If you're consuming too few calories your body essentially goes into starvation mode and receives the message that it needs to protect itself. This means holding onto weight for protection's sake. The body perceives reduced calorie intake as a stressor.
1. Your Metabolism Will Slow Down to Store Fat. The more you work out or manage your calorie intake to lose weight, the more your metabolism wants to compensate by slowing down to maintain your current weight, this is called metabolic compensation. It kicks in to preserve and store fat for future energy.
At the most basic level, not reaching your weight loss goal can occur when calorie intake is equal to or higher than calorie use. Try strategies such as mindful eating, keeping a food diary, eating more protein, and doing strength exercises.
Many overweight people have built up resistance to a hormone called leptin. Fat cells in your body make leptin, and leptin tells your body when you have enough stores of fat, decreasing your appetite.
You're Into the Wrong Foods
Unhealthy eating is the biggest driver of big bellies. Too many starchy carbohydrates and bad fats are a recipe for that midsection to expand. Instead, get plenty of veggies, choose lean proteins, and stay away from fats from red meats.
If you eat too much and exercise too little, you're likely to carry excess weight — including belly fat. Also, your muscle mass might diminish slightly with age, while fat increases.
If you have been trying to lose weight for three months, but haven't seen results, talk with your doctor. Stalled weight loss efforts can be attributed to many factors, such as hormones, stress, age and metabolism.
Start your diet by setting your calorie deficit at 20-to-25% (eat 20-to-25% fewer calories than you burn every day). Once you stop losing weight (and you've already tried the other strategies in this article) reduce your daily energy intake by 100-to-150 calories per day (take them all from carbs).
Many factors can affect your ability to lose weight, including certain health conditions, your dieting and weight loss history, age-related changes and your mother's diet and weight changes during pregnancy.
You may have a positive overall caloric balance despite your healthy diet because you're consuming more calories than you're burning. If you exercise hard and regularly, just keep your cool. The scale is probably telling you that you're building muscle mass. Muscle weighs more than fat.
You're Consuming More Calories Than Your Body Needs
Incorporating a few days of exercise into your weekly routine is likely to increase your appetite-especially if your body is burning more calories than it's used to. Unfortunately, this can cause many of us to trip up and consume more calories than we really need.
Walking might not be the most strenuous form of exercise, but it is an effective way to get in shape and burn fat. While you can't spot-reduce fat, walking can help reduce overall fat (including belly fat), which, despite being one of the most dangerous types of fat, is also one of the easiest to lose.
Causes include poor diet, lack of exercise, and short or low-quality sleep. A healthy diet and active lifestyle can help people lose excess belly fat and lower the risk of problems associated with it.
A diet high in added sugars, especially from sugar-sweetened beverages, may increase belly fat. Most often, stick with water, unsweetened coffee/tea, and eating a diet rich in whole, minimally processed foods.
Some of the best natural metabolism boosting supplements for this are caffeine, capsaicin, green coffee bean extract, and green tea extract. Including them in your diet will help you see some benefits, but the greatest effects come from taking metabolism pills such as Leanbean or PhenQ.
Muscle is denser than fat.
While one pound of fat weighs the same as one pound of muscle, muscle occupies about 18 percent less space. In addition, muscle burns calories while fat stores them. So, if your weight isn't decreasing but your clothes are starting to fit more loosely, you may be building muscle.