Why Your Calorie Deficit Isn’t Working: The Real Reason You’re Not Losing Weight

Today I want to talk to you about why your calorie deficit isn’t working and this episode is not going to be about food and calories. We are not going to talk about having more discipline, trying harder, using more willpower or effort, or being stricter either.

You see, many of you message me saying I’m in a calorie deficit and I’m not losing weight.

Well, the first thing we need to be truthful about is that you are not in a calorie deficit if you’re not losing weight. You may be in a calorie deficit sometimes, but you’re not in a calorie deficit most of the time which is why you’re not seeing weight loss.

I’ve worked with a lot of one-on-one clients over the last 11 years and it’s common for me to see a client in a calorie deficit a handful of days out of the month and expecting weight loss, but you see, weight loss won’t happen if you’re only in a deficit sometimes.

And tracking food consistently is an issue I’ve seen many times too. If you’re only sometimes tracking your food, then weight loss isn’t going to happen. Weight loss doesn’t care that you are sometimes tracking your food, sometimes are eating in a calorie deficit, sometimes getting steps. Weight loss requires you to be consistent with those things.

So, consistency is the real problem and there can be a lot of reasons why consistency is an issue for you.

Lack of structure and routine around meals, not prepping ingredients for meals, having a bad relationship with food, all or nothing mindset, being too restrictive with food or the types of food, guilt and shame over body image or food, negative self-talk or what I call being a jerk to yourself, emotional eating patterns, how you deal with stress and stress coping mechanisms, not believing in yourself, always thinking you should be motivated to do things.

These are all things that are likely going on underneath your calorie deficit that is impacting your ability to be consistent and that’s why sometimes you are in a calorie deficit. Sometimes you track your food. Sometimes you get steps. Sometimes you do healthy behaviors.

This is why many of you are struggling to lose weight. It’s not because a calorie deficit doesn’t work. It’s because you must fix those the things causing you to be inconsistent before you try to track calories and be in a calorie deficit.

This is what messes up a lot of women. They’re trying to be in a calorie deficit, but they’re not ready yet. Because you have to fix what’s broken first.

Many of you are not dealing with the real reasons why you gained your weight in the first place. You just want weight loss.

But without dealing with why you eat, why you feel guilty eating certain foods, why you treat yourself so poorly, why you talk down to yourself, why you don’t believe in your ability to change, why you think in an all or nothing way about your habits, why you think food is good or bad, why you think you can’t have something then overeat it, why you eat when you feel fatigued, angry, sad, stressed…

You will always struggle with a calorie deficit because you are not dealing with the real problems making you inconsistent. And, even if you do somehow lose weight without addressing those issues you will gain weight back after you lose it because those issues will still be there.

So, one of the things that’s important is making sure you’re dealing with the root cause of your weight gain. There’s a reason you need to lose weight. It’s because of the weight gaining problem. Have you ever stopped and thought about why you need to lose weight in the first place?

Well, you need to lose weight because you have excess body fat. But why is the excess body fat there? How did it get there? Well, it’s because you’ve been living in a calorie surplus.

You’ve been regularly putting more calories into your body than it needs. That could be from over consuming even though you exercise and move a lot. It also could be that you’re not moving enough. Or, in most cases it’s a combination of over consuming and under moving.

What most women do is go on some diet and lose weight. All diets just create a calorie deficit. There’s nothing magical about diets. They are all simply ways to create a calorie deficit. So, most people find a diet, go on that diet, lose weight and gain it back because they go back to what they were doing before that diet.

The reason they go back to what they were doing before that diet is because what they were doing before is their normal. Their baseline way of living. The lifestyle, habits, routines that created the body they wanted to change. Many women are seeking to lose weight without changing the lifestyle that created the weight gain in the first place. And they’re dieting. Jumping to calorie counting. Cutting out different foods, fasting, or even doing a GLP-1 thinking like well, I’ll do this and I’ll just get the weight off and everything will be fine after I get the weight off. But why did you gain the weight in the first place?

Many women think there’s something wrong with my body. I’m broken. I’m a food addict. I’m addicted to sugar. It must be the fruit! There are too many unhealthy foods around.

But most women fail to see that it’s none of those things that are the real problem. Sure, they are likely contributing to the weight gain, but it’s really the excess eating and lack of moving.

Think about how a GLP-1 works. It makes you eat less. As a side note, I am very pro-GLP-1 but like a diet if you go on a GLP-1 you still must figure out the lifestyle piece and what areas of your lifestyle need adjusting to keep the weight off. Otherwise, people go on a GLP-1, lose weight and gain it back because again, they return to their normal baseline lifestyle that caused the weight gain.

If you lose weight on a GLP-1, then wean yourself off of it. What if the reason you gained weight was because you struggle with emotional eating? What if the reason you gained weight was because when you’re stressed you want to eat and not move? What if you’re a social eater and you come off a GLP-1 and that social pressure is still there, but now you don’t have the ability to say no because you’re not able to say no now that you’re not on the medication. You see what I mean? You really have to get to the root cause of your weight gain. Whether you do a diet, calorie count, or go on a GLP-1.

I’m going to share with you critical skills you need to master before calorie counting and losing weight. If you don’t master these skills, you’re going to struggle with losing weight. Many midlife women I talk to and coach want to jump right into calorie tracking. They want to jump to dieting and losing weight.

They think: If I’m not losing weight, I’m not making progress. I’m failing.

Totally get that. I used to think this way too before I lost my own 80 pounds. You see, for me, when I started losing my weight it was only when I decided to stop dieting that I lost the weight for good. Ironically, I stopped focusing on weight loss to lose weight. It was when I finally decided I had to start changing my life that weight loss became easy. It was when I let go of needing to see weight loss to do healthy habits, that I was able to lose 80 pounds and keep it off for 17 years.

Before, doing healthy habits was always contingent on whether I was seeing weight loss. If I’m not losing weight, I’m not doing the habits. Funny thing is I also did this the second I wasn’t on a diet. Every time I stopped following a diet, I stopped exercising. I stopped paying attention to food. I stopped tracking my food. I stopped walking. I stopped doing all the things to take care of my health when I wasn’t in weight-loss mode and dieting. That’s really weird, isn’t it?

You see, most women are not willing to put weight loss on hold to fix what’s broken first. To adjust their normal life that supports losing weight but won’t necessarily create fast results.

For me, I started with just moving more because I was living a chair-to-chair lifestyle. Relocating from chair to chair all day long. Barely moving my body. So, I began walking 10-minutes every day. That’s all I did for many months. Did I see weight loss? Nope! Weight loss didn’t come from walking every day, but it supported the life that I wanted to build which was someone who was healthy and fit, and it made me feel good.

In the beginning of your journey, you have to be willing to do things for a long time that won’t necessarily create weight loss but will support weight loss down the road and make you feel better. The women who struggle with losing weight are the ones who are so weight loss focused so they’re never addressing the root causes of their weight gain. That’s why a calorie deficit isn’t working because you can’t be consistent with a calorie deficit when you haven’t fixed what’s broken first.

So, first skill you must master is the ability to say this is what I’m going to eat and then do it. Just winging it, meal to meal doesn’t work. You’ve got to be able to have a game plan of what you will eat and have a structure and routine in place to prepare those foods, meals or ingredients ahead of time.

When I was 215 pounds, I acted like mealtime was a surprise. It’s lunch, what am I eating? I had no structure or routine. So, when lunch time rolled around, I grabbed whatever was most convenient. Same for dinner, which was why I would come home for work, tired and stressed and go through the drive through, eat an entire bag of chips and wonder what was wrong with me. I had zero structure. Zero routine.

You can’t do that when you’re trying to lose weight. Later, when you get more skilled like I am now 17 years later, you can wing things more because you have more knowledge and practice but, in the beginning, failing to plan is planning to fail.

Not having a plan for what you’re going to eat also makes it extremely difficult to track food. Different meals, different ingredients make tracking calories so hard. Most people eat a lot of the same foods and meals when they are not trying to lose weight, but when they hear someone like me say you should repeat a lot of the same meals to lose weight they automatically think they’re being restricted somehow and that’s your bad relationship with food being highlighted to you.

Because do you really need last Wednesday’s lunch to be the most amazing, memorable meal ever or do you need it to fuel you, be satisfying and keep your food noise under control so you don’t eat every snack in sight when you get home?
You need to plan. Especially in the beginning of losing weight and tracking calories. You can’t wing it and you also need to be able to know how to say no when something unexpected happens. And not no, in a way that you’re being a jerk to yourself.

Like when you want seconds after finishing a meal or finishing off the food your kids didn’t eat. Or when someone offers you food you really don’t want or didn’t plan for. Or when you have a plan, but you think grabbing takeout sounds better. Or when you plan to eat a cookie with your lunch and brain wants five more. Or when you want popcorn just because you’re husband is eating it.

You have to be able to say no sometimes when these things happen because you saying yes, all the time is what got you into this weight gaining situation. And you have to be able to say no without invoking the weight loss card. You know when women say, I can’t have that because I’m trying to lose weight. No, that’s dieting. You’ve got to be able to say no because you are changing your life. Not because you’re trying to lose weight because otherwise, after you lose weight, you’ll just go back to saying yes to everything again.

You also have to be able to sit with uncomfortable feelings. Stress, anxiety, fatigue, negative feelings, pain. You need to learn the skill of sitting with uncomfortable feelings. Like wanting to eat but not eating. Because again, if you don’t practice this skill and you lose all your weight and you have a pattern of eating food when you feel discomfort then you will gain your weight back. Again, this is why your calorie deficit isn’t working because you can’t be consistent with a calorie deficit when these things are going on.

Many women don’t want to sit with uncomfortable feelings so they will try to calorie count to try to manage their overeating. But that’s not fixing the real problem. So, you gotta be able to plan what you eat, learn to say no and learn to sit with discomfort.

But many women want to jump to the weight loss part. The dieting and calorie counting part because if I’m not losing weight, I’m not succeeding. But see, that’s just it. Losing weight does not mean you’ve changed your behaviors. I have seen so many women lose weight and then something happens, they stop losing weight and go back to doing what they were doing when they were gaining weight.

And that happens gradually. They return to their old lifestyle and don’t notice it. Yes, some women run back to that lifestyle that made them gain weight overnight. But most don’t do that right away. It’s usually a slow return to that lifestyle. They gain back 5 pounds here, 10 pounds there, another 5 pounds here and before you know it, you’re like huh, I’m right back to where I started.

Because that person was so focused on just losing weight and going on a diet, and not focused on changing their lifestyle, habits, routines, and mindset. They were not interested in creating a lifestyle that was incompatible with being overweight.

You see emotional eating and a bad relationship with food sits at the heart of a lot of this. And that is why when I’m working with my clients most of them do not start with calorie counting. We start with building meals (usually one meal at a time like breakfast) and writing down what we eat.

Can you do that? Because if you can’t do that, you’re not ready to track calories. You’re not ready to lose weight yet because you got to first work on changing your behaviors. You gotta nail the foundations first.

I’m not interested in helping you lose weight and gain it back. I’m interested in helping you lose weight and keep it off. And you do that by focusing on the weight gaining problem. Focusing on the behaviors that created your weight gain in the first place.

Once you focus on getting to the place where you can plan what you eat, write it down, learn how to say no, learn how to talk to yourself like a supportive friend, are able to get consistent movement and are better at sitting with uncomfortable feelings (not eating through them), then you’re ready to start doing the diety things.

When I say diety things, I mean tracking calories and putting yourself into a calorie deficit. You’ve got to be in a consistent calorie deficit for a prolonged period of time in order to lose weight, and that is the issue for those of you who are saying I’m in a calorie deficit and not losing weight. You’re not consistent because you have these foundational problems going on with food making it extremely difficult for you to be consistent with a calorie deficit.

You see, you are not going to create a new life in 6 months or in a year. You’re not changing ten things all at once. You’re changing thousands of little things in your life. Every interaction with food, every routine, ever social situation, every belief that interacts with food, how you move. Some of those situations will show up daily and some will only show up once a year.

That’s one repetition to offset 45, 50, 60 birthdays of doing it the old way. The first birthday you’re probably going to mess a few things up. Then you have to wait an entire year to practice that one event. Maybe you go out to eat once a week with friends. That’s 52 reps a year so maybe you’ll learn how to navigate that one faster. The point is taking two or three years to un-diet your brain and unlearn 40 or 50 years of conditioning with food is actually fast.

And if you gotta take the first 6 months to not worry about weight loss, but to worry about getting good at mastering these skills that’s really darn fast. You must realize that mastering these things and fixing your normal life is progress. Progress isn’t just the weight loss. The weight loss is a bonus to changing your life.
You should be able to ask yourself along this journey with the changes you’re making, could I do these behaviors for the next 10 years. If yes, it’s a lifestyle change. If no, it’s a weight loss change. Fine for when you are temporarily in a calorie deficit to lose weight, but you’ve got to be making the 10-year changes otherwise the weight just comes back.

So, to reiterate. The single biggest reason why you’re calorie deficit isn’t working is because you’re not consistent because you’re not ready yet because you have root issues getting in the way of you being consistent. You’re jumping right to the weight loss without fixing those root causes of your weight gain and inconsistency.

And like me, you may have been conditioned from all the dieting you’ve done to jump into weight loss and thinking if I’m not losing weight, I’m doing something wrong. If the scale isn’t moving, I’m failing. It’s not working. Except you’re not doing that anymore. That’s your old way of doing this.

Lifestyle is not the sum of one thing. It’s your habits, routines, mindset, self-talk, beliefs, self-worth, patterns, environment, what you should and shouldn’t do running in your head. If you count calories or go on a diet and leave everything there intact, you’re setting yourself up for weight regain.

If you total up the weight you’ve lost across every dieting attempt, the bigger number is what you weighed at your heaviest. That tells you something. You don’t have a weight loss problem. You have a weight gaining problem. You’re actually pretty good at losing weight. But you’ve never learned how to stop the regain.

Like I said before, I’m not interested in help you just lose weight. I’m interested in helping you become leaner, healthier, happier, in better shape forever. Your goal at the end of this journey is not to have just lost weight. Your goal is to have adopted upgraded habits, routines, belief systems, self-talk, confident to the point where being overweight is incompatible with that life. It would be impossible for you to be overweight because it wouldn’t match with how you live your life.

People want to do the opposite. They want to keep their current lifestyle, the one that produced their overweight body, and just have the body of a thinner person at the same time. They think if I can just change my body, then everything will change.

Look, I tried that many times before losing my 80 pounds and I’ve seen so many women try to do it that way and it just doesn’t work. So, I want to leave you with one question for you to reflect on this week? Are you dieting or are you changing your life?