5 Myths to Know If You Can’t Lose Weight

The reason why you can’t lose weight might be because your strategy is either cutting back on food or trying really hard to exercise. Both of them rely on the assumption that weight gain is a caloric surplus problem (the Caloric Theory) and on a simplistic way to look at food: food equals calories.

Despite managing to reduce their caloric intake, most people still find it difficult to lose weight. If you are one of them, you should be asking the right question.

What do I need to know about weight loss before choosing a diet?

Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the ax. – Abraham Lincoln

It is better to take enough time and research the best weight loss approach before going to the execution part.

There are several things people fundamentally get wrong about weight loss. Things that can cost you years of struggling with your weight.

I want to dispel five of them in this article. Five myths lurking around in the weight loss space. They may explain why you are not losing weight despite the fact you are trying hard.

1. Weight Loss is about Restricting Caloric Intake

While your body is indeed set up to store excess energy (calories) in the form of fat, the Caloric Theory is not painting the whole picture. In fact, it is not even close to painting the whole picture. Which is why any attempt to lose weight based on it will fail sooner or later.

Restrictive diets are built on this “calories in, calories out” weight loss myth. Going through a program that bans certain food groups or has a strict eating regimen will make you believe that you are incapable of losing weight. You think it’s either because you lack will power or because something is wrong with your body. It just doesn’t react like that of those people you saw in the Before & After pictures. The ones that DID have enough will power and that DID go all the way through.

It is not true. Restrictive diets DON’T work for losing weight in the long run.

In a meta-analysis of 29 long-term weight loss studies, more than half of the lost weight was regained within two years, and by five years more than 80% of lost weight was regained (Maintenance of lost weight and long-term management of obesity)

According to Examine.com, a trustworthy website that checks claims that are frequently made in the health and wellness space, ” the failure rate of dieting is high”. It is often said that 95% of people who diet fail but Examine.com didn’t find evidence to support this high number. In fact, it depends on what the definition of a successful diet is.

Is it losing 5% of body weight in 1 month? Is it 10% or more and keeping it off for at least 5 years?

What is your desired outcome? I encourage you to think about and clarify your aspiration. Is it body weight or body fat? What is the higher reason you desire this change? Is it to have more energy, be healthier, look in a certain way, have more self-confidence?

If the success metric is having lost 5% of body weight in 1 month, most diets would probably be considered successful because they are assessed on a very short period of time. By decreasing the caloric intake, one can lose fat but also muscle mass. Moreover, the time period is so short that it doesn’t account for all the people that quit the diet because it is not a sustainable way to live and feed themselves. At what point the weight is put back on.

For me, the definition of a successful weight loss intervention is being in the healthy range with regards with body fat and visceral fat. It is feeling good and energized at your current body weight and composition. And sustaining it for the at least 5 years.

Examine.com looked at how many diets were successful at losing at least 10% of body weight 1 year after starting the diet and they found success rates ranging from 10% to 33% (“Do 95% of diets fail?”). It is pretty low.

Would you start any diet or any project if you had so slim chances of success (and this is just after 1 year, imagine after 5)? You would if you though there were no alternatives. But there are.

Another mechanism sets you up for failure as soon as you start losing weight by restricting your caloric intake. This brings me to the second myth.

2. Fast Weight Loss Should be Celebrated

When people search for diets online, they often ask things like “How to lose 10 kgs in a 1 month?”. The speed of losing weight is important for them. In other cases, an event in their life, such a wedding or a trip becomes the deadline for losing the extra weight that bothers them.

Research has shown that rapid weight loss reduces your metabolic rate (ie, the rate at which you burn calories) more than slow weight loss. This means that you will consume less calories for the same activity level. What is more, this reduction persists long after you stop dieting, even for years.

In other words, the less you eat, the less you need to eat to keep the same weight. This mechanism can be explained by an evolutionary feature we all have built in: in order to survive periods of famine, we are able to continue the same activity level with less energy intake.

Even if you want to lose 2 kgs to fit into a dress for your important upcoming event, you should not engage in a rapid caloric restriction program. You will mess up your metabolic rate and potentially go down a spiral of gaining weight and further restricting your energy intake.

In episode 4 of the Nourishing Wins podcast: “Wanting Things Fast” (listen here) I go more in depth about how expecting to get results fast sets us up for failure, whether we are trying to eat healthily, lose weight or make other meaningful changes in our life. 

3. Weight Loss is Linear

No matter how much you reduce your calories or do physical exercise, after the encouraging weight loss that happens in the beginning, your body’s set point will probably get in your way.

Your body’s set point is your programmed weight. If you go below this weight you will stop losing fat (stored energy) and start saving even more energy. It is also a survival mechanism that helps you go through times when food is scarce. It makes you store more of the glucose you have available and avoid using the existing fat.

This mechanism is often referred to as the weight loss plateau.

Can you reset your body set point? Yes, but it has to be done in a gradual way.

When people hit these two obstacles (numbers 2 and 3) related to their biology, they lose faith in their ability to lose weight and psychological mechanisms will further determine them to quit their attempt.

4. You Don’t Have Enough Willpower

When you realize the diet worked in the beginning but then it stopped, you start losing faith. You might even believe something is wrong with your body and it becomes very hard to follow the difficult eating rules of the diet. You quit and you think you didn’t have enough power, otherwise it would have worked.

However, as the previous myths have been dispelled, you now know that diets are not supposed to work. It is not your fault.

Moreover, relying on motivation for implementing a difficult, new behavior is not supposed to work either. Motivation is unreliable: it comes and goes and cannot be trusted to fuel a behavior that you want to do daily, one which is also hard to do, as most restrictive diets are.

Behavior science shows us the reliable ways we can build new habits but they are not yet used in the weight loss domain, which still largely relies on motivation to change people’s eating habits and lifestyle.

5. Losing Weight is Hard

You might be surprised by this myth. The difficult part is not losing weight but maintaining the lost weight in the long run. By greatly restricting calories for just a few days you will start to lose weight. However, this will reduce your metabolic rate, forcing you to eat even less in the future to maintain the same weight. When you’ll reach your body set point (which is approximately when you lose more than 5% of body weight too fast), the weight loss process will also slow down.

Losing body fat is also more difficult than losing overall weight. By not eating balanced meals aligned with your level of activity and your lifestyle, you might be losing muscle mass and water. This could be good news at first sight, but muscle is much more difficult to put back on than fat and it is much more important in maintaining our metabolic health.

The Best Strategy to Lose Weight

First and foremost, the strategy you choose must be something you can sustain in the long run. Anything that gets you saying “I can’t eat this right now because I am on a diet” is not a good strategy.

Here are the 5 main pillars if the plan I create for my clients. They don’t need to ask the question “Why can’t I lose weight?” anymore.

1. Whole foods: without restriction of any major food group
2. Microbiome rebalancing
3. Scientifically-proven habit creation (using BJ Fogg’s Tiny Habits method)
4. Mindset: clarifying the greater “Why” of your weight loss initiative, rethinking your relationship with food and stopping emotional eating (one of my most listened to podcast episode is “Love your Body Now, Before Losing Weight”: listen to it here)
5. Holistic approach: tackling lifestyle factors with proven influence on weight management: sleep, stress, timing of meals and physical activity

Nutrition-wise, I believe weight loss should be gradual and not focused on a drastic caloric restriction. It should be centered on rebalancing your microbiome, replacing ultra processed foods with whole foods, avoiding blood sugar spikes and including a diversity of plants (with a role in regulating your body fat). This type of approach has many more chances to reset your body’s set point, avoid the weight loss plateau, and limit the reduction of your metabolic rate.