The Top 10 Reasons You Can’t Lose Weight No Matter What You Do
Overcome Fitness & Weight Loss Blind Spots with my Monthly Life Coaching Program for Women Physicians
By Dr. Ali Novitsky, M.D., Life & Wellness Coach for Women Physicians
Newly board certified in Obesity Medicine!
Have you been doing everything right — eating well, exercising, paying attention to your habits, and frustrated that you’re still not seeing results?
The good news is, you probably aren’t doing anything wrong, you’re just dealing with some common blind spots that are blocking your progress. In this article, I’m going to break down exactly what those are and how to overcome them.
We get discouraged when we are trying hard, sacrificing, and still not getting where we want to be. But all we need to do is identify and release the common fitness and weight loss-hindering habits that keep us from progressing.
And a lot of these harmful daily habits only need some small tweaks to start seeing the changes you want. So, what are they and what can we do about it?
Below I combine many of the top 10 reasons why we get stuck in our fitness and weight loss journeys into 4 main points. But, you can get a quick-reference guide to each of the most common blind spots that keep us from reaching our goals, by downloading my 2 pg. guide below:
Get my easy-to-reference, visual list of the
“The Top 10 Blind Spots to Progress”
here:
Throw this useful guide on your fridge as a reminder to help you stay on track with your goals!
Now let’s get into it with some physician wellness tips that will keep you on the path to success!
1) Watch Out for Weekends and Alcohol!
We tend to stay focused and do great on the weekdays, but when Friday night comes around, after a long week in our practice as busy women physicians, we feel we deserve a little cheat night to relax and unwind. And there’s nothing wrong with that! The importance of self-care for doctors can’t be understated . . . BUT . . .
An extra drink here and there and overeating past when you are already full will sneak up on you — especially if it becomes a habit.
According to this article from Women’s Health, “having four or more drinks on any day or eight or more drinks per week for women) had a 41 percent higher risk of going from a normal weight BMI to an overweight BMI when compared with people who weren’t heavy drinkers . . .”
Here’s a great resource for you: Check out this handy-dandy alcohol calorie counter and you may be surprised at how many calories you are actually packing on with that extra drink or two each week.
This site is great because you can plug in the number and type of drinks you have per week and it will calculate how many calories that equals. (Agh, shocking right?!?!) For example, if you drink 3 glasses of red wine and 2 beers per week, that equals 681 calories! That’s if you’re pouring the suggested serving size, and let’s face it, we are usually more generous with our pours at home.
Keep a log of your alcohol intake for a week so you can start being realistic with yourself. Then think about the lowered inhibitions that cause you to make other detrimental health choices, like grabbing those extra snacks when you’re drinking or choosing those deep-fried bar foods.
The problem is it will take days to rid your body of the glycogen you have accumulated to get back into a fat-burning mode during the week.
After a few extra drinks on Friday night, Saturday becomes an even higher calorie, carb-loaded day. Bring on the pizza, pasta, and other feel-good foods. Then, knowing Sundays is your last day to relax, you may be tempted to grab a few more cocktails, trying to push the work week ahead out of your mind.
The idea is not to eliminate, but to cut back. I typically recommend 1 bottle of wine or less per week to start seeing a change in your body composition.
Alcohol is interesting because our body cannot store it. So our body will be busy burning off the alcohol before it can expend any energy to burn off the food we just ate. Our ability to burn fat will be dependent on how easy it is to burn off the alcohol.
At this pace, It’s easy to see how letting everything go on the weekends leads to a vicious cycle of deprivation ➔ overindulgence ➔ an inability to keep the weight off in no time.
Not to say you can’t enjoy yourself on your time off, that downtime is so important for women physicians and your overall wellness, but the key is moderation.
If you try to model your weekends after your disciplined weekdays, you will see wonders in as little as two weeks, I promise!
2) Taking in More Fats Than We Burn Off
We are all familiar with the high fat, low carb movement, and often think that we are immune to weight gain because our insulin is supposedly low and we think we can't store body fat.
But, losing body fat depends on how much of a deficit we create between our calorie intake and the fat and energy we burn off.
It is very easy to over-eat fats, so we often consume more calories than we think we are without even realizing it.
The bottom line is — we will gain weight if we are in a surplus of calories taken in vs. calories burned off.
Our modern-day, sedentary lifestyle doesn’t do us any favors either. We work out so we think we are fine, but we are sitting most of the day.
As this article from the Washington Post states, “And more recent observational studies comparing workers who sit for long periods against those who sit for fewer hours have found that sedentary workers have more than twice the risk of developing type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease, a 13 percent increased risk of cancer and 17 percent increased risk of dying.”
Did you know 5,000 steps or less per day is considered sedentary? Use this article to pick a pedometer that works for you, and start tracking your steps, you may be surprised by how much you’re sitting in one day!
By bumping up steps and using NEAT (non-exercise activity thermogenesis), we will increase our energy expenditure and achieve results with ease.
This is what I focus on in my physician wellness programs, along with an emphasis on strength training to regain lost energy reserves.
3) Not Eliminating Weight Loss Byproducts by Drinking Enough Water and Not Eating Enough Protein
We often underestimate how little protein we consume and it’s so important when we are trying to lose weight. This is because protein has the highest thermogenic burn of any macronutrient and thermogenic burn helps us burn off excess calories and fat. When we don’t get enough protein it lowers the potential thermogenic burn and keeps the weight from coming off.
We also tend to be hungrier when we are not eating enough protein.
If you are putting the time in at the gym, you need the added protein to repair and rebuild your muscles. This will result in a leaner and stronger physique.
Not drinking enough water also prevents us from losing weight because the byproducts of weight loss leave our body through exhalation and urination.
To maximize body fat loss, we have to drink at least half of our body weight in water and stay hydrated much more than we usually do when we are rushing around as busy women physicians.
4) Finding Balance — Exercising and Sleeping Enough Without Overdoing It
Did you know that if you are getting less than 7 hours of sleep per night, you are considered to be sleep-deprived? And sleep deprivation increases cortisol and ghrelin, which affects weight loss. This is because cortisol causes water retention and ghrelin causes increased appetite.
The increased appetite will leave us feeling uncomfortable and food-focused.
It is also possible to overexercise, which is counterproductive and defeats the purpose.
If we are training multiple hours per week, we often become tired and hungry.
When we are tired, our primitive brain takes over and starts to make decisions, which are usually ones that we will regret in the morning.
And it’s no secret that when we are hungry, we tend to overeat. The trick is to balance exercise amount with nutrition intake to hit the sweet spot, allowing us to reach our goals.
The other problem I see a lot, as a life coach for women, is that we get excited and go all in, committing to a complicated exercise routine and strict nutrition program that we can’t sustain long-term.
We forget about the small changes that can make a BIG difference.
Instead of signing up for time and energy-intensive programs that aren’t realistic for your lifestyle, commit to doable, sustainable methods. Trust that changing your habits one at a time will lead to reaching sustainable goals.
These roadblocks to success are exactly why I created the gentle, but effective,
G.O.A.L.S Society, my affordable monthly membership program,
that can be done at home on your schedule.
G.O.A.L.S is for you If you’re a busy woman physician who needs a little extra accountability and encouragement to stick to your weight loss and fitness targets. You will get custom-tailored life coaching from me while joining a fun, supportive environment with your peers.
In G.O.A.L.S Society you get weekly evidence-based fitness workouts, a macro nutrition plan for your specific body type, and mindset coaching using proven Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) techniques.
Knowing what to do for weight loss can be hard for busy physicians, but in this physician coaching program, I will teach you all the secrets behind the transformational results I have gotten for hundreds of my clients over the years.
