I was losing weight, all of a sudden I stopped losing weight. Everything I’ve tried is just not working.
Is this you?
Your situation is not peculiar and your story isn’t strange. In fact I’ve met ladies that said oh a few years ago I could loose weight easily. Now it’s so tough and I’m watching what I eat, I’m exercising. What more can I do?
Why is my body just not complying?
Well…… your body is not complying because weight loss or gain is not dependent on just what you eat, it’s also dependent on several things.
Some of these things include
- Muscle mass
- Hormonal function.
- Emotional eating.
- Body fat composition
These 4 things are points that men clearly have the upper hand on.
Men have more muscle mass than women, increased muscle mass helps with weight loss
Men produce testosterone which encourages the burning of fat and do not have frequent cyclical changes.
Men’s fat are usually deposited around the organs while women’s fat is deposited below the skin. It’s been discovered that burning fat on the organs is much easier than burning fat below the skin.
Women also have an association to emotional eating which can occur when one is stressed, had food cravings, sad, lonely and when we miss our diet regimes.
So how do all these play out for women and what can they do to achieve the weight loss they so desperately want.
Women experience hormonal changes frequently and these changes in turn determine where fat is deposited.
Hormones act like a switches.When it’s on, your body works fine, when it’s off your body slows down.
Two hormones vital to weight loss are leptin and gherlin. Leptin tells your body when you are full and gherlin stimulates hunger and slows down metabolism.
10% of a woman’s weight is in body fat, if she looses body fat and it’s not replaced by increased muscles the leptin hormone takes it as a signal that the brain is full and reduces its availability.
The second hormone gherlin increases its quantity. More gherlin causes metabolism to slow down and hunger to set in.
A lady that noticed, she lost 2 kg last week ,suddenly notices that she is no longer losing weight.
She is hungry and refuses to eat, starves herself but the weight just does not go.
Now I’ve started with my medical jargon so I’ll stop here. Let’s break down all we’ve stalked about so far.
A lady’s make up actually encourages her body to work against her when she is trying to loose weight.
So what’s missing?
Muscle mass and one way to get muscle mass is doing strength exercises like lifting weights and
press ups.
Yes I can hear you, I don’t have weights what do I do? You can do planks. When you lift up yourself to do a press up, you hold yourself,in that position for as long as you can.
Another is filling plastic bottles with sand and lifting it.
Strength exercises twice weekly is good for a start.
Other simple things you can add are
more greens into your diet.(if you can make it at least 1/3rd of your meal)
Greens- Vegetables, in their raw form contain hormones also which help to improve and maintain the function of the body.
These hormones are messengers when they get into the body they look for where things are not moving smoothly and help to correct them.
Greens also contain a lot of fiber. Fiber helps us to digest food faster and burns fat.
Hence more greens means more bowel movement, more bowel movement means more waste and toxins( of which fat is included) leaves the body.
One great way to take greens is by juicing them. Try it juice some apple and cucumber and let me know how you feel.