Why Aren't Diets Doing The Trick?

You may not be losing weight, even if you're doing everything right. You are keeping your metabolism in raging shape, you are exercising regularly and are eating carefully. Still the pounds pile on. What exactly is going wrong?

Brown fat vs white fat

Your body contains white fat that can expose you to heart disease and diabetes, while brown fat helps to burn calories. When you cut the calories on a diet, you can prevent the body from converting white fat to brown fat. According to researchers at the Yale School of Medicine, hunger prevents the white fat from converting to brown fat, which actually leads to weight gain!

However, if you eat just enough food to blunt your hunger, you encourage the browning of white fat. "It's actually eating that encourages white fat to turn brown. Pay attention to your hunger and eat just enough to quell it," suggests Dr Xiaoyong Yang, PhD of Yale School of Medicine, according to tribune.com.

Get enough sleep

If you log onto the laptop and other electronic devices, you expose your body to the blue lights from these gadgets, which would disturb sleep-inducing hormones, keeping you wide awake. You need to get at least seven hours of sleep every night, or you would suffer from a set of problems including "sluggish metabolism, higher stress-hormone levels, more blood sugar, and rising insulin resistance". They all lead to hunger and fat storage, according to nutrition expert JJ Virgin.

Eat a well thought-out diet

You cannot switch to extremes of eating too much or too little. Instead, work one or two healthy alternatives in your daily routine. "Doing this can lead to more weight loss than you ever imagined," says Marissa Lippert, RD, author of The Cheater's Diet, according to health.com.

Instead of overloading yourself at a restaurant, you can eat well just once a week. It can make you lose 20 pounds in one month.

You're taking the wrong meds

Some kinds of medicines, such as birth control pills, heart disease and blood pressure, anti-seizure or diabetes or cancer medicines, or for rheumatoid arthritis may induce weight loss. "When I see patients who are helplessly trying to lose pounds, I start looking at their medications," says Steven D Wittlin, MD clinical director of the endocrine-metabolism division at the University of Rochester Medical Centre in NY. "That's a biggie. Some may affect appetite; some may affect metabolism."

So if your medicines are the culprit, then ask the doctors for alternatives.

Obese network

A recent study from Harvard tells you that if you have an obese friend, you are more likely to increase your weight by half a per cent. In fact, for every four fat friends, your own chances of obesity too shoot up. Even if the fat friend lives miles away, you may be less sensitive to the charge of being overweight, according to a New England Journal of Medicine study. All friends in the same circle tend to affect each other's lifestyles. However, the way to lose weight is not to lose friends. Just work on it with your friends, and you can both enjoy doing it together, and also motivate each other's ability to get thinner.

The fake thin model

You might adopt a super-thin role model, but Tilsburg University in the Netherlands found that surrounding yourself with thin models only accelerates your false hopes. All the photographs you idolize have been heavily retouched and photoshopped. Most of them are too distant to be realised.

When she saw the recent ads for Christian Dior, Oscar winner Jennifer Lawrence commented: "That doesn't look like me at all. The world has this idea that if you don't look like an airbrushed perfect model, you don't look good. But we have to see past it. You must be comfortable in your skin. Being hungry every single day to make other people happy is just dumb."

What is the healthy homeostasis?

Your body has a "genetic set point", but you want to cross that in order to get thinner. Even as women try to achieve a healthy homeostasis it would be tough to reach them. Serious work is needed to be done with "carbs, calories, activity levels, sleep, and stress." Even if you reach your balance, there will still be a lack of sync between your ideal and achieved weight.

So do not sweat the small stuff, but just keep going to see that you achieve a healthy weight balance.