Eating Healthy and Exercising But Not Losing Weight? 14 Reasons Why the Scale Isn’t Moving.

Picture this. You want to lose weight. You start exercising for an hour every day. You start cooking at home instead of ordering takeout. But no matter what you do, your weight just does not want to budge. Sounds familiar? Your body weight is connected to so much more than just what you eat and how much time you spend working out. Hormones, the environment, genetics, food quality, and stress all play a role in the number on the scale.

Hormonal Imbalances and Weight Gain

Hormones are messengers that send signals throughout your body to tell it how to function so that you can live optimally. Your body makes over 50 hormones, and there are four main ones can be connected to your weight.

Insulin is the main hormone that helps your body process the energy that you get from your food. It is released by the pancreas when you start eating and tells your cells to take in the nutrients from your meal to use as energy. The process is drawn out below.

When you eat a meal, your pancreas makes insulin to process the glucose in that meal. If your cells operate normally, they will absorb the glucose and use it for fuel. The more glucose you give your body, the more insulin it makes. Constantly eating high amounts of glucose makes your body less sensitive to insulin. Think of it like someone knocking at your door. Initially, you will respond within a few knocks. If they keep knocking, you are likely to tune out the noise. When your cells stop responding to a lower level of insulin, it is called insulin resistance. Instead of using glucose immediately for fuel, your body changes the glucose into fat and stores it. Since the cells did not get their fuel, you feel tired and hungry and continue eating, and keep gaining weight, hence perpetuating the cycle.

Leptin is a hormone that is produced by fat cells in your body and is responsible for sending signals to the brain to tell you that you are full and should stop eating. However, your body can build up a resistance to leptin too. The more fat cells you have, the more leptin they release, which makes your brain more desensitized to leptin. Your brain requires more leptin to get an “I’m full” signal so you continue eating. Your body does not know what to do with the extra energy it gets from the food and stores it as fat for later use (6). Leptin resistance may have a genetic background as well. It may also be more common in people whose mothers had gestational diabetes during pregnancy (5).

Another important set of hormones that affect weight gain are thyroid hormones. The thyroid is a small organ that produces two main hormones to regulate nearly every function of your body. For your thyroid to release its hormones T3 and T4, it gets a signal from the brain in the form of TSH. A higher level of TSH is associated with a more “sluggish thyroid” and causes an increase in weight (2). A very common symptom that women with ”sluggish thyroids” report is “I started gaining weight all of a sudden for no reason, and no matter what I do, I keep gaining”. If you feel like your thyroid might be the reason you feel sluggish, read our blog post Thyroid Blog 1: Do I Have a Thyroid Problem? to learn more.

Finally, when you go through menopause, you are likely to gain 5-10 pounds of weight, especially around your abdomen. This is completely normal! During menopause, your estrogen levels drop, which changes how the fat in your body is distributed. Estrogen helps direct your body fat to your curves so without as much estrogen, your body fat will straighten out. The fat that may have resided in your curves before moves up to round out your belly area.

How the Environment Causes You to Gain Weight

Our external environment is filled with toxic pollutants called endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs). Some of these are known as “obesogens” because of how they bind to your DNA and mess up its code, which creates signals for more and bigger fat cells (3). EDCs are found in both indoor and outdoor products. Personal care products can contain parabens, plastic water bottles can contain bisphenol A, air fresheners can contain phthalates, and meat can contain persistent organic pollutants. All of these chemicals ultimately send unhappy signals throughout your body, which makes it harder for you to lose weight. Wondering which specific products to avoid? Check out our blog post on chemicals in products that you might use in your day-to-day life. Our team also has a helpful video that goes over the chemicals to avoid and the common products they are in.

Is Weight Genetic?

Genetics and weight loss are closely connected. Your genes are your fundamental building blocks, containing information that tells your entire body how to function. Scientists are still researching what exactly each gene controls. So far, they have identified at least 30 spots on your genes that are directly linked to your weight (1). Some of these genes are related to your brain’s signals for hunger while others connect to your body’s internal clock to tell you what time to eat (1). Variations of these genes can make certain people more likely to gain weight after eating foods high in sugar, salt, and/or saturated fat (1). If you are interested in learning about which food groups are more likely to make you gain weight, our team would be happy to guide you through the appropriate tests.

While your ancestral genetics may play a role in weight, perhaps a more direct effect comes from your parents’ choices soon before you are born. And, yes, both parents have an effect. A father’s diet choices, exercise habits, and exposure to pollutants can impact the DNA that gets transferred through his sperm into the baby. Since the baby develops in the mother’s womb, her choices are also critical before, during, and after pregnancy. Eating a plentiful spread of fiber-rich produce and getting movement in are two beneficial ways a mother can increase her baby’s likelihood of maintaining healthy food behaviors when the baby grows up. One big goal is to try to balance your blood sugar levels during pregnancy and avoid gestational diabetes, especially if you are at a higher risk of developing diabetes. If the baby does not get proper nourishment in the womb, they are more likely to store the limited energy they get as fat because they anticipate being born into an environment of scarcity (4). In addition, exposure to environmental toxins like obesogens during pregnancy has been shown to increase the body weight of the baby (3). In addition, once the baby is born, the mother’s good gut bacteria (the microbiome) is passed down through breastfeeding. Therefore, if the mother has a diverse diet rich in whole grains, vegetables, and fruits, the baby gets a positive influence as it enters the world (1).

Eating Less but Gaining Weight

Most people say that weight gain is a matter of calories in = calories out. So by that logic, if you reduce the amount that you eat (calories in) to be equal to or even less than the amount that you exercise (calories out), you should be losing weight easily, right? It’s not actually that simple. When you repeatedly diet, your brain enters a state called “starvation mode” in which it does not know when you are going to get enough nourishment to comfortably fuel yourself. It stores whatever food you are getting as fat, the body’s energy storage mechanism (7). It also signals to your appetite-regulating hormones to increase your appetite so that you can get more energy to store in your reserves (7). Think of it as your body’s way for preparing for a snow day.

The calories in, calories out equation does not factor in what foods account for those calories. Let us use a fun-sized Snickers and a banana as an example. Both of these foods are 100 calories. The Snickers comes with 10% of your daily saturated fat limit, nearly 25% of your daily sugar limit. It does not have much fiber or protein, two powerhouse nutrients that will keep you fuller for longer, which means you will likely be reaching for another one really soon. The banana on the other hand is loaded with fiber, potassium, and magnesium, all of which help your heart health, fuel your muscles, and feed your healthy gut bacteria. The banana is also nearly 6 times as big as the Snickers, which means you get to eat 6 times more food and feel good about doing so! The Snickers is an example of the calorically dense foods that have become increasingly popular in developed countries. Calorically dense foods tend to be high in fats, sugars, and salt and low in nutrients. In fact, as of 2019, nearly 25% of total calories in the US came from added sugars (9). Eating more of these calorically dense foods is also linked to a lower intake of important vitamins and minerals, which are crucial for your body to function optimally (9). This phenomenon is known as being calorically fed but undernourished: you are meeting your calorie target but not your nutrient goals. Therefore, your brain will want you to eat more so that you meet your nutrient needs, causing the extra food to be stored as fat.

Eating an abundance of calorically dense foods also impacts the internal environment of tiny microbes inside our gut. Our microbiome has been referred to as our second brain by some researchers as it has a direct connection to the brain inside your head. There are over 10000 species that live in the microbiome, some are helpful, and some not so much. 16 of these microbes were found to be linked to an increase in the fat stored around your abdomen which is more dangerous for long term diseases (1). Your microbiome’s composition adapts to your diet, age, and diseases. If you constantly feed your gut bacteria calorie dense foods, those microbes will get more powerful and make you crave more of those foods in a cycle. On the other hand, if you eat a variety of fibrous fruits and vegetables, the helpful microbes will gain strength. You may actually find yourself reaching for the roasted carrots instead of the bag of chips because of how powerfully your microbes can influence your cravings.

Stress and Weight Gain

If your body is under pressure, it has certain protective mechanisms that may make losing weight harder. These can be related to stress, inflammation, and fluid retention.

In today’s world, it feels like stress is being blamed for everything. But, it is true to some extent. When your body is stressed, it does not know whether you are sitting in a job interview or running away from a thundering herd of wildebeests. The same “fight or flight” response is activated. Your brain signals to your body to release a hormone called cortisol that alerts the rest of the organs to activate protection mode. Cortisol does not become problematic until it is constantly being produced. To understand how cortisol can impact your reproductive health, read our blog post, Does Stress Affect Your Period? In regards to appetite, cortisol wants to make sure you eat more to recover from your stressor so it makes you more hungry. You are more likely to crave foods high in fat and sugar, since those are higher in energy and can “help you run away from the wildebeests” (8).

Cortisol can also trigger low-grade inflammation over a longer period of time. Inflammation is your body’s natural response to an injury or infection to help it heal. Short amounts of inflammation are fine, like if you get a paper cut and the area around it turns red and swollen, as these help that area get better faster. Long-term inflammation is more problematic. When your body produces cortisol for an extended period of time, it affects your cell’s ability to respond to insulin, increasing your insulin resistance. Having more insulin leads to more fat gain. Fat cells are self-propagating and produce inflammatory chemicals to fuel and feed themselves at the expense of throwing off the inflammatory balance of the rest of the body. Some fat cells even mobilize troops to cause mayhem in other areas of your body (10).

Is the scale always right?

Actually, no! Your weighing scale may not be showing you your actual body weight, especially if you fall under the following two categories.

Fluid retention, or edema, is a big reason why some people’s weight is inaccurate on the scale. Fluid retention happens when your body swells and water gathers in the tissue, making you feel puffy and heavy. It is most common in the arms and legs but can happen anywhere in the body. It can be caused by another medical condition, pregnancy, a side effect of a medication, weakened veins, or a high-sodium diet. The reason that this number affects the scale weight is that the scale is now showing you your body weight plus the weight of the water that your body is holding onto.

If you are someone who exercises quite a bit and are still not losing weight, you might actually be putting on muscle. Muscle tissue is more dense than fat tissue, which means that you may weigh the same but look leaner. One of our patients came to us because her doctor had told her that her weight was technically considered overweight. She was confused. She ate healthy and worked out at a gym for almost an hour every day. We recommended her to try a DEXA scan, which is a machine that analyzes your body composition as separate components: muscle, fat, and bone. When she came back to us, she was ecstatic to report how her muscle mass had increased significantly, and her body fat was less than she assumed. Just by looking at a scale, she would have been misled about her body, but getting a different perspective on her body allowed her to cherish her progress.

As you can see, diet and exercise are not the only two factors contributing to your weight. It is important to realize that your body is on the same team as you. By putting on weight does not want to spite you or make you feel ashamed. It is merely trying to protect you. By letting it know that you are safe and calm, you can align your mind and body to your goals and get there one step at a time. Our providers would be happy to guide you. We have worked with clients who have faced nearly all of these issues and helped them discover their happiest, most nourished versions of themselves.