Why you won't lose weight
Anonymous test shows you how losing weight works for you too!
Losing weight is one of those things: the range of very different diets, numerous powders and lots of meal replacement products is huge. At the same time, there are a considerable number of people who, despite all their attempts, usually lose only minimal weight - or who do not lose weight at all, but in some cases even gain weight. Many have simply given up in resignation. Most feel tormented and frustrated. But one thing is clear: anyone can lose weight.
The reasons for lack of success can be identified
We did an anonymous survey of people who have difficulty or even no weight loss - despite dieting. The given answers to the question showed us what the reason is that it does not work. We looked at all the answers and thoroughly evaluated what was stopping them from losing weight in each case. From these evaluations we have created this guide, which clearly shows you what is preventing you from losing weight. We discuss the individual reasons point by point. Just look up which of these main reasons apply to you - and which points you have to avoid in the end, so that you can also lose weight.
Because: Anyone can lose weight. Building up body weight and reducing body weight is a completely natural function of the organism, which is basically present in every living being. We could not survive without the processes behind it. Our body must produce heat 24 hours a day to maintain body temperature. If the energy necessary for this is lacking, or if there is not enough energy for movement, it must by force draw on the available reserves. Losing weight is a completely natural process that works for everyone. Even for you.
The only condition is that you remove the obstacles that hinder these processes. We will now discuss them point by point.
You need to pay attention to these 9 points:
1. The motivation
Our first question to our survey participants was: Why do you want to lose weight?
The answers we received to this question were naturally very varied and very different. Some simply want to look "better", while others already clearly notice the health restrictions of their excessive weight and want to get rid of it. Others have set themselves a certain desired height or weight as their goal because they simply consider it desirable for some reason.
Motivation is very important when losing weight. Losing weight purposefully and consciously is always uncomfortable and unpleasant. This is in the nature of things, all the body understands is: "There is not enough". Without any form of deficiency, the body sees no reason to reduce the fat deposits again or to attack them at all. The extent to which we feel this deficiency also depends largely on the method we use to lose weight - and how drastically we personally feel these changes.
Only genuine motivation makes less pleasant things bearable
We will have to endure these unpleasant sensations if we want to lose weight. Losing weight and at the same time happily shovelling food into ourselves will not work. Get this into your head once and for all. And whoever suggests to you that this is possible is not offering you a weight loss method, but only an excuse. It's not gonna work.
What helps you to survive and endure these unpleasant sensations is your motivation.You must have good and strong reasons why you want this. Reasons you believe in yourself unwaveringly. Just wanting to impress someone, or just copying or trumping someone's physique, are not very strong reasons, even a vague "somehow better looking" is not enough as a reason. You are not this or that internet model - you are you. And you don't have to trump anybody. We are all worth the same as people.
Reasons should always be with yourself and not with other people. It's about you and your life, so find reasons that yourself and that you consider important to you. Set yourself clear goals, goals that are worth doing something for or even endure uncomfortable situations.
You are solely responsible for achieving these goals: not your environment, not a new Instagram trend and not the diet method. The responsibility for achieving your goals is entirely yours.
This is where it all begins.
2. Note your initial weight
In our second question we wanted to know from the participants how much they actually weigh. This is very important, because depending on the starting weight, the situation when losing weight is always very different.
It makes a difference whether you weigh 170 kg and finally want to go through life with a healthy body weight, or whether you want to lose only 10 kg almost at normal weight to fit into the next smaller size or into some current beauty craze. Both are completely different situations. The whole thing is often made even more difficult by the fact that nobody tells you clearly how much you should actually weigh exactly. Body Mass Index and normal weight calculations only give rough ranges in which a weight is somehow medically reasonable. But this varies greatly from person to person, depending on age and physique. Just as an example - at the BMI most successful bodybuilders have catastrophic values in the area of overweight and this although they have the body fat percentage of a half starved person.
If you are very overweight (BMI values over 30), your weight has usually increased over a very long period of time. This means that there is often a larger number of unhealthy eating and living habits that you have been following for a long time and which need to be changed. These are major changes, which usually also change many other things in your life. This takes time.
Extremes rarely or never work
It is also a matter of realistic objectives. "10 kg in 2 weeks" are goals that are so completely nonsensical because the body first has to adapt to the entire new nutritional situation, adapt physical processes accordingly and find solutions for any problems that may arise. With such high body weights, only a slow, continuous weight loss works in the long term - you have to put your diet on a healthier basis and then you can watch your weight disappear. Your body is not a machine where you push a button and it does what you want. It is a very complex system of many individual processes that work together. YOU are your body. When you do brute force to yourself, nothing usually gets better. By the way, if you're on a zero diet, you gain a lot of weight, but that's it.
If you aim for a weight of 60 kg at 1.75, it may be that you like the number and the weight, but your body doesn't. In this case, your body may then take every opportunity to correct the weight to a value that makes sense to it. Then you will constantly struggle with your "desired weight" because it is not a realizable goal. Something that your imagination can live with, but your body can't. And that's what it's all about. Delusional values are not real values.
Both problems have one thing in common: they result from not listening to your body when it comes to health. Some arbitrarily agreed or advertising-technically strongly exaggerated numerical values are used as "goals", which are however without any meaningful basis. Theoretically, of course, you can starve to death as quickly as possible, but in practice this works rather poorly.
If you work against your body and its natural processes, you are working against yourself - and against the success of your purchase. Don't do that.
3. Number of meals per day
We also asked the participants about this. Some of them estimated quite high values (about 5 - 6 times), many of them could not say this exactly.
In today's western world, eating habits have changed dramatically: we have adopted a "bite by bite" pattern in which we eat practically all the time. This is, of course, anything but healthy; in addition to our weight, it also damages our body enormously.
In earlier times, farmers had 5 meals a day, citizens usually had 3, although these meals were often not very opulent, much of which we would now call "snacks" - and simply eat them on the side. Also with the number of meals we are today mostly far away from this frequency.
This leads to two problems: on the one hand, the quantity of what we eat during the day is hardly manageable and the calories often accumulate significantly "so incidentally". On the other hand, we also make it difficult for our body. It basically needs the time to digest food and then our digestive system needs time to thoroughly dispose of the leftovers.
If this time is no longer available, the system will eventually be overwhelmed. If it is constantly occupied only with digesting new incoming food, it will eventually be unable to keep up. Out of pure stress, things are then simply put directly into storage, because there is no time to use them up. This is exactly where you don't really want your food, on your stomach and around your hips.
In addition, we often miss out on important nutrients, get digestive problems from time to time and, above all, make a habit of eating all the time. This habit already makes us nervous if we don't get anything for two hours, even if we are not hungry. So the disaster takes its course and it requires discipline to stop eating all the time or to "reward" us with snacks.
Even if feelings of hunger make you panic, you will not die of hunger. You can go without solid food for up to two months, so a few hours is no problem. They are only unpleasant, but we can't always remove all the unpleasant things in our lives right away. We go to work, even if we don't like it very much.
Many Buddhist monks only eat once a day. None of them look starved - so it seems to work without any problems. They don't know the feeling of hunger in the time in between, the body adjusts itself quickly if the food comes regularly. A clearer head is supposed to do that as well.
4. Pay attention to your weekly balance
We asked our participants to write down what they eat during the week. The answers were - at least for us - already very enlightening.
Over the course of a day there is usually no really clear picture of what we eat. A few "little things" that are maybe not so healthy add up to considerable amounts over the course of one week, in addition, in a period of 7 days one gets a much better feeling for how much meat, bread, vegetables and finished products one actually really eats.
A "healthy" day over a week does not make much difference in relation to the total amount. And three portions of vegetables are not exactly opulent with a total of 21 meals. So a weekly balance sheet exposes our popular self-deception well, so you should definitely do that - and be honest about it. It usually shows you exactly where your "weak points" lie.
In addition, many of our nutrient stores in the body last for about 7 - 10 days, so within this period we should have taken in the most important nutrients through food and replenished the stores. If we do not succeed in doing this, there is a risk of nutrient deficiency (this is very common, especially among overweight people).
Writing or tracking your food on a weekly basis also helps you to take stock at the end of the week: What have I eaten too much of, too little of? What things have I fallen for this week? In which situations do I regularly eat too much? How has my weight developed with these food quantities/food, what "works"?
Weekly balance sheets often contain valuable information - which you should not ignore.
The marginal factors in weight loss
The remaining five questions are aimed particularly at the "marginal factors" that play a major role in determining whether you succeed or fail in losing weight. We will pass on these questions to you in exactly the same way as we have asked them to our participants. You can answer them for yourself and draw your own conclusions.
5. What is your absolute favorite food?
We asked our participants that as well. The question sounds strange at first, in fact the favourite food reveals a lot about individual eating habits.
Even the weekly evaluations have shown that most people tend to eat the same thing over and over again very often. There is actually not so much wrong with this, which is not only quite common, but also makes it easier for the body to adjust optimally to what usually comes in and to optimize the necessary processes for digestio
It is only problematic if the food as a whole is very one-sided and important nutrients are missing. This is where the principle "Improve your habits and you improve your life" comes into its own: if you simply make what you usually eat a little healthier bit by bit, the amount of willpower required to persevere is usually much less than if you only want to eat vegetables overnight.
Many dishes can actually be "upgraded" in a healthier way, you can do this step by step. In addition, the quantities can be reduced optimally in small steps over a longer period of time. In this way, you do not break with your cherished habits at one fell swoop (unless they are too harmful), but change them bit by bit into better ones. Most of the time this works quite well if you consistently incorporate improvements.
6. Are you ambitious?
Another strange question we asked our participants - but it is also important, also for losing weight.
How you deal with self-imposed goals, and whether you have any at all, plays a very important role in how well you progress in life and with your desired goals.
Those who are very lax with their goals and often shrug their shoulders and don't take their goals particularly seriously, but always wait for everything they want to achieve to happen somehow, will often have problems losing weight.
The antithesis is people who set themselves a clear goal, a reasonable time frame, and every day do something to achieve their goal - which is NOW.
This requires a bit of power, a little discipline and a lot of clarity about what goals you want to achieve and why you want to achieve them. To do something right now means to lose weight and in many cases to give up something right now when you are confronted with your goal. Power, discipline and above all clarity are the three essential ingredients for success - not only when losing weight.
See for yourself which of the two sides you'd be more comfortable with - and whether you can't just become a little more "power-human" if necessary. There are a number of aids for this, too, which are not always all about losing weight, but generally help to develop goals and pursue them consistently. A little more "Achieving-Power" does not harm us all.
7. Are your parents of normal weight and pay attention to good nutrition?
This is indeed a very important question. That is why we asked it to our participants.
A great many things in our lives are controlled by unconscious habits that we acquire in early childhood by simply copying the adults around us. In most cases, we retain such habits throughout our lives.
For parents who have always struggled with their own weight or paid little attention to healthy eating, the chance is very high that you have simply subconsciously adopted many of these unhealthy and dysfunctional eating habits, preferences and attitudes towards food.
Of course, nothing is ever set in stone - we can also change long-held habits, mistakes or unhealthy attitudes. To do this, however, they must make us fully aware of them and put them to the test.
We always tend to see as "great" and "indispensable" everything we have eaten since our earliest childhood. But that doesn't necessarily have to be true, it's just our impression of it, because we associate it with "home" and "security" or simply as a habit that is hard to change and is inseparable from us.
Changing such things (for example eating 4 times a day) often takes a lot of work and takes a long time, but is worth the effort. It is not decisive whether something "feels good" or whether we have always done it this way - what is decisive is only what is now and here sensible and reasonable - according to rational standards. Unreasonable and unhealthy does not get better just because you keep it for 60 years.
The fact that you can change almost everything is shown by people who grew up with almost exclusively animal products and are still convinced vegans today. As I said, nothing is set in stone. You can always make it reasonable.
8. What do you think about fasting?
This question is directly aimed at how well you can deal with renunciation. If fasting is a frightening, life-threatening idea for you, most likely not very well. If you at least find it exciting and would like to try it (if you don't already have it), it is much better. And if you think that shrugging your shoulders is something that can be done, it would of course be quite good.
It is less about fasting itself, which in its original form is not very suitable for losing weight anyway, but more about the attitude towards it. It's about how well you think you can part with food.
As mentioned before, physically speaking, one can survive up to 2 months without any problems without solid food. The only reason why we cannot or do not want to do without food from time to time is emotional reasons.
Appetite is unpleasant (this is its biological purpose), but for some people it is also almost unbearable if they do not always immediately get what they (impulsively) think they are getting. For others, food is the "solvent" for all negative feelings: sadness, boredom, fear, frustration, anger and whatever other unpleasant things happen to them.
If you find it very difficult to deal with it, if you cannot have the food you want immediately or are not allowed to have it for a while, or if you like to raid your fridge as a problem solution or like to "treat yourself" quickly in emotionally challenging times, then this is a psychological problem. It has absolutely nothing to do with your body. You can only solve these things on the psychological level, on the physical level it doesn't help.
Food is only there to keep the body functioning. It is not a suitable means to regulate any emotions. That's not what it's for.
9. There's a barbecue! What are you doing?
This is a question of perseverance. The question aims to show you how well you can stand by your goals, attitudes and values - even when others act differently. How much you allow yourself to be distracted.
If you cannot stand behind what you want to achieve for yourself when others do something else or do not understand what you are doing, your backbone is weak. You have to work on that. Standing by your decisions and going through with them is your sole responsibility.
If you feel coerced or forced, mocked or belittled to do what your friends do and "go along with it" during such events - then you have the wrong friends. They won't stand behind you for anything else in life. Whoever tries to force you to do something or to dissuade you from something is not a friend - but only someone who tries to control your life in all parts.
(Especially internally weak people like to do this because it makes them feel stronger themselves).
Nobody else than yourself has the right to decide about your life - you are also responsible for what comes out in the end. So only you can decide for yourself, the rest has to respect that. (Think how many of your "friends" would put up with it the other way round if you try to force them not to eat).
Final words
These 9 points cover the most essential areas that turn out to be obstacles to removal. Most of them have nothing to do with your body - but with your habits, your attitudes and your personal well-being.
If you notice that you are having difficulty losing weight or sticking to a diet, take another close look at these 9 points and see what it might be. We have not asked these questions to our participants for nothing. They are important - so are the answers.
Remember: Anyone can lose weight - this is a completely normal, physical process that runs by itself anyway. If we create the conditions for this and remove the obstacles that stand in the way of losing weight.
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