Not Losing Weight? 8 Common Reasons and How to Fix Them

3. Your weekends undo your weekdays

Five days at a 500-calorie deficit is 2,500 calories. Two days at a 1,250-calorie surplus wipes it out completely. Many stalls are really a weekend problem.

Fix: look at your weekly average intake, not your weekday intake. Plan your weekends rather than leaving them to chance: decide in advance where the extra food or drinks go, and keep protein high.

4. You are moving less without noticing

When you diet, your body nudges you to save energy. Many people fidget less, sit more and take fewer steps without realising. This drop in everyday movement can eat a large part of your deficit.

Fix: set a daily step target and track it. Keeping your steps steady protects your deficit. See how many steps a day for fat loss.

5. Your maintenance has dropped

As you lose weight, your body needs less energy, so the deficit that worked at the start gets smaller. If you started at 90 kg and are now 82 kg, your old calorie target may now be close to maintenance.

Fix: after a good amount of weight loss, re-check your maintenance and adjust your target. See how to calculate your maintenance calories.

6. You are overestimating exercise

Fitness trackers and gym machines often overestimate calories burned, sometimes by a lot. If you "eat back" those calories, your deficit can disappear.

Fix: set your calorie target to already account for your normal training, and do not add food back based on a tracker's estimate.

7. Sleep and stress are holding water

Poor sleep and high stress raise hunger, make you less active and can increase water retention, which hides fat loss on the scale. Poor sleep also makes it much harder to stick to any plan.

Fix: aim for 7 to 9 hours of sleep. During stressful periods, focus on consistency rather than pushing for faster loss.

8. It has not been long enough

Fat loss is never perfectly linear. It is common to see nothing for two weeks and then a sudden drop. A month of good adherence is a better test than a week.

Fix: be patient for two to three weeks of consistent effort before changing anything, unless the numbers are clearly off.

Also check

• The menstrual cycle can cause a predictable rise in weight for several days. Compare the same phase of your cycle from month to month.
• New medication or a medical condition, such as an underactive thyroid, can affect weight. If you suspect something is wrong, speak to your doctor.

If it really is a stall

If your weekly average has been flat for two to three weeks, your tracking is accurate and your steps are steady, make one small change:

• reduce calories by about 100 to 200 a day, or
• increase your daily steps by about 1,000 to 2,000.

Then give it two more weeks before judging. Big, sudden cuts usually lead to hunger, poor training and eventually a rebound. More on doing it properly in how to lose fat without losing muscle.

Where coaching helps

The hard part of a stall is telling which of these eight things is happening. That is exactly what a weekly check-in is for. With one-to-one coaching from CoachAk, you send your weight, training and nutrition adherence, steps, sleep, energy, hunger and stress every week. Your coach looks at the whole picture, finds the real cause and makes one deliberate change, rather than cutting calories at the first bad week.

If you are stuck and tired of guessing, apply for coaching.