Why You May Not Be Losing Weight On Keto
The Keto diet is promised as one of the most efficient and most effective diets for burning fat and building muscle. It’s designed to maximize what your body needs for growth and minimize everything it does not need.
However, there’s no such thing as endless growth, and all good things come to an end. After months of losing weight on the Keto Diet, a lot of people have been going strong, and then suddenly, their weight loss completely stagnates, and they’re stuck at a certain number. The Keto Diet WAS working, but what changed? What are the next steps? How do you keep up your body recomposition?
The Big Question: Why Aren’t You Losing Weight?
There isn’t one single answer that’ll fit all use cases. Everyone’s situations and bodies are different, so it would be much better to consult a personal physician or dietician to help you figure out why you’re not achieving the rest of your goals.
But, there are a few common problems we’ve come to see.
- First, because you’ve lost weight and you do not need as many calories as you used to in the past, your body is at the point where it can keep itself in balance. It processes the amount that you eat now just fine without gaining or losing any more weight on top of that. Re-calculate and find what your daily maintenance calories are now.
- You aren’t keeping up with daily energy expenditures or bodily repairs. There are two sides to this. One side could be you aren’t using the exact calories you used to. If you’ve been training at the gym with the same routine and haven’t changed it up much, then your body might be at a point where it’s becoming efficient at saving energy with your current expenditures. Push yourself more, and you might be able to start burning more calories.
- But, the second part of this earlier point is that there might be some factors in your life that are stalling your bodily repairs. It could be stress, it could be a lack of sleep or a lot of factors, but if there’s something that’s been consistently bothering you and overwhelming you in life, that could be a likely culprit. When your body is stressed, it often releases cortisol, and that hormone has been linked to fat preservation.
There isn’t a single simple answer to this question, and you need to either talk with your physician or personally evaluate your life and try to isolate what’s affecting your weight loss.
Closing Remarks
The Ketogenic Diet is, at the end of the day, a diet. And all diets exist because there are standard rules and tendencies of humans as a whole, and one of those tendencies is, unfortunately, to retain as much weight as possible in situations of stress. Your body doesn’t care about your weight loss goals.
So, try and reduce as much stress as possible as you can in your life, try to live the closest to the ideal life that you can manage, and really evaluate what’s important to you and what’s not. If weight loss and physical health are essential to you, then you’ll have to make sacrifices for it.
