8 reasons your diet isn't working (and how to fix it)

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You're stuck.

You've been trying to lose weight but it's just not working. Maybe it's your genetics... (it's not.)

I hear this a lot so I decided to compile X common reasons that your diet isn't working:

1. You're not tracking calories.

This is a big one. Although you don't HAVE to track calories to lose weight, the fact is, if you don't, then how can you KNOW you're truly dieting?

Dieting to lose weight is fundamentally the process of consuming less food than your body needs to operate, forcing it to use stored fat for energy. If you don't know exactly how much food you're eating, you can't know if you're eating LESS than your body needs to operate.

This is your step 1 if you aren't doing this. Find out how much food your body needs to stay the same weight and then eat less than that.

2. You're not being honest about your effort.

Some people just like to complain. They don't truly see themselves succeeding, so they make facebook posts about nothing working for them and just eating that piece of cake.

You have to WANT this and be willing to make sacrifices. Be willing to track (see number 1). None of this "I'm just not a meticulous tracking kind of person" garbage. You'll need to track at least in the beginning unless you're so in tune with your eating that you can truthfully and accurately eyeball less food (statistically hard for humans to do.)

3. You're still eating at maintenance or more.

Maybe you are tracking, and maybe you are being honest. You've been tracking EVERY morsel that goes into your mouth, but the scale isn't moving.

If you've been doing this HONESTLY for 3-4 weeks, this might be the time to reduce calories by 100-200 per day and observe.

4. You're hoping for a magic pill.

We're human, so naturally we want to find the easiest path to success. This ends up in people getting sold on snake oil. Belts that vibrate your belly DO NOT make six pack abs. Doing an ab exercise DOES NOT make the fat on your belly disappear. I can't stand seeing this crap.

There is NO magic pill to fat loss. Maybe Ephedra was close, but that got banned because it was causing heart attacks.

Be willing to put in the daily work to get the success you want.

5. You're too impatient for results to start.

This one is obvious. Although if you're completely new and quite overweight, you should start seeing results within the first two weeks, but if you're just jumping aboard the intermittent fasting train and hoping for Day 2 weight loss, think again.

6. Stress.

Stress can screw up a lot of things. For one, it will cause you to retain water weight so you'll look and feel bloated EVEN if you might actually be losing fat from your diet.

Your body will do all sorts of stuff to hang onto fat if you're super stressed out, so get that handled. Remove stressful elements from your life, meditate, get good sleep, practice self love.

7. Progress is happening but isn't visible.

This goes along with stress. The scale might show the same weight (or more) but that doesn't mean you aren't losing weight.

Water weight fluctuates DRAMATICALLY every day depending on many factors like salt intake, menstruation, and stress.

If you're also doing strength training, you could be gaining muscle too (which weighs more than fat by the way).

Make sure you're tracking in a consistent way (don't weigh yourself Monday morning after eating a pizza the previous night and expect to compare it to last Monday when you didn't.)

8. You're jumping from strategy to strategy expecting rapid results instantly.

This sort of goes along with the magic pill idea in #7. I see many people that are so desperate to lose weight that they jump from technique to fad to diet pill to fad to technique day after day, week after week.

I get it, you just want to lose this damn weight. All this fitness advice is overwhelming.

Go back to the basics. The first few items in this list are a good place to start. Collect raw data on yourself and be scientific about it. Be willing to put in the daily work.

Oh and by the way - I'm working on something special that will help with all of that. Sign up for my newsletter below to find out more.