The most common complaint I hear is that someone “just can’t lose weight.” They believe they’re doing all the right things and they’ve tried “everything” but the scale won’t budge. They’re frustrated and ready to give up. I’ve even been here myself, several times. So what’s going on?

Everyone knows how dieters can get stuck on a plateau that last forever or that chronic dieters have been dieting for so long that their bodies don’t burn calories efficiently anymore. But what are some other reasons you can’t lose weight?

There are lots of them! I’m going to share the ones I think are most common that we tend to ignore! Why do we ignore these? Well, sometimes we’re not aware they could be a problem, and for others, we prefer to go the “easy” route and delving into some of this stuff is a bit harder! Read on – you never know, your solution could be in one of these paragraphs.

Reasons Why You Might Not Be Losing Weight

You have a hormonal or metabolic condition that makes it difficult for your body to burn fat or causes weight gain. Hypothyroidism, PCOS, Metabolic Syndrome, Cushing’s Syndrome and natural hormonal changes like perimenopause and menopause are just a few of the medical/physical conditions that can make weight loss seem impossible (and weight gain seem inevitable).

If you suspect that you have a medical condition that is getting in the way of your goals, talk to your doctor. There are tests that can diagnose all of these conditions and treatments that can help! And the sooner you know if you are dealing with a medical condition, the more effective all your efforts will be.

Food Sensitivities & Weight Gain

You have a food sensitivity. Food sensitivities can cause us to gain weight, but we usually don’t know we have one!

Food sensitivities are not the same thing as a food allergy. If you have an allergy to a food, it will usually show up in a blood test or skin prick test that you can have done by an allergist. When someone eats a food that they are allergic to, the symptoms usually happen relatively quickly (hives, itching, wheezing, etc.) and can be life threatening (such as in the case of someone with a peanut allergy with anaphylaxis). To learn more about food allergies and testing, visit FARE.

While food allergies usually are noticeably caused by the food in question, a food sensitivity can go completely unnoticed, as the symptoms and discomfort that come from the sensitivity happen so slowly over time that we don’t see them as related.  We usually only become aware that there is an issue with that food if we take it out for a period of time (like during an elimination diet) and reintroduce it.

Food sensitivity symptoms can include many things that can appear to be from other conditions (or just a part of getting older) like bloating, body aches and pains, rosacea, asthma, constipation, diarrhea, and weight gain. Food sensitivities are becoming increasingly common today (a few reasons include an increase in gut permeability and exposure to hormones) and many people who have a food sensitivity gain weight because the offending food causes an inflammatory response in the body.

Interestingly enough, the foods we are sensitive to are often foods we eat frequently and have cravings for! Remove the offending food and weight starts to come off easily. If you need help doing an elimination diet to see if you have a sensitivity to the most common ones, let’s chat!

Mental and Emotional Causes

Weight Gain Due to Self-Limiting Beliefs

You have self-limiting beliefs. Do any of these sound familiar? “I’ve always been fat.” “I can’t lose weight.” “Losing weight is too hard for me.” “I’m just a big-boned person.” “Everyone in my family is overweight.” “I’ll never be a normal weight.” For me, the thought was “I’m just a fat girl” – as if being “fat” defined who I was as a person. We make our weight mean something about us. Thoughts that we think over and over again become part of our belief system and when something is ingrained in our beliefs, like it or not, we take actions repeatedly that will provide evidence for that belief.

For example, if you believe that your weight is a direct result of just everyone in your family being naturally heavy or if you believe that it’s not possible for you to lose weight, how much effort do you think you’ll put into eating well or not eating too much? If you are like most people with these beliefs, you’re going to half-ass it! If you already believe you will fail, you won’t give it your all – because why give your all to something you know you can’t have? You’re not a bad person or lazy for doing this – it’s human nature. We won’t work hard at something we know we can’t have.

But you don’t HAVE to believe these things are true. It’s a choice to believe these things about yourself. Change your belief and you will change your future. To open up the door, start asking yourself empowering questions, like: What if I could lose weight? What can I do today to make weight loss more likely? Is eating this food in alignment with the person I want to be? See where that takes you!

Emotional Weight & Physical Weight Gain

You’re holding onto emotional weight. This is where I’m gonna get a little woo-woo and won’t provide scientific facts to back me up – just personal experiences and observations, but I have a feeling you’ll get what I’m talking about.

Sometimes we gain weight and can’t lose it because we are holding on to something that we believe or think about ourselves on such a deep level that it becomes what I like to call “emotional weight.” The belief doesn’t even have to actually be true to weigh us down – it just has to be something that we think must be true!

For example, maybe you got the impression as a child that you weren’t lovable – so to prevent people from loving you, you gained weight to protect yourself from what you saw as inevitable rejection. Or perhaps you got a lot of attention when you were young that made you feel uncomfortable, so you gained weight in the hopes of reducing that unwanted attention.

The weight was a physical way for us to build up a wall around ourselves to keep others out or to keep believing whatever it is we want to believe about ourselves. Emotional weight prevents us from being who we want to be, it gives us an excuse to hold ourselves back, it keeps us playing small and safe. We think it’s protecting us in some way to continue living that story or belief about ourselves, but all it’s really doing is limiting our potential.

You may not even realize there is some deep emotional root to your weight gain – many of us get stuck here and can stay here for years until we recognize that the reason we are unhappy in our bodies is because we are stalling ourselves in other ways.

If you can let go of whatever is weighing you down emotionally, often we start to lose weight. Release whatever is holding you down emotionally and weight loss will happen naturally. Don’t know how to that? Schedule a consult with me to discuss it.

Stress Related Weight Gain

You’re super stressed out. High levels of stress cause us to release lots of cortisol, the “fight or flight” hormone – and when this happens too often we gain weight, especially in the belly. In early times, this release of hormones helped us to stay alive by giving us quick energy to escape predators and increasing fat storage in case we were without food for long periods of time!

Today, many of us enter that fight-or-flight mode daily due to situational stress, (most of which isn’t a threat to our lives), and our body (amazing machine that is is) prepares us to deal with it by making sure the body is prepared for famine or being on alert. When we’re chronically stressed, the body thinks that we’re at risk for starvation so it starts to store fat in case we need it later (because thousands of years ago food wasn’t at our fingertips like today). When this happens on a daily basis, you can see how difficult it will be to lose weight if your body believes you are in danger and need all the fat stores it can make!

Even more annoying is that while under acute stress, most folks lose their appetites, but when the stress is chronic, we actually get the urge to eat more – so you end up with eating more which contributes to the fat storage.

If you’re under high levels of stress, or even moderate stress but don’t handle it well, try making stress relief a priority in your life. Gentle exercise like walking and yoga, movement like tai chi and qigong, deep breathing exercises, massage, evening baths with Epsom salt, journal writing, meditation, and avoiding caffeine may help. As you reduce your stress level, the weight may come off more easily.

Overeating

You’re eating more than your body needs. This is the category that most of us fall into. It’s not something we like to hear, but most of the time, the reason we gain weight and the reason we can’t lose weight is because we are taking in more food than our bodies are using for fuel. This happens for a lot of reasons, a few that you may relate to are:

1. We’ve gotten disconnected from our bodies and don’t listen to hunger and fullness signals to determine when to start and stop eating. This means we eat more and more often! When was the last time you actually felt true hunger?
2. As a society, we eat a lot of foods that are high in refined carbohydrates, these foods make us feel good in the short term but they spike and crash our blood sugar, making us feel ravenous later, again leading to eating more food than we can use.
3. We live sedentary lives, spend too much time driving, on the computer, watching TV and not enough time moving so we don’t burn enough calories.
4. We turn to food when we’re upset, sad, frustrated, lonely, or even happy. When we do this, we usually consume large quantities of food in a short period of time and do it regularly.
5. We eat massive portions that restaurants serve and start serving ourselves those same sized portions at home even though they are way more food than our body needs. It’s just what we’re used to, so we eat it!

How do you deal with this? Take an honest inventory of your habits. Some people may need to try weighing their food with a kitchen food scale (to determine whether they’re having 1 serving or 4) or get back in touch with their bodies natural hunger signals.

Self-Sabotage Dieting

You’re self-sabotaging yourself. You eat well and exercise for a couple of weeks, then decide to reward yourself for your hard work by having a cheat day, but that cheat day turns into you falling off the wagon for three weeks. Or you have been stuck at the same weight for a year, despite exercising 5 days a week and eating well 5 days a week but every Friday and Saturday night you have a few drinks and then after your drinks decide to eat chocolate, ice cream, or whatever else strikes your fancy. You’ll worry about your “diet” on Monday! Or, you drop 20 or 30 pounds and while super excited about your progress, you start to purposely sabotage yourself because there is a part of you that is completely freaked out about going below a certain weight.

We use weight to protect ourselves sometimes and even though consciously we want to lose weight, sometimes we’re more comfortable at the weight we’re at than we want to believe. In fact some of us actually don’t want to lose weight but have been conditioned by society to believe that we need to in order to be happy, so we struggle to lose weight even though it’s not even something we want for ourselves!

So how do you stop sabotaging yourself?

Self sabotage is a complicated beast but for most it goes back to getting in touch with our feelings. Do you feel guilty or berate yourself when you something that isn’t on your “diet”? Then you’re going to self sabotage. Do you use food to comfort or reward yourself? That’s self sabotage. Getting to your why is key to putting an end to it. Find out why you are doing this to yourself and then come up with some good reasons to stop doing it – without judgement and with love!

Go back to why you want to lose weight in the first place – what’s your motivation? How will losing weight change your life? Is there anything that scares you about that? Is there anything that excites you?

Be Honest With Your Habits

Own up, be honest with yourself. This is your ride and you’re in control of it. If you are having a difficult time losing weight and aren’t sure where to turn next,  I sincerely hope you will contact me. I have helped many women get over hurdles that were blocking their success and I’d love to help you do it too.

If you were to ask a group of adults in America about their biggest health complaints, the vast majority would identify weight gain, lack of energy, and less than optimal mood as top contenders. These are not just health concerns, but are major contributors to diminishing quality of life.

Weight, Energy, Mood, Your Thyroid & You

In fact, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), about 71 percent of men and women over the age of 20 are overweight or obese. About 45 percent of adults in the US report feeling chronically tired or fatigued, even though they report 7 to 8 hours of sleep a night. An even higher percentage report fatigue who sleep less than 7 hours. There are estimates that upwards of 30 percent of people report some type of mood disorder, with likely many more mild cases unreported.

If Sherlock Holmes was a health investigator, I am sure he would turn to Dr. Watson and ask if there was something connecting these major problems. And if Dr. Watson had paid attention in endocrinology class, he would have responded, “But of course, my dear Sherlock. There is one gland that plays a role in weight gain and loss, levels of energy, and even mood. And that is the thyroid gland.”

What Does the Thyroid Do?

The thyroid gland is located in the front of your neck and consists of two lobes that partially wrap around your trachea (windpipe). Many people refer to the thyroid as butterfly-shaped because its connected lobes resemble wings. The thyroid gland makes hormones, often referred to as T4 and T3, that dictate the speed at which fuel (food) is burned for energy. Creating energy for the body affects everything from heart rate, to bone density, to bile duct stones, to fertility, to brain function and much, much more.  

Thyroid dysfunction can lead to thyroid disease in which the thyroid can be overactive (hyperthyroidism) or underactive (hypothyroidism). The vast majority of thyroid issues are attributed to the latter.

Why are Thyroid Problems on the Rise?

What is causing this epidemic of thyroid issues? I don’t think this is a one-size-fits-all answer, but rather a combination of many factors negatively affecting the ability of the thyroid gland to do its job.

Thyroid-Disrupting Synthetic Chemicals & More

A 2017 study found that a synthetic chemical called perfluorooctanoate (PFOA) can disrupt the thyroid and even kill its cells at high enough concentrations. Certain fabrics, carpeting, and furniture are known to contain PFOA, among many other of its industrial uses. Exposure to heavy metals is also a risk factor for developing thyroid disease. Cadmium is a common component of phosphate fertilizers and can accumulate in plants like rice, some grains, and potatoes. Within the body, cadmium is able to concentrate in the thyroid gland where it can cause oxidative stress and inflammation.

We are swimming in a sea of thyroid-disrupting chemicals. Is it any wonder our thyroid is struggling to maintain some kind of balance? And often failing to do so?

Suboptimal Iodine Levels & Thyroid Problems

The most documented cause of thyroid dysfunction is sub-optimal amounts of iodine in the body. The thyroid requires two primary raw materials to make hormones: iodine and the amino acid, L-tyrosine. Unfortunately, our diet is often lacking adequate amounts of this essential nutrient. The soils are depleted, and it has been shown that average iodine intake has decreased 50 percent or more in the last several decades.

If that wasn’t bad enough, we are now exposed to high levels of iodine’s competitors: fluoride, chlorine, bromide, and astatine. These compounds can accumulate in the body and attach to receptors meant for iodine. We get fluoride in our drinking water, chlorine in water, swimming pools, hot tubs, and laundry, and bromides from commercial baked goods using brominated flour and brominated vegetable oil in soft drinks. The competitors are more abundant than the real deal—iodine!

What Happens When Your Body is Iodine Deficient? 

When the body doesn’t have enough iodine, it cannot make adequate thyroid hormone. Thyroid hormone is responsible for the conversion of food (fuel) to energy. It the thyroid isn’t working properly, then that process slows down. That results in lower levels of energy, depressed or low mood, and weight gain. If the food is not burned for energy, it is turned into the storage form of fuel, called adipose tissue or fat.

Research has shown that even mild-to-moderate iodine deficiency can be correlated with metabolic syndrome. Metabolic syndrome involves a myriad of conditions like hypertension (high blood pressure), blood sugar issues (diabetes and insulin resistance), excess abdominal weight, and triglyceride and cholesterol imbalances.

It has also been reported that a high percentage of individuals with some type of depressive disorder have sub-optimal thyroid function, and treating the thyroid in some cases greatly reduces symptoms or even eliminates the problem. There is even evidence that thyroid function plays a role in certain types of schizophrenia.

Natural Ways to Improve Thyroid Function

One important way to care for your thyroid is to do your best to avoid competitors and toxins that can damage this gland. It is also important to use iodine, or iodine in combination with L-tyrosine, to make sure the thyroid gland has readily available raw materials to make optimal amounts of thyroid hormone.

Iodine for Thyroid Support

There are several kinds of iodine. Any form will have some functionality in the body, but certain tissue prefers certain forms. For example, the thyroid likes potassium iodide, the breast and prostate like molecular iodine, and sodium iodide is the most soluble, enhancing the absorption also of other forms. Therefore, a blend of more than one type is a good choice for a wider spectrum of benefits.

Dosages of iodine are highly variable. Iodine experts recommend 12.5 milligrams (mg) a day as a medicinal dose, with 30 mgs as a daily dose for specific thyroid problems. You may have to experiment with dosages to find the level that provides you with the most optimal functioning.

Improve Thyroid Function with Selenium 

Another mineral to consider is selenium. Selenium is required for the conversion of the storage form of thyroid hormone (T4) to the active form (T3). Sometimes people make adequate levels of hormones, but still suffer from low thyroid symptoms. They often have a conversion problem that selenium helps correct. A good daily dose to improve the conversion of T4 to T3 is about 300 mcg a day. Note this is micrograms, not milligrams (mg). Only tiny amounts of supplemental selenium are required, and higher levels in the milligram range can be problematic.

The thyroid directly or indirectly affects virtually every single health system in the body.  Improving thyroid function, and increasing thyroid hormone production, benefits your health in more ways than you may know.

The American Thyroid Association estimates that around 20 million people in the U.S. suffer from thyroid disease. Of the people affected, women are over 5 times more likely to have thyroid issues than men.