4 reasons why your brain won’t allow you to lose weight

Not having a reason why

When doing anything in life, there needs to be a reason for it. At the beginning of your weight loss  it will seem easy, but over-time it will grow increasingly hard to maintain the journey if there is no purpose in it.

To successfully lose any weight, it depends more on discipline than motivation. But it’s hard to be disciplined on something you don’t have any clue about. It’s like taking a college course in something you have no plan to pursue.

Setting a reason for why you want to lose weight can help to enforce the importance of sticking to your goals, whilst helping to specify ways on how to achieve your weight loss.

Having the right reason to lose weight is also just as important. If you are looking to lose weight for superficial reasons, like looks or someone’s opinion, you’ll find the determination to be disciplined hard. Working on your health can lead to many opportunities in the future, and it focuses on you. Finding a good reason to lose weight can make the chances of losing weight higher.

Your brain doesn’t want you to lose weight

Your brain hates the thought of dieting. One part of the brain’s dislike for weight loss is the huge shift in comfort levels. Your body and brain have gotten used to the daily routine of easy, tasty food— like sugar-filled, fatty, salty foods. When you attempt to get into a healthier lifestyle, it is a radical change for your brain. Losing weight requires more effort in your food choices, and more importantly, a calorie deficit. A calorie deficit causes your brain to go into fat-preservation mode.

The last thing your brain wants is for you to be losing weight, especially at a rapid pace. In a recent study done on mice, published in the online medical journal eLife, researchers found that key brain cells actively prevent the body from burning fat when you begin to eat less.

Scientists theorized this trait developed when our ancestors needed to retain fat in famines. Simply, any time your body detects you are starving yourself— even in a reasonable calorie deficit diet— it will begin to preserve the fat in your body.

Dieting makes the brain vulnerable to binging

More than likely, this probably isn’t the first time you’ve tried to lose weight. Don’t worry, most people who try to lose weight end up gaining it back. Better known as “Yo-Yo Dieting”, it is a post-diet weight gain, which typically happens as a result of following short-term success diets.

Sure, you can fail and try over and over again, but a Oxford 2016 study found that these cycles can prompt your body to gain more weight over time. This is especially true for people who fall victim to unhealthy diets that tend to place undernourishment on a pedestal.

A large problem with following these diets is that you can get stuck in a pattern called the “Last Supper Syndrome.” You may find that before you start a diet, you want to have a “last good meal” before planning to fully commit to healthy eating—or starvation. The problem is, you may fail the diet the next week, or even the next day. Then you become trapped in a mental cycle of “I'll eat everything delicious today, then I will start tomorrow.” Most people stuck in this syndrome have long-lasting weight plateaus or put on pounds from the constant starvation and binging.

Ultimately, what works for weight loss in the long-term is small, incremental changes to your overall eating patterns. The idea that you’ll never eat another bad food again can cause you to break your weight loss attempt from desperation. The less you focus on restricting and categorizing foods and the more you focus on creating healthy behaviors around food and exercise, the healthier your body — and mind — will be.

Stress Sabotages your Weight Loss

For many people, stress is a common issue in their daily lives. Whether it comes from work, school, your family, financial issues, or even while losing weight, it plagues a part of your life. Stress is a mental problem and has harrowing effects on the body. A side effect of stress for many is weight gain.

The worst part of stress is that it's a cycle, from stress causing overeating, to weight gain causing stress, and even stress to take off the weight. It seems like it doesn’t end.

Stress causes your body to produce more of the hormones cortisol and Betatrophin, which are stress hormones that promote body fat. Cortisol makes weight loss harder, especially more around the stomach area of your body.

Stress though takes a toll on you mentally, and how you act with food. A common stress response is eating, also known as emotional eating. It’s done as a way to suppress or soothe negative emotions. But most people won’t pick up a salad when they want to emotionally eat, instead of turning to more high sugar and high-fat alternatives, which are common craving foods. Emotional eating, especially with a stressful life, can cause large amounts of weight gain.

It’s important to get your stress managed when losing weight, as it can subconsciously damage your health.

Don’t let your brain stop you from weight loss.

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