a few large meals is you experience large spikes in blood sugar that can result in dramatic drops before your next meal. These periods of low blood sugar, or hypoglycemia, result in hormonal imbalances as your body tries to compensate – and, if regular, these imbalances can ruin a well-executed weight loss plan.
Tip #5: Get Enough Sleep
While many people don’t realize this, not getting enough sleep is one of the easiest ways to nuke your weight loss efforts. Sleepy people feel hungrier throughout the day, eat more as a result, and make poorer food choices than when they are alert and well-rested. Your body loses its ability to balance insulin and blood sugar levels and, if that weren’t bad enough, often stays in fat storage mode through the day as well.
To top this off, when you don’t sleep enough, you produce less testosterone – if you’re a guy – and both sexes suffer from reduced growth hormone levels. Lack of sleep also leads to high cortisol levels, one of your body’s stress hormones, which also hurts your ability to burn fat. In other words, if you want to lose weight, make sure you’re getting enough sleep.
Tip #6: Relax!
Perhaps the only thing worse for your fat loss efforts than not getting enough sleep is stress. In addition to all the other debilitating effects chronic stress can have on your life, it quickly ruins any attempt at trying to lose weight.
This gets back to cortisol, which we mentioned before. Cortisol is released during stressful situations as part of your body’s fight-or-flight response to help increase your blood sugar level so you’ll have enough energy to either fight or flee. However, when you can’t do either and the stressful situation never ends, cortisol begins to accumulate, resulting in a wide variety of debilitating chronic problems. In short, your body can no longer balance itself properly and fat loss simply isn’t going to happen.
Tip #7: Check Your Gut
This is one of those internal problems which may be interfering with your weight loss efforts. Here are a few common problems to look out for:
• Low stomach acid
• Bad bacteria, easily fixed by probiotics.
• Chronic inflammation, which can be caused by not getting enough fiber or by food sensitivities, such as gluten or dairy intolerance.
Tip #8: Medical conditions
Beyond gut problems, there are a wide variety of medical conditions that could be impacting your weight loss efforts. These include anemia, which affects your body’s ability to supply oxygen to your muscles which results in a lowered metabolism. Low iron and low B12 can both lead to anemia. Other issues could include insulin resistance, hypothyroidism, hypoglycemia, or side effects from medications you may be on. All of these could be having a hidden impact on your results. The fix? Seek help from a doctor who can help you identify and treat these conditions.