7 Reasons Your Fat Loss Diet Isn’t Working

photo credit: ffîon

As the summer approaches, the hottest topic on the lips of every physique-conscious individual is, without a doubt, fat loss.

Dieting down for the summer months is humdrum for those who wish to reveal their six-pack abs and look great in their bathing suit.  Just the other day as I was training, I overheard some chatter amongst a few of my peers about their fat loss efforts, their routines and how “slow” their fat loss attempts were going.  As a result of my nosy eavesdropping I inferred as to why they were failing miserably.

After their conversation was over, here are a few ideas I would have liked to run by them.

You Grossly Overestimate Your Expenditure

I’d assume this is one of the main reasons people don’t lose fat as fast as they’d like to.  It’s not uncommon.  Many ads claim that a certain exercise or type of training will burn more calories than their alternatives.

While this sounds nice, walking at an incline for 1 hour is not magically going to burn hundreds of more calories than walking a similar pace on a flat surface.  One thing we must realize is that our rate of perceived exertion doesn’t always equate with how many calories we’ve burned.

When I was testing out my Bodybugg and later, the GoWear Fit, I’d burn about the same amount of calories during an hour of intense weight training and an hour of brisk walking.  Guess which activity I was more gassed afterward?  I could’ve continued walking another hour and burned twice as many calories while preserving my energy.

It’s also been noted by many using these devices that simply moving more in the form of chores, errands and other random movement will increase daily burn substantially.

I’d say the number one reason people fail in this area is by “rewarding” themselves after a workout they perceived as being very intense, and then hitting up the local Dairy Queen for a large, chocolate shake.

You Suck At Tracking Calories

If you aren’t familiar with tracking your intake accurately, this is an instance when someone who is following a diet with a perceived deficit is often eating at maintenance, or worse, over maintenance.

Take the active female with a maintenance intake of 2500 calories per day.  She’s eating a diet rich in fruit, nut butters and lean protein.  The problem is that she uses a (rounded) tablespoon when portioning her peanut butter or that she relies on the caloric content of an average-sized piece of fruit instead of actually weighing out each portion.  As it turns out, the perceived intake of 1900-2000 calories per day is actually 2500 calories.  She get’s discouraged and frustrated because now, to her, dieting doesn’t work.

It’s just a matter of getting things right from the start.

You Believe All The Hype

You know, all the hype on television and the internet about miracle workout programs and quick fixes.  On some late night ads, we often hear and see many drastic transformations.  Our ears lift as we hear how someone dropped 8 dress sizes in only 14 days!

The problem with hype is that it’s just that, hype.  Remember, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.  Dropping 20lbs of body fat is going to take a lot longer than 2 weeks and depending on the individual, it could take anywhere up to 20 weeks.

You Rely On Supplements

This could fall under the hype category but I wanted to highlight this one by itself.  No supplement will ever replace ass-busting work.  The only ones that do replace some of the hard work are certain pharmaceuticals, but even when taking those, the diet still requires some effort and attention to detail.

Many supplements have outrageous claims stating they will burn fat 10X faster than diet alone or that they will keep you from storing certain macro nutrients (such as fat or carbohydrate).  Most of these are made to sell, often overpriced and sometimes even dangerous for certain individuals.

There are only a few supplements for fat loss that have extensive research behind them and one of them is the famous Ephedrine/Caffeine stack.  Lots of the hype a few years ago in the news, about how bad ephedrine is, was due to people who DIDN’T FOLLOW THE CORRECT DOSING PROTOCOLS and thought that more equaled better.  Dumb.

You Subscribe To False Dogma

Many, even to this day, still believe in the meal frequency myth.  You know; it’s the statement that multiple meals throughout the day will stoke the metabolic fire.  Of course, we now know through research and through anecdotal evidence (my personal testing with meal frequency) that this idea is simply false.

Then we have the cliché, no pain, no gain.  It’s common for folks, especially when dieting, to absolutely annihilate themselves during training because to them, harder/more is always better.  It’s just not true and is an easy way to burn out, get injured and in turn, get suboptimal results.

You Have Entire Free Days

One thing I overheard the two discussing that stood out to me the most was the fact that the one who was having lots of trouble losing fat was having entire cheat days.  Their 6 days of moderate dieting and over-exercising was completely stamped out due to their Sunday afternoon brunch at the local Cracker Barrel and the night out eating pizza and ice cream.  Weeks and even months of dieting can pass by with no results to speak of due to such practices.

I’d rather one have 1 or 2 regular free meals incorporated into their diet or a structured refeed every once in a while to maintain some sanity as opposed to completely undoing their progress for one day of gluttony.

You’re Too Rigid

The final, and often biggest issue for people whose fat loss diets are NOT working is due to their approach and mindset.  For these folks, rigidity consists of being too strict with their food choices, meal timing, exercise routine and their attempts to make everything perfect.

For many, it’s the all-or-nothing approach in which they feel that one slip-up will ruin all aspects of their diet and hard work.  This is sometimes followed up by thoughts of inadequacy for not “sticking to their plan.”

Such tragic thoughts can lead to periods of carelessness where they go completely off their diet and some even have binge episodes, simply because they didn’t allow themselves to be human and mess up every once in a while.

Guess what; life isn’t always going to be perfect and your diet sure as hell isn’t always going to be perfect.  Learn to accept and deal with it.  Once you learn to have a more relaxed approach, things will become much easier, I promise.

Stop trying to control everything and just let go.

What About You?

What do you struggle with most on your attempts at fat loss?  What did I miss or leave out?  Let me know in the comments.

Tagged as: Diet, dieting, Fat Loss, Lose Fat, weight loss