5 Surprising Reasons You Are Not Able to Reduce Belly Fat
1) You Are Not Eating Less Than Your TDEE
The first law of thermodynamics is the most important law to consider when your goal is to lose weight. What it essentially means is that if you eat more calories than you can burn, you will gain weight and vice-versa.
Even if you are doing everything right (including the reasons I mentioned in this post), if you don’t eat Less than your body burns, you will not lose weight. Period!
Please note the type of calories matters too. I mean, don’t expect to eat junk food and lose weight. While in the short term, you may lose weight even if you eat junk (provided that you are eating less than your TDEE).
Besides seriously damaging your health, you will clog up your metabolism, will lose more lean muscle than fat, and end up gaining all the weight back once you start to increase your calories, and trust me when I say this, in the long term, you will increase your calories as overeating is a serious concern in our modern society!
Related Article: TDEE Definition: Total Daily Energy Expenditure
Besides emotional eating, which is one of the reasons linked to overeating, foods that you find today in the markets have been chemically altered. Food companies spend billions of dollars annually in R & D to ensure that ‘no one can eat just one.’
That’s the trademark line for one of the companies that manufacture chips. Sure, they want you to eat the whole packet.
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How to Lose Belly Fat [2-3] Inches in less than 21 Days | A Step-By-Step Guide | Part-2
2) Your Metabolism Has Become Sluggish And Slowed Down Due To Toxic Overload
Besides eating chemically altered foods, you are also ingesting huge amounts of toxins not just via food but also through the air and water you bathe in and drink.
In the last 75 years, more than 80,000 chemicals have been created. Our bodies have tolerated and adapted to toxins over millions of years but not these types of chemicals that have been man-created, especially after the industrial revolution since World War-2.
If you suffer from symptoms like bloating and gas, have frequent constipation, have bad breath or an offensive body odor, or suffer from frequent colds and flu, then you are most probably in a state of toxic overload!
As a result, your liver and colon, which are your body’s main detox organs, are overloaded and overburdened. When this happens, your liver cannot metabolize the fat which comes from the small intestine in semi-digested form.
In this scenario, your sluggish liver simply dumps it back into the bloodstream, which then gets deposited as adipose tissue, and you become fat.
Toxins also impair and disrupt your weight and appetite regulation cycle by altering your delicate hormonal balance, which then slows down your metabolism. This problem is aggravated by the fact that most of us are not eating enough fiber!
If you are a woman, you need about 25+g of fiber and 40+g of fiber if you are a man. However, data shows that we are only getting an average of 12g /day, which is clearly not enough.
Fiber, as we know, is what our colon needs to do its job properly. But unfortunately, when this happens, the colon is not getting the support it needs to remove the toxins and other undigested particles from the body.
Over time, these toxins are reabsorbed and sent to the overworked liver to be broken down, causing more problems and weight gain. According to Ann Louise respected nutritionist and detox pioneer, the more toxic your body becomes, the more difficulty you’ll have in losing weight.
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3) You Are Not Moving Enough
It’s possible to lose weight by dieting alone, but it is short-lived. Let me explain. 1 pound of fat has 3,500 calories, so you are required to create a deficit of 500 calories daily from your diet in order to drop 1 lb /per week (500*7=3500). But the reality is way different than simple solutions like this.
Weight loss is never linear.
Your genetics are designed to love body fat. Therefore, being in a caloric deficit signals the body that you are under threat causing the body to slow down its metabolism to preserve fat mass.
Your body works under the assumption that food is scarce (remember, our genetics were formed millions of years ago when our forefathers were hunters/gatherers and had no idea where their next meal would come from, so their genes adapted to love fat tissues as a survival mechanism.)
By the way, when you add exercise when trying to lose weight, guess what happens to your metabolism? It goes through the roof:)
4) You Have Nutritional Imbalances
When you eat a diet comprising complex carbohydrates, proteins, healthy fats and enough fruits and vegetables, your body receives all the nutrients and phytonutrients it needs to function effectively. This sends a strong signal to your brain, which says something like this, ‘Hey Buddy, I am full, don’t eat more.’
But when you eat a diet that is deficient in these nutrients that your body needs, you start to crave. These cravings are simply a cry from your body to nourish it with the nutrients it requires to function effectively.
But You Assume Cravings For Hunger And Eat More
Now, I don’t need to point out the fact that when cravings strike, you don’t reach out for broccoli or apples, do you? Instead, you choose pizzas, doughnuts, and chips which overall results in more cravings over time and leads to addiction.
Did you know studies have confirmed the fact that sugar is more addictive than coke (no-no, not the soft drink, but coke)? Check this study out. 1https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0000698
So just like millions of others, you become a sugar addict. As we all know, sugar is ‘The Biggest Reason’ for the obesity epidemic worldwide, where approximately 2 billion people worldwide are overweight, out of which 600 million are obese.
5) You Have A Leaky Gut And a Compromised Microbiome
‘You are not just what you eat; you are what you digest and absorb!’
Remember the above phrase. It is estimated that there are 100 trillion bacteria living in the human gut, primarily in the large intestine. Unfortunately, foods like vegetable oils [omega-6], high sugar foods, stress, and less sleep, rob us of good bacteria in our intestines- the type of bacteria that we need to lose weight and maintain good health.
You also get chronically inflamed, leading to weight gain and poor health. For most people, when they think of their gut, they think of bloating, gas or heartburn. But it is much more than that. Some scientists are calling the gut ‘the second brain.’
It’s where your health originates from; in essence, the latest science points towards the fact that you are as healthy as your gut! So doesn’t it make sense to keep your gut in top condition?
Do you suffer from any of the reasons that I have listed in this post?
Have any questions or doubts? Let me know in the comments below!
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About Akash Sehrawat
Akash is a creator of 25+ programs and certificate courses in which more than 200,000 students have enrolled both on Udemy and Fabulous Body's native platform. Akash is also an author of three books that can be found on Amazon. His answers on Quora have gathered more than 12 million views in less than a year.