Why You're Not Burning Fat: 7 Causes

Are you still not seeing any effects after counting every calorie and depriving yourself of all your favorite foods? If you've been dieting and sticking to your plan religiously but the scale hasn't moved, it's time to evaluate your strategy more carefully.

If you don't address little difficulties that arise along the route straight away, they might sometimes grow into major concerns. Do any of the following problems affect your diet? If so, sort things up in order to start getting the outcomes you want.

1. You've been on a diet for far too long.

When was the last time you finished a meal feeling completely satisfied? If you always feel hungry, something has to be changed.

The first possibility is that you've been dieting for too long and aren't seeing the results you'd hoped for. An extended diet may cause you to have less calories. Your metabolism is slowed by this hunger phase. You may be eating less calories, but you're also burning fewer, so your progress is stagnant.

If this describes you, stop and take a break. Seriously! Take a break for two to four weeks without obsessing about calories in vs calories out. Just one step backward will allow you to continue to experience long-term progress.

2. Your meal measurements are incorrect

The most frequent cause of weight gain among individuals may be due to improper meal measurement.

You're putting together your evening snack before bed. You dip your spoon into the jar of peanut butter and generously pour some into the Greek yogurt. But hold on. On the spoon, how much peanut butter was there? If you've been assuming it to be roughly one tablespoon but it's really closer to two, you've just increased your daily caloric intake by 80–100 calories. You then ponder why your diet is ineffective.

Because it has a lot of calories and is often consumed in little amounts, peanut butter is a suitable illustration. If you make the same error with other high-calorie items like steak, salmon, pasta, or almonds, it's simple to see why the weight seems to stay on.

3. On weekends, you stray from your plan.

How often have you heard someone claim that they follow their diet religiously...during the week? These same strict dieters fall severely off the wagon during the weekend. The weekend makes up roughly 30% of the whole week. It makes sense that you aren't seeing the desired weight reduction if you only adhere to your diet around 70% of the time.

Use the 90/10 rule when dealing with percentages instead: 90 percent of the time, stick to your diet; the other 10 percent, unwind and enjoy yourself. This is a wise guideline to abide by. It helps you keep mostly on the correct road while yet allowing you to indulge sometimes.

A 70/30 guideline is not often observed since it is impossible to get results by spending 30% of your time neglecting your diet and having "fun." Regarding how strictly you are adhering to your food plan, be honest with yourself. Simply following it exactly throughout the week is insufficient. Weekends also count.

4. You don't modify your plan as you go

Additionally, since they don't modify their program as they go along, many struggle to see benefits. They begin their diet program, get wonderful results, and then just go on as before, anticipating that more of the same benefits will appear. Sadly, that isn't how it always goes. Your strategy must adapt as a result of how your body reacts to it.

Your body tries to go into starvation mode and preserve fuel more as you become leaner. Even though it seems paradoxical, eating extra carbohydrates may help you prevent that response. Increasing your carbohydrate consumption may also improve your insulin sensitivity and leptin release, two processes that support body weight maintenance.

5. You Work Out To Burn Calories.

You must work out hard if you want to reduce weight, right? There's nothing wrong with going to the gym only to burn calories, unless you get too focused on one particular metric. Simply because these devices spew out a calorie-burn figure and make it simple to measure your progress, they are significantly more likely to be used if your only goal is to burn calories.

Despite the fact that lifting might result in the most dramatic changes to your physique, barbells do not provide these calorie counts. Lifting not only helps you lose weight overall, but it also helps you sculpt your physique.

This is why you should lift weights for at least 70% of your exercise. Cardio activities are excellent, but they need to be the cherry on top, something to enhance the outcomes of strength training. Don't only depend on exercising to reduce your caloric intake.

Exercises should be stacked back to back with as little rest as possible between them for the greatest effects. Low-rest training boosts your post-workout calorie burn more than standard training, according to a research in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research. 

6. You're wearing yourself out from working out

You could believe that pushing yourself to the limit while you work out is a good thing. Working out hard isn't harmful in and of itself, but pay attention to how this maximum energy production affects the other 23 hours of your day.

Too many individuals, particularly those who are just beginning out, will give it their best during exercises only to revert to a highly sedentary way of life the rest of the time. Why? because their training has left them fatigued!

Your everyday exercise in all its forms may have a significant impact on how many calories you burn overall. Do some cleaning around the home or play basketball with the kids if you're too exhausted to go for a stroll. Your daily calorie burn may actually be declining as a result of your exercise.

Let's assume you work out hard but not too hard and burn 300 calories as an example. You should have enough energy remaining after that to burn an extra 400 calories during the remainder of the day. Your overall calorie burn would be 700 in total.

Let's imagine you engage in a strenuous exercise session that burns 500 calories. In fact, you wind up sleeping on the couch for the remainder of the day because it is so tiresome. Your extra caloric expenditure? Fifty. So you only consumed 550 calories overall for the day.

Short version: Over-exercising might hinder your capacity to shed weight.

7. The Juice Bar Is Where You Go After Your Workout

Finally, avoid making this typical post-exercise error: rewarding yourself with a large snack after a challenging workout. You will maintain all the strength and cardiovascular gains you made throughout that training session whether you eat a snack or not. However, after all your sweat and hard work, you may wind up calorie neutral if you followed it up with a large smoothie or a bagel with cream cheese.