4 Surprising Factors That Can Prevent Fat Loss
By: Shannon Clark
You’re working hard – you’re in the gym five days a week, you’re planning and pre-cooking your meals to make sure you stay on track, and you’re regularly monitoring your bodyweight and body fat levels to make sure that you are inching closer to your goals.
Then, there comes a time when it seems as though progress comes to a standstill. This likely leaves you feeling confused, frustrated, and not knowing what to do – everything was working – up until now.
In many cases, it could be one of the following factors that is preventing you from moving onwards with your fat loss progress. People place so much emphasis with what they are doing in the gym, that they forget that the other 24 hours in the day will also really influence the results they see.
Here are four surprising factors that could be hindering your ability to shed that last layer of body fat.
Psychological Brain-Drain
The first factor that can really start to reduce the results you see with both your weight loss diet program and your fat loss workouts is what I like to call ‘psychological brain-drain’. You’ve probably experienced this one before. It’s when you wake up one morning and just don’t ‘feel it’.
Going to the gym seems about as exciting as getting your yearly physical and the items on your menu actually make you just lose your appetite altogether.
After a period of intense training and dieting, it’s not unusual for people to start to feel this motivational dip. This in itself is bad because it means you’re going to be even less likely to get those workouts in, but what’s more, is that even if you do manage to push through it and force yourself to the gym, the mental drain can cause up to a 15% reduction in physical output.
To you this spells unproductive workouts that would have just been better skipped.
So what’s the solution? How do you climb out of this problem?
Take a day – or two – or a week for that matter, off.
While it may seem counter-intuitive to what you think you should be doing, it’s really not. The body does need rest and when it doesn’t get it, it’s going to fight hard (and usually,
Lack of Sleep
The second factor that can prevent fat loss from taking place is a lack of sleep. Sleep is also when the body really works hard to repair all the damages that have occurred over the day and when you’re going to ‘recharge’ your engine.
What’s more is that this lack of sleep can actually increase your sensations of hunger, causing you to eat more calories than you need to.
Combine being mentally sleepy with being on a lower calorie diet where there’s usually hunger present plus the added hunger from lack of sleep and you don’t need me to tell you why this is a problem.
Sleep. 8 hours a night will be the ticket to maintaining a good rate of fat loss.
Too Little Dietary Fat
There are a number of people who, when trying to lose body fat, outlaw anything that contains more than 2 grams of fat. The reason? Fat contains over twice as many calories per gram as carbohydrates or protein (9 and 4, respectively).
In doing so, they figure they will speed up their rate of fat loss since they will be consuming fewer calories. The only problem with this thought process is that despite the fact that they aren’t taking in this high calorie macronutrient, they often wind up experiencing very high levels of hunger.
Dietary fat is very helpful in terms of helping to keep you satisfied, making it an important addition to your meals – in limited quantity. In some cases a weight loss diet plan will actually take fat extremely high (such as the Ketogenetic Diet), which is fine provided all the calories are in check.
Unintentional Miscalculations
Finally, the fourth reason why you may not see a rate of fat loss that you were hoping for is due to incorrect calculations.
If you want to get the best fat loss results possible, you must be counting calories. This gives you something solid to work off of. If you aren’t counting calories and aren’t losing weight, it becomes very hard to try and establish where exactly you are going wrong.
By making the time and effort to count, you’ll know exactly what to change when the plateau starts to set in.
Now, that said, you must be sure to count correctly.
There are a number of people who misjudge how much they are actually eating, therefore this causes them to see very little fat loss – if any at in.
In some cases they may even gain weight and then they’re really left wondering what went wrong.
Be absolutely sure you are counting calories correctly. Measure it out to be extra sure. (and just for reference, calories consumed while standing do count so don’t let yourself use that as an excuse)
So, be sure that none of these four factors are influencing the results you get. It’s incredibly helpful to take a look at the ‘bigger picture’ (your everyday life outside of the gym) to assess what could be at play there causing a lack of results.
Has there ever been anything you’ve noticed that kept you from getting results? Share it with us.
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