Learn how to break past weight loss plateaus with this checklist of 10 things that might be holding you back.

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Hey there. Welcome to the Coaching Corner podcast. I'm your host, Jayd Harrison, AKA Jaydigains. I've been a personal trainer for about 10 years and I created this podcast to educate my clients and followers on everything you need to know to get started and make progress in your fitness journey. We're going to talk about everything from how to exercise to how to eat to build a body that you love. In today's episode, I'm going to be sharing with you 10 reasons why you're not losing weight. So if you've been at a weight loss plateau for a while, or maybe you've just started one creeping in, or maybe you want to prevent one from happening in the first place, you might want to take out a pen and some paper to write down these 10 things. Now, before we move forward, keep in mind that I do have an email newsletter that you can sign up for and I will send you podcast updates as well as announcements of the things that are going on in my community. You can sign up for that in the link in the show notes, and without further ado, let's go ahead and get started.

If you have ever caught yourself saying something like, I don't understand, I'm exercising, I'm eating healthy, but I'm not losing any weight, what is happening? This is a super common problem that a lot of my new clients and followers face on their fitness journey. When you reach a point where your weight isn't moving and it hasn't been moving for two weeks or more, we tend to call this a weight loss plateau. So a plateau, you think about in topography, that's when the land, it is like a top of a mountain and it just kind of is flat. That's a plateau and a plateau when it happens with our weight loss is when we just don't see our weight moving anywhere. Now, there's a lot of things that can lead to a weight loss plateau. Not all of them mean that you're not making progress. So in today's episode, I'm going to share with you 10 things that could be contributing to you not seeing the scale move very much.

But before we get into those 10 reasons why you're not losing weight, we first need to talk about the way that our bodies store energy and burn energy. So if you are trying to lose weight, I can wager that your actual goal is fat loss. Remember that all of our body's tissues make up our total body weight. It's not just fat, it's bones, it's muscle, it's the water that your body retains as well as the fat if you're trying to lose weight. Keep in mind that not all weight loss is good weight loss. So body fat is our body's stores of energy. It's like our battery packs, right? And when we eat more energy than what our bodies burn, our bodies will store that energy as fat. So you'll notice it subcutaneous fat underneath your skin and that's everywhere, all over your body. You also have visceral fat that's around your organs, right?

So belly fat and then there's brown fat usually is in infants and little children and that reduces as they age. Now, our bodies do actually need a certain amount of fat to just be healthy. So there's a certain range of body fat percentage, which is the amount of your body weight that's made up by fat that you need in order to stay healthy. For men, that's usually around seven or 8% minimum, and for women it's about 15% minimum. So that's like the bare minimum amount of body fat that you need to just stay healthy because fat is important for the regulation of our hormones, for the absorption of vitamins, our brain function, keeping our skin tissue and other tissues healthy. And also it's good to have some extra stores of energy just in case. And when we want to reduce our body fat, if we have a high body fat percentage or if we want to get lean like for bodybuilding competition, what we need to do is put our bodies into an energy deficit so that our bodies can tap into those energy stores.

And when we do this, we're actually putting our body into what's called a catabolic state. This is as opposed to an anabolic state. These are two main functions of our metabolism. So catabolic processes are processes that break stuff down, right? It breaks food down into molecules so that your body can access that for energy as well as apply the vitamins and the minerals and your food to your actual body tissues to keep you healthy. So whenever our bodies are breaking things down, that's a catabolic process. Now we also have anabolic processes where our bodies build tissue or build stuff up, arrange smaller molecules into bigger molecules. So things like protein, muscle synthesis. When your body is actually building the muscle in your body, that is an anabolic process. So anabolic and catabolic processes are happening in your body all the time, and whether you burn fat or build muscle has a lot to do with the percentage of your metabolism that is going towards catabolic or anabolic processes.

In general, if you want to break tissue down, namely fat, you need to be in what we call a calorie deficit, which means that your body is taking in less energy than what your body spends on average for the anabolic processes. These run so much better when our bodies are in what's called a calorie surplus. When you're actually eating more energy than what your body is burning on average, having that excess energy gives your body that extra energy that it needs to build new tissue. So this is why a lot of times you might hear people say, oh, I'm a hard gainer. I have a really hard time building muscle. Almost 100% of the time when someone is a hard gainer and they have a hard time building muscle, it's because they can't get into a calorie surplus. They're having trouble getting as much of their metabolism to go towards anabolism or anabolic processes as they can.

People who struggle to lose weight or burn fat tend to have a hard time getting into a catabolic state. They have a hard time getting into a calorie deficit. So there are lots of reasons why you may struggle to get your body to be more catabolic or breaking stuff down, breaking down fat versus being in a more anabolic state. When you are trying to achieve a healthy physique, most of the time what we recommend is that you focus on burning fat, but preserving or building muscle. And the reason for that is because muscle is one of the best drivers of your metabolism. You can get your body to actually burn more calories and then therefore burn more fat If you build muscle, having more muscle means that your body is going to on average, burn more calories on a day-to-day basis, even on the days that you don't work out.

So when you're working on recomposition in your body or losing weight, you want as much of that weight loss to come from body fat and as little as possible to come from muscle. You want to minimize the breakdown or the catabolism of your muscle and you want to maximize the amount of metabolism that happens towards your fat, and there are some things that we can do to help encourage our bodies to do that. So let's go over my checklist of 10 things that I like to go over with my clients when they are struggling to see the scale move and they're not seeing any more weight loss. So number one on this list is that your calorie intake is still too high. You can eat healthy and still be eating a calorie surplus. Remember that when you're in a calorie surplus, you're eating more energy than what your body is burning, and you can do this with healthy food.

There are calorie dense healthy foods that a lot of people don't realize they're actually overshooting their energy budget. Things like nuts and seeds are a big one for a lot of my clients. Also, oil, even if you're using olive oil and healthy vegetable oils, a little bit goes a long way. Fat in general is very calorie dense. One gram of fat is nine calories as opposed to one gram of protein or one gram of carbohydrates, which is four calories. So it's very energy dense and a little bit goes a long way. So if you're not tracking what you eat in a calorie tracking app or a food journal or using one of my nutrition tracking sheets that are downloadable, and I'll include a link to that in the show notes. If you're not tracking what you eat, you may not be aware that you're actually eating more energy than your body is burning, even though the foods that you're eating are healthy.

So that can make it so that your body isn't actually burning fat because you're not getting into that catabolic state. You're staying in a calorie surplus, you're still eating more energy than what your body's burning Number two is, maybe your calorie intake is actually too low for too long. This is another really common thing that I see with new clients in particular, whenever I have taken on a nutrition coaching client almost every single time when they tell me that they're struggling to lose weight, we take a look at how many calories they've been eating over the course of months, and it's almost always the case that their calorie intake is too low and it's been that way for a really long time. So you might be thinking, that doesn't make any sense If I eat less calories, shouldn't I be in a calorie deficit? Your body is going to adapt to whatever calorie intake you give it, and this is actually a good system.

This helps to keep you alive. If we were in olden times and experienced famine or crop failure, your body has this ability to rev everything down so that you burn less calories every day so that you can stay alive during periods of scarcity. So if you have been eating a really low calorie intake for a really long time, your body will set into this mode where it's going to be burning fewer calories than it used to. So everything will slow down and you're going to have a hard time burning fat at that point. You're not even in a calorie deficit anymore because your body slowed down to bring your maintenance level of calories down to meet the average number of calories that you're eating every day. So this is why I usually like to have my clients cut or go on a diet for short periods at a time because your body is eventually going to adapt and in order to get your body burning fat again, you either need to cut calories again, which there's only so many that you can take away before you get into dangerous territory.

You don't want to eat less than a thousand calories a day, especially if you're a big dude, you know what I mean? So if you've been eating too little for too long, that's also going to stop your weight loss. In that case, I would recommend doing a reverse diet and starting to gradually add calories into your daily intake on a very gradual basis, like on a week by week basis, adding only 50 calories to a hundred calories at a time, and slowly bring your calorie intake up to the point where you're able to eat more calories and your body weight is still staying the same. And once you reach a point where you're eating the amount of calories that someone of your size should be eating, then you can cut again. Then you can cut calories. But again, you want to make sure that it's a short period of time, six to 12 weeks because your body will eventually adapt to that.

Number three is you're not building muscle. If you have been eating healthy and exercising, but you're not exercising in the right way, this can also impact your weight loss. So remember that we talked about how muscle is a main driver of your metabolism. If you are not careful, if you're in a calorie deficit and you're not actually training to build muscle, your body will actually break down muscle in addition to fat, to access the energy that's stored there. As this happens, your overall daily calorie expenditure is going to go down. If you're not actively building muscle or trying to preserve the muscle that you have, you're going to see your daily calorie expenditure go down. That means your body's going to burn fewer calories. So if you want to prevent this from happening and keep your metabolism revved up, one of the best things you can do is resistance training.

Resistance training. You don't even need more than two or three times a week. But if you're doing a lot of cardio, especially a lot of high intensity cardio like beach body workouts or group fitness or HIIT workouts, then you're likely burning away your muscle. So it's really important to incorporate strength training, traditional strength training, learn how to lift weights, learn how to do calisthenics in a way that builds muscle because this is going to keep your metabolism revved up so that it doesn't slow down and you can prevent a weight loss plateau. Number four is you aren't sleeping enough. Sleep is so important when it comes to fat loss, weight loss and just establishing health and wellness. When we don't get enough sleep, it completely disrupts our hormonal balance. Leptin is the hormone that signals fullness, so you know when to stop eating, so when you don't sleep enough, your body doesn't actually produce enough leptin so you have a harder time knowing when it's time to stop eating.

So this can lead to overeating and over-consuming calories, ghrelin increases and that makes it so that you feel like you have more of an appetite and you feel like you need to eat more. So with these two things combined, it's just a recipe for overeating and mindless snacking. Also, when you don't sleep enough, you're likely going to feel tired, which is going to make it harder for you to show up and exercise or do your workouts. And if you do this often enough and you experience chronic sleep deprivation, there's a lot of long-term down the road effects that this can have that will impact your weight loss, not only disrupting your metabolism, but also impacting your insulin sensitivity and putting you at an increased risk of developing diabetes or complications from diabetes. So please make sure that you're getting enough sleep. Everybody's sleep needs are different, so you want to make sure that you do a sleep journal or a sleep study to figure out how much sleep that your body needs, and if you have a condition that makes it hard for you to sleep, I strongly recommend doing a sleep study or getting on medicine to help you because this is going to impact so many areas of your life even beyond your ability to lose weight.

Now, number five, very similar to number four is that you're overstressed. Now when you are really stressed, just like when you haven't slept enough, your hormonal is going to be totally out of whack and your body is going to produce a lot more specifically of the hormone called cortisol, and cortisol is essentially like your stress hormone. Now, a little bit of stress is actually healthy for us. Acute stress that happens in the moment, it helps to motivate us to get ourselves to safety or to take action when we need to. But the problem comes when we have chronic stress and we're in this fight or flight state for long periods of time very often, and this can lead to all kinds of problems for our health and also impact our weight loss. Cortisol, which is the main stress hormone, can actually cause your body to store more visceral fat, which is the fat in your belly that surrounds your organs.

Now, having a lot of visceral fat is associated with a lot of other comorbidities, meaning illnesses. People who have higher visceral fat are usually at increased risk of certain types of cancers, diabetes, heart disease, so it's not really good. We don't want visceral fat or we don't want too much visceral fat. Also, when we're stressed, we tend to reach for comfort foods, which a lot of times are calorie dense. So if you're stressed eating or if you do emotional eating or you eat a lot of comfort foods, you may not realize that you're actually eating more energy and this can cause you to stay in a calorie surplus, which makes it hard for your body to burn fat and to lose weight. So it's super important to practice stress management, and there are a number of ways that you can do this from learning breathing exercises like in yoga and looking into mindfulness practice and seeing a therapist is also a good idea.

One of my favorite types of therapies as a neurodiverse person is EMDR, eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, and this is a somatic therapy that helps you to process trauma as well as regulate a dysregulated nervous system. Cognitive behavioral therapy can help you to organize your life and structure your life in a way that minimizes stress as well. So a lot of options out there. You do not have to live in this chronic stress, and if you want to lose weight, it's going to be really important that you get a handle on it. Number six is that you may actually be working out too much. This is related to being overstressed because a lot of the impact is the same. When you work out too much or too hard and you don't have a good balance of the intensity or the volume of your workouts, you may be overstressing your body, which again makes your body release more cortisol, which is going to make it harder for your body to recover from your workouts and is actually going to lead to you retaining more visceral fat.

Also really intense can increase your appetite, and a lot of people don't realize that after they have done a really hard workout, they end up mindlessly snacking, they eat more, and they end up actually overshooting their calories and keeping their body in a calorie surplus. I remember it. To burn fat, we want our bodies to be in a calorie deficit. So if you work out really, really hard and then you treat yourself with a high calorie after workout snack or smoothie or something, you're not going to be really impacting your fat loss. However, you may actually be helping yourself to build more muscle because building muscle happens best when you're in a calorie surplus, but if you see the weight is not moving, if you see that your scale isn't moving and you tend to do a lot of really hard, really intense workouts, but you're not tracking what you eat, you may want to take a look at what you're eating, especially on the days that you work out or the days following that you work out.

You don't really need to blast yourself in the gym to make progress in your fat loss. It is all about managing your energy budget. You can work out very moderately and still make a lot of progress, but it's important that you are only working out as intense as your body can actually recover from overstressing. The body is going to just add more problems. So try to strike a balance with your exercise intensity, frequency and duration with proper rest and make sure that you are monitoring what you're eating. Another thing to keep in mind if you work out really, really hard is how does that actually impact your frequency? Because a lot of people when they first start in the gym, they hit it really, really hard and then they end up being really, really sore and they end up not really showing up for the gym again after the first week because they were so sore, they had such a hard time and they got off their schedule and then they just can't get back on, right?

It's better for you to do a lighter intensity workout that you can recover from and then show up the next day and do it again. Frequency, being able to show up again and again and again is going to be so much more impactful to your weight loss than hitting a workout really, really hard just once a week and then spending the rest of the week recovering. It's better to be more active at a lower intensity than it is to just really blast yourself, and that leads us also to number seven. Your workouts are inconsistent. Frequency is everything when it comes to burning fats and achieving a body that you love, you have to put that consistent work in. So just like with number six, if you're working out too much and that's impacting your consistency and your ability to show up consistently to do your workouts or to consistently eat the way that you need to eat, then you need to reexamine how you're spending your time and you need to get organized.

So I would recommend getting on a training program with an actual schedule of when to do your workouts and what you're going to do when you do your workouts so that you can build some consistency. Now, I create workout plans like this for all of my clients. Every single one of them has a training program that we run for between four and six weeks usually, and the routine is the same for those four to six weeks. They work on the same exercises, trying to add more reps and more weight over time, and this gives them that sense of consistency that they need. And I highly recommend getting on a schedule, get your workouts done on the same days every week at the same time, set it as a recurring event in your calendar so that you can show up consistently because that is going to be key when it comes to consistently making progress in your weight loss.

Now number eight has to do with your food intake. If you're not eating enough protein, you are going to struggle to lose fat and to lose weight protein is so important for helping your body to burn more calories. Eating a higher protein diet actually makes your body burn more calories during the digestion process, but also the protein is a building block for your muscles. And remember, we want to preserve as much muscle as possible when we are in a fat loss phase or when we're on a weight loss phase. If you don't have enough protein in your diet, you increase the likelihood that your body is going to take away energy from your muscles and break your muscles down to make up for the energy that you're not getting in your diet. So eating a high protein diet is super important at all times, but especially when you are in a fat loss phase.

The recommendations for these range really, but a good rule of thumb is to say 0.7 grams per pound of body weight. If you are really overweight and you have a high amount of body fat, you can base that off of your centimeters of height and you can say one gram per centimeter of height. This is usually a pretty good rule of thumb. Now, one of the places that I work at actually does these 3D body scans and they can tell you exactly how much of your body weight is fat versus lean muscle tissue, and a lot of times registered dieticians will take a look at that and they'll base your protein intake off of your actual lean tissue and how much lean tissue you have in your body and how much of your body weight is lean tissue. But just I think good rule of thumb between 0.7 and one gram per pound of body weight is how many grams of protein you should eat every day is a pretty good rule of thumb.

And if you are really overweight, then you can just use the centimeters of height. But if you want a more specific number, I would say talk to a registered dietician. Number nine related to this is you may not actually be drinking enough water. Your body needs water. Water is what hydrates us. It keeps us healthy, keeps our immune system strong. It helps to flush out cellular waste from all of our body's processes. In addition to this, a lot of people actually mistake the cue that your body says, I'm thirsty for, I'm hungry. So you've probably experienced this before where you just feel hungry or you feel like your appetite is up and you want to eat something. A lot of times it has to do with sugary stuff in my experience, and a lot of times my body will crave like sugary stuff and I'll think like, wait, when was the last time I had some water and I drink a bunch of water, and then the craving goes away.

So if you tend to experience sugar cravings like that throughout the day, check to see how much water you're drinking and make sure that you are drinking plenty of water. Your specific water needs are really individual to you, your body, your level of activity, and it will change on a day-to-day basis. But the best rule of thumb that you can do is check the toilet when you pee. So the darker that your urine is the more water you need to drink. So if you see a really dark orange or yellow color in the toilet, that means that you need to drink some more water. We want our pee to be watered down lemonade kind of color. Okay, I know that's kind of gross, but to think about and to talk about, but it's really important. Your dehydration levels is really a life or death kind of situation.

You need to stay hydrated to stay healthy, but then also if you really want to see your fat loss go anywhere, you need to make sure that you're drinking plenty of water. Now finally, number 10, the reason why you might not be seeing the scale move and you may not be losing weight is because your body is in a recomp. A recomp is short for recomposition. Now this means that your body is doing both burning fat and building muscle at the same time. And when this happens, you're likely not going to see the scale move very much at all over a really long period of time. But that doesn't mean that you're not making progress because you absolutely are. You're building muscle and you're burning fat, but remember that both muscle and fat add weight to your body. So as you build muscle, your body is naturally going to be heavier.

And then as you burn fats, your body is going to be lighter as you're doing both. Sometimes they can cancel each other out and look like the scale is not moving at all, but you'll know that you're making progress because you can see some other indicators. For instance, your clothes may be fitting really loosely. You might have to go down in a belt size. Maybe your pants are fitting really loose, maybe you need to get some new clothes. If you take your measurements, you should see your measurements changing, especially around the belly. If you can see your inches or your centimeters going down around your belly, this is usually a good indication that you are making progress and burning fat, but you're also building muscle and that's why you're not seeing the scale move. Again, getting a fit 3D scan or some kind of a body fat analysis is one of the best ways that you can check to see if you are making progress, if you're really worried about not seeing the scale move.

But this is really common. A lot of people in the first year or two of their fitness journey and in advance people as well, anybody can do a recomp. It's just that when you're doing both burning fat and building muscle at the same time, it's very slow. And that's where it can be kind of frustrating, is that you're making progress, but you're making progress in both directions, burning fat and building muscle. And so it's just going to be slower than if you were in a real calorie deficit, not a real, but a deeper calorie deficit where more of your body system is going towards catabolism, breaking down tissue, breaking down fat. The more catabolic you are, the more you're going to burn fat and break tissue down. And some of that is going to be muscle. So a lot of people say when they're in a deep calorie deficit, they lose measurably, they lose strength, they lose muscle because it's just a battle to keep that muscle, to keep your body from breaking that down as well as the fat.

When you're in a really catabolic state and when you're in an anabolic state, that's really the best place that you can be if you really want to put on muscle. If you're a skinny guy and you're really concerned with putting on weight, putting on size, you need to keep your body more anabolic. So if you're trying to do both at the same time, you're going to see pretty slow progress in both directions. But that doesn't mean that you're not making progress, but you can turn some dials by increasing your calorie surplus or decreasing your calorie surplus to affect whether your metabolism is going to be more anabolic or catabolic. And just remember, the more anabolic you are, the more that your adaptation to your workouts is going to be build muscle, and you're also going to store a little bit of fat. It's hard to avoid that even if you had a very, very small calorie surplus, you're going to have a little bit of fat gains when you are in anabolic state.

Now, when you are really catabolic and you're blasting the fat, you're going to lose some muscle likely as well. So that's the trade-off, but they're faster, right? So you'll make faster progress in your muscle gains if you're more anabolic, you'll make faster progress in your fat loss if you're more catabolic. But the downside is that you're going to trade off that muscle loss for the fat loss as well, and you're going to trade off a little bit of fat gain when you are also gaining muscle. So I hope that this gave you a lot to think about in terms of your own weight loss progress, and let me know if you found something confusing and you would like a little bit more information. If you are following me on YouTube, you can leave those comments and questions in the comments underneath the video for this podcast episode.

If you're in my Coaching Corner Discord server, you can also post your questions in the public chat channel and make sure that you also join my email list so that you can always get notified when I drop new podcast episodes, and you can get announcements about other things that are going on in the community. So make sure to check out all of those resources. They are linked in the show notes of this episode. Thank you so much for watching or listening wherever it is that you are. Have a wonderful rest of your day. Don't forget to eat your protein, eat your veggies, drink water, and prioritize your self-care. I'm Jayd Harrison, AKA Jaydigains, and I will see you soon.