Why Is Your Diet Not Working?

You may be following your diet plan exactly, but what if it isn’t working?  What if you are not losing weight even though you are trying really hard to stick to your diet?
There are many reasons why this may be happening.  If you are in this situation then there are a couple of things you need to look into before you decide to change your diet plan.

First, you need to keep a diet diary, for one week you need to write down everything that you are eating, how you are feeling e.g. Tired, hungry, bloated etc.  During this time you should just eat as you normally would, and at the end of your seven days you will be able to look through your diary and find any trouble spots that you may not be aware of.

Here are some of the most common reasons that your dieting efforts may not be producing the results you want to see.

Lack of Protein in Your Diet

Protein controls appetite, every meal you eat should include some protein; this could be lean meat, fish, beans, low fat dairy or nuts.  Protein requires more calories to digest than for example, carbohydrates.  You can actually burn more calories simply from your body digesting your food by including protein more often in your diet.

Lack of Calcium in Your Diet

Calcium helps your body to burn fat, instead of consuming whole milk dairy products try using non-fat or low fat and include calcium in at least two of your daily meals.  Studies have shown that dieters who ate more calcium daily have lost nearly twice the amount of weight as others who did not include calcium in their diet.

Large Snacks

A snack should be just that, an in-between meal that consists of roughly 150 calories, any more than that and you are more than likely over snacking, leaving you will fewer calories for your main meals.


Binge Eating

This one may seem obvious, but many people are not aware that they are binge eating, many people believe that by skipping meals, or having a light meal instead of a proper breakfast or dinner they will consume less calories and lose more weight.  What often happens in this case is they end up unintentionally eating more than if they were to eat regular and often full meals.  This happens when your body gets hungry from skipping meals and when you do sit down to eat, you either consume more than you would have had you not been hungry or you eat the wrong types of food because it was easier to have a quick snack.

Not having regular set mealtimes can completely sabotage your dieting efforts, eating regular and often has shown over and over to be a much more successful weight loss plan. 

Weekend Binges

Many people who are following a diet will fall into the pattern of sticking rigorously to their diet during the week, even going to the extremes of consuming less calories than needed to allow for a few weekend “extras” tempting though this may seem and even though you have allowed “space” for these extra calories, falling into this method of diet you may be setting yourself up for failure.  Allowing yourself a small treat every day would be more beneficial than denying yourself the calories you need daily just so you can consume extra at the weekend.

Daily Overeating

Many dieters also find that they have a specific time of day when they are more inclined to overeat.  This may be your lunch out of the office, or when you get home from work etc.  It is very common for dieters to overeat by anything from 300 plus calories a day by doing this.  In other words enough to actually gain weight instead of losing it.  If you have fallen into this pattern then you should look into why you feel particularly hungry at that specific time of day try and change your routine slightly to see if this can be altered.  Common causes are boredom and habit; if you always relax in the evening in front of the TV with a snack, try either doing something different in the evenings or at the least changing to a lighter snack.

Forgetfulness

Often when you are not keeping a diet diary, you will find that you simply forget everything that you have eaten during the day, or maybe you do keep a diary but you only fill it in every other day. It is very easy to forget about that mid morning snack or the extra cookie at lunchtime. Keeping a diary and filling it in everyday may help you in many ways, having to record what you have eaten may deter you from having a little something extra just because you know you are going to have to add it to your daily diary.

After seven days of recording everything you have eaten, along with the times you ate and how you felt before or after eating you should be able to determine if any of the above are causing problems with your diet.