Can’t Lose Weight? These 15 Reasons May be Why

Are you finding yourself struggling with the fact that you simply can’t lose weight? Have you wondered how to lose weight with hypothyroidism? Body weight is one of the biggest drivers of long-term health, and is huge for our mental health, too. In this article, I want to go through 15 reasons why someone can’t lose weight.

After all, we want to feel confident in how we look and how we feel. And, we want to make sure that we lower our risks while feeling our best. Fatigue, depression, chronic pain – weight drives all of that, so let’s talk about how we can make weight loss easier for you.

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Table of Contents

15 Reasons You Can’t Lose Weight
Discovering the Metabolism Reset Diet

15 Reasons You Can’t Lose Weight

Let’s dive into the key reasons why you simply can’t lose weight. We’ll start in a familiar place, with our thyroid health…

1. Too Little Thyroid Hormone

Essentially, our thyroid controls how quickly we burn fuel. If we are lacking in thyroid hormone, that is going to slow our metabolic rate more than any other known factor – making it progressively harder and harder to lose weight.

An important point here, when it comes to losing weight with thyroid disease, is that there is too little hormone alongside thyroid autoimmunity. Some find that natural thyroid medications like nature-thyroid work better for weight loss. Even if there is enough thyroid hormone, the autoimmunity alone can make weight loss more difficult.

2. Too Much Thyroid Hormone

This one may not be as intuitive, but it can be a factor for those who can’t lose weight. There are two unique cases I want to highlight here.

One, is that someone has a condition that makes too much. Or, more commonly, someone is on an excessive dosage of thyroid medication.

The paradox here is that someone may be on too much medication in order to help their weight – but, it turns out it is holding them back!

Because too little thyroid hormone can cause weight gain, it would seem totally logical that extra could help weight loss. And, there is a point at which massive amounts of thyroid hormone can cause you to lose weight – but, this is definitely not a healthy form of weight loss.

Before that point, it is very common that mild-to-moderate degrees of excess thyroid hormone can cause weight gain. What happens is that the excess makes the body resist thyroid hormone as well as the breakdown of stored fat.

In this case, the effects of too little thyroid hormone look very much the same as too much thyroid hormone. It’s funny how that works.

3. Clean/Organic Foods Don’t Automatically Lead To Weight Loss

I have heard this one a lot when people can’t lose weight. People try really hard, and try to eat only organic food – and yet they still struggle to lose that weight.

Here’s the thing: it’s so important to eat good food! I don’t want to make it seem like clean or organic foods are the bad guy here. It’s more a question of the relationship between the quality of the food we eat and our overall body weight.

While it is true that it is easier to overeat on highly-processed foods, that is more of an argument for not gaining not weight. And, not so much an argument for losing weight.

High-quality food, by itself, should not be expected to cause weight loss on its own. Weight loss is not easy, and it doesn’t happen without a really structured plan. Healthy food alone almost never leads to spontaneous weight loss.

4. Fatty Liver Disease

This is a bit of a “chicken or the egg” situation. Because weight gain can cause fatty liver, and fatty liver can subsequently cause more weight gain. It’s a tricky conundrum!

Basically, your liver stores and burns two kinds of fuel:

• Glycogen
• Triglyceride

Glycogen comes from carbohydrates. Triglyceride comes from anything – and anything means carbohydrates, fats, ketones, and alcohol. All of those can be made into triglycerides.

The liver has compartments for both. We can store precisely somewhere around 60 times more fat than we can store carbohydrates.

The issue is that we need some carbohydrates to burn fat. So, if there is too little carbohydrate in the liver, we can’t burn the fat – this is what happens in the case of fatty liver disease.

In those cases, that ends up affecting the body fat in general. There are more fat stores elsewhere in the body, and it is not effectively broken down.

Thankfully thyroid supplements for weight loss can often help fatty liver. In fact, many of the ingredients in Metabolism Boost directly help the liver burn fat.

5. Insulin Resistance

In the case of insulin resistance, the body is deliberately not burning some kind of fuel. In short, insulin is a signal that moves types of fuel into cells to be burned or stored. If the cells can’t handle it, they resist insulin and do not respond to it.

When this happens, it is not that insulin is inherently bad and needs to go away. Instead, it is that the body is in a state where it cannot accommodate that fuel.

Here we think again about liver function and liver health. It is just another reason why it is so important to get this part of our health dialed in.

6. High Triglycerides

Different forms of fuel are stored in the liver, the fat under the skin, and the fat around the organs. But, fuels can also be stored in the bloodstream. When the body can’t burn something, it leaves it in circulation.

Triglycerides in the blood means that there is too much triglyceride in the deeper tissues. This means that the body can’t burn them properly – and, it is a state where the body resists effective weight loss.

7. Abnormal Cortisol Rhythm

This is especially interesting because an abnormal cortisol rhythm changes where the fuel goes in your body. In a healthy cortisol rhythm, where we make cortisol in the morning and shut it down at night, the fuel goes to our muscle tissue. And, we burn energy in our muscles.

When that cortisol rhythm is wrong, more of that fuel goes around the organs and inside the organs. That is dangerous.

8. APOE4 Variations

Somewhere around a quarter of the population has variations in the APOE enzymes. What this means is that they cannot carry fats around the body the same way that other people are able to. This specifically relates to saturated fats.

People with this variation cannot tolerate saturated fats in the same ways as others. That includes things like coconut oil, lard, butter, and animal fats. All of the things that are greasy and solid, folks like these cannot circulate them as easily and effectively.

The problems here really consist of:

• Cardiovascular risk
• Weight gain
• Alzheimer’s risk

These are things that are much more pronounced with the APOE variations.

9. Too Little Dietary Protein

This is fascinating stuff. As it turns out, our hunger can be based largely on protein – sometimes even more so, than total caloric load. So, it is incredibly common that we can eat and eat and eat, and not feel full until we hit our protein target.

Some foods that don’t have that much protein require a lot of food to hit that target. Other foods that are more protein-dense, we don’t need to eat as much of them.

We also know that protein affects our basal metabolic rate (BMR), and also affects body composition in general. If we enjoy better sources of dietary protein, we are not as hungry, we burn calories better, and we grow muscle tissue more effectively.

10. Too Much Dietary Fat

The total amount of fat can be super relevant if you can’t lose weight. Don’t get me wrong, it is not so much that fat is bad, but with calories coming from fat, protein, or carbohydrate – the more you have of one, the less you can have of the others.

So, too much fat can inhibit our ability to have enough protein or healthy amounts of carbohydrates. In fact, a recent study found that high-fat diets are more apt to cause diabetes.

Higher fat is not better, what we need is healthy fats which are in a certain proportion relative to how much protein and how many carbohydrates we are getting.

11. Low Fiber Diet

The fact is that we want a lot of total fiber, and we want a lot of diversity of fiber. There are upwards of 16 categories of fiber, and the more variety of plant categories we consume, the more we get and the better for us.

Consider things like:

• Vegetables
• Fruits
• Legumes
• Intact whole grains
• Seeds
• Nuts

Out of those six, think about all of the varieties within them. The more different plans you can have, from each of these categories, the more fiber diversity you will have – and, ultimately, the easier it will be to regulate body weight.

12. Poor Sleep

Sleep is so important. That includes quality of sleep, regularity of sleep, and duration of sleep. This may be one of the larger controllable factors behind body weight.

That may not be obvious, but a lot of the internal mechanisms that regulate our weight are taking place while we are sleeping.

In fact, how much you eat is often tied directly to how well you are sleeping. So, if you can’t lose weight, you may want to ask yourself about the quality of your sleep.

13. Chronic Dieting

If you are lowering your food intake for too long, that lowers your basal metabolic rate. It does that by changing how your body responds to thyroid hormones. Essentially, it changes the way you burn fuel – and makes it harder to burn fuel.

The solution is to diet with purpose. That is why, when I wrote the Metabolism Reset Diet, I really focused on set blocks of time. I will talk a bit more about that later.

14. Skipping Breakfast

Can’t lose weight? Have you had your breakfast? Skipping breakfast may seem like you are eating less food, but research has found that skipping breakfast often leads to simply eating more food later on – with lower food quality to match.

15. Diabetes & Prediabetes

These often overlap with insulin resistance and fatty liver disease, which we spoke about earlier. The latest research has now shown that somewhere around 51% of American adults either have diabetes or are close to it.

What happens here is that this often pushes the body into that storage mode state of being. So, this is something we definitely want to keep in mind if you can’t lose weight.

Discovering the Metabolism Reset Diet

So, what do you do if you simply can’t lose weight? If you want to get past some of these barriers, there are definitely some things you can do to take back control.

Some, like sleep, are about just that: fixing sleep. But, the most effective strategies involve the idea that weight loss should be brief – ideally, four-week windows of weight loss.

Also, ensuring that things are simple and sustainable. Meal replacements, for example, can make losing weight much easier by making things simpler.

I created the Metabolism Reset Diet with these principles in mind. It is a process that has helped so many people who had the same issue of not being able to lose weight.

Take a read through it today, and I hope it helps start you out on a new journey to losing weight, feeling better, and putting some control back into your life. Enjoy!

P.S. Whenever you are ready, here is how I can help you now:

1. Schedule a Thyroid Second Opinion with me, Dr. C, Click Here for Details
2. Need A Thyroid Supplement Recommendation? Take My Thyroid Specific Formulations Quiz Now
3. Need a Personalized Supplement? Check out My Thyroid Specific Formulations
4. Download and use my Favorite Recipes Cookbook Here
5. Check out my podcast Medical Myths, Legends, and Fairytales Here

Dr. Alan Glen Christianson (Dr. C) is a Naturopathic Endocrinologist and the author of The NY Times bestselling Adrenal Reset Diet, The Metabolism Reset Diet and The Thyroid Reset Diet.

Dr. C’s gift for figuring out what really works has helped hundreds of thousands of people reverse thyroid disease, lose weight, diabetes, and regain energy. Learn more about the surprising story that started his quest.