Five Reasons You're Not Losing Weight

Eating No Carbs, Dairy, Gluten or Sugar and Still Not Losing Weight? Health Guru Libby Weaver Tells Us How to Get Off the Diet Bandwagon and Lose Those Pesky Pounds for Good.

- Libby Weaver

When Libby was studying dietetics and later biochemistry at the University of Sydney in Australia it was the late 90s and the prevailing wisdom on weight gain and loss was calories in, calories out. But when she started practicing, she found clients who were running marathons or calorie counting obsessively would gain rather than lose weight. Thirteen years, 10 nutrition books and hundreds of clients later, she is convinced there are lesser known but powerful reasons people can’t lose weight.

“I wanted to help my clients but calorie controlled diets weren’t working for them,’’ says Weaver. ‘That led me to go back to my biochemistry textbooks with the question in mind: what leads the human body to get the message to either burn fat or store fat?”

Weaver says that while eating too much and exercising too little contributes to weight gain, other factors play a major part too.

HERE ARE LIBBY'S TOP FIVE FACTORS ALL TOO OFTEN OVERLOOKED BY DIETERS

1. STRESS

The link between stress and obesity is being increasingly confirmed in scientific research and for Weaver, it’s one of the prime reasons people can’t lose weight. That marathon runner was putting her body under so much stress that she gained 12 pounds, Weaver remembers. What was going on? 'When we’re under stress we’re constantly churning out the stress hormone adrenalin and that prepares our body to fight or flee from an attack,’ says Weaver. 'Blood supply is diverted away from processes such as digestion to the muscles and causes the body to use glucose, not body fat as its fuel.’ When stress is prolonged, the body starts to make another stress hormone called cortisol which breaks muscles down and having less muscle subsequently slows down metabolism. Other studies have found that people with high cortisol levels tend to put weight on around their middles.