Not Losing Weight in a Calorie Deficit? 11 Reasons Why

The Weight Loss Puzzle

There are moments when you’re prepared to make a vow to never listen to your know-it-all gym friend again, and your most recent weight loss setback is one of those times. After two months of maintaining a consistent calorie deficit in the hopes of losing weight, you’ve stepped on your gym’s scale to reveal… nothing. 

Despite all of the workouts, the lower calorie intake, and the sacrifice of so many of the processed foods that you enjoy, you don’t seem to have lost a single pound after the first month.

Frustrated, you track down the surly veteran personal trainer of your gym and press them as to why the principles of fitness math don’t seem to be working when it specifically comes to you and your weight loss journey.

“So what’s the deal?!” you ask. “I’m doing everything I’m supposed to! I do cardio, I lift weights, and I’ve been eating all of the right things! Why am I not losing weight in a calorie deficit like everyone says I should be?!”

The trainer just smiles and shakes his head. 

“There’s a whole lot more to weight loss and overall weight management than sticking to a calorie deficit,” they respond. “There’s water weight. There’s muscle mass. There’s your metabolism. While you’re at it, you should definitely double check your calculations when it comes to your calorie deficit, because you may not be understanding the reality of calorie deficits and how they connect with your metabolism.”

With that, the trainer walks away, leaving you to stew in your frustration just a little bit longer, since you’re more than willing to do whatever it takes to prompt weight loss progress in a healthy way, but have yet to find a successful strategy.

What you would really appreciate is if someone would explain to you all of the reasons why you might not be losing any weight in spite of the calorie deficit you’ve been maintaining for so long, or if they could somehow help you structure the right calorie deficit diet. 

Well, if you pay attention to some of the principles mentioned below, you’ll be well on your way to properly rearranging your nutrition plan, and generating weight loss through the creation of a healthy calorie deficit based on a thorough understanding.

Inaccurate Calorie Tracking

The general belief is that losing weight is as simple as eating fewer calories on a consistent basis. Therefore, taking this principle of maintaining a calorie deficit at face value, logic dictates that if you’re able to stick to the habit of consuming fewer calories for an extended period of time, you will experience rapid weight loss.

Before you can confidently say that your calorie count has been meaningfully lowered from its peak, you need to be able to accurately account for everything contained within your meals and snacks. This is far easier said than done, as there are several ways that you can easily miscount your calories and slow the process of losing weight.

Uncounted-For Snacks

The handfuls of peanuts you grab from the community bowl at the reception desk of your workplace may seem minor at the moment, but too many handfuls of high calorie foods like peanuts can add hundreds of calories to your daily calorie count. 

The 300 calories of peanuts you innocently eat at work can easily surpass the 200 calories you intend to burn through your evening exercise routine. Not only can situations like this dramatically inhibit your weight loss efforts, but if the snacks are salty, they can also affect other important markers of health, like your blood pressure.

If you’re going to take weight management seriously and achieve the health benefits that come from being a healthier size, you need to keep an accurate calorie count. This requires you to account for every snack you consume, and eliminate some of them if they’re necessary.

Sugary Drinks

There’s a reason that people with trouble losing weight frequently experience sudden weight loss the instant they start monitoring and cutting their calories consumed through drinks. 

Quite often, drinking can be such an unconscious activity driven by thirst, and the act of drinking is so effortless that many people fail to realize they might be slurping down the number-one source of sugary carbs.

Someone who consumes four cans of soda each day could easily be adding 600 empty calories of little nutritional value to their daily diet. So if you’re on a mission to consume fewer calories, you need to account for what your choice of beverages is adding to your overall calorie intake.

Hidden Ingredients

In theory, one of the simplest ways to create a calorie deficit is to eat fewer calories. You may think you’re on the right track to cutting calories when you add up the calories in every ingredient of the meal you’re cooking on the stove, but then you add half a cup of olive oil — all 950 calories of it — into the mix, and calorie count rockets skyward in the blink of an eye.

Just like that, all of the forethought you put into planning a meal with low-calorie ingredients went out the window. Unless you closely police the ingredients you’re cooking with, you can manage to add more calories to every serving of your meals to an alarming extent. This is especially true of recipes that include oils, sugars, and sauces.

You’ve Hit a Weight Loss Plateau

Weight loss plateaus are an unfortunate occurrence that nearly everyone is forced to contend with. In your efforts to lose weight, your metabolism is probably going to play the role of the unlikely villain, forcibly stalling your efforts. Not only is this frustrating, but it’s often the X-factor that makes understanding calorie deficits very challenging.

There are several elements that contribute to weight loss plateaus, but the basic cause is how your body adjusts to changes in your behaviors, and this includes the actual creation of a calorie deficit and the subsequent loss of weight.

For everyone who has heard that a pound of fat contains 3,200 calories, the common formula for weight loss is often stated as some version of this: If I consume 320 calories below my established basal metabolic rate each day for 10 days, I’ll burn a pound of fat, and if I keep this up for a year, I’ll burn 36 pounds.

The immediate problem with this math is that your basal metabolic rate changes the instant you start losing weight. Your body will make rapid adjustments to reach a new equilibrium point, and if you rely solely on the tracking of calories, you’ll find yourself cutting more calories and creating steeper calorie deficits in your efforts to lose weight.

When this happens, you may find that you’ve effectively shut down your metabolism, and the remedy for this may actually be to temporarily increase your food intake in order to kickstart your metabolism once again. 

As studies indicate, most people’s bodies have hormonal mechanisms that balance energy intake and expenditure over time, often resulting in low levels of weight loss that seem incommensurate with the amount of calories consumed or sacrificed. (1)

In order to keep your metabolism high, common strategies include spreading out your meals throughout the day, getting adequate sleep to maintain your hormonal health, and shifting to a high protein diet as opposed to a low calorie diet.

Water Retention: Why the Scale Lies

It’s important to differentiate between weight loss and fat loss, because if you fail to account for your physical appearance and the constant changes to your body composition, you may misinterpret a momentary failure to lose weight as an underlying flaw in your weight management process.

In reality, your perception that there is a hiccup in your weight loss efforts may be a byproduct of the time of day you are choosing to weigh yourself. If you are weighing yourself after meals, or following serious rehydration efforts, what you perceive as excess weight may be your body holding onto additional food or water that has nothing to do with the loss or gain of body fat or muscle tissue.

On a more serious note, studies have proven that there are instances where serious water retention is spawned by equally serious health issues, including cardiac abnormalities. In some of these cases, fluid retention as high as 40 kg (88 lbs) was uncovered. (2) 

Therefore, if your body weight doesn’t seem to be budging, it may be worth checking in with your healthcare provider to see if there is an underlying medical issue leading to undetected water retention.

You’re Gaining Muscle: The Scale Doesn’t Tell the Whole Story

If part of your comprehensive body improvement strategy is the recomposition of your body through muscle gain, then you should rest assured that there are other factors at play on the scale than the simple loss of fat tissue.

There’s a popular joke about which weighs more, a pound of fat or a pound of muscle. Obviously, the punchline to the joke is that both weigh the same amount despite the greater density of muscle tissue. 

All humor aside, if you’re engaged in steady weight training, multi-pound gains of muscle mass are undeniably going to offset the difference you see on the scale while you lose fat. This is usually seen as an overall improvement in line with body recomposition efforts, and another reason why the number on the scale doesn’t paint the whole picture.

Not Enough Sleep: How Poor Sleep Sabotages Weight Loss

The failure to get adequate sleep is linked to undesired weight increases for several reasons. First of all, chronic sleeplessness can result in changes to your resting metabolic rate, which destabilizes your metabolism and results in unpredictable weight loss even when you’re maintaining a calorie deficit.

On top of that, the likelihood that you’re going to be able to sustain a calorie deficit is going to decrease, because the more time you spend awake, the more likely you are to consume food that is going to result in an increase to your overall caloric intake.

While you’re eating food out of boredom, you’re also going to be more likely to eat food in large quantities. This is because an insufficient sleep schedule can deregulate your hormones that help you to feel satisfied by eating, thereby resulting in more food being consumed overall.

Finally, at least one study indicates that calorie-restricted individuals who slept for 8.5 hours per night as opposed to 5.5 hours per night lost a greater percentage of body fat even though the total weight loss was the same. (3) In comparison, the participants who slept only 5.5 hours per night endured a greater loss of fat-free muscle mass.

Stress and Cortisol: Emotional Eating and Weight Gain

If you intend to lose weight, that’s a good time to address whatever issues in your life are causing you stress. There are a number of negative consequences to stress, none of which are favorable to your plans to shed body fat.

The point of stress is to temporarily prepare your body to respond to an emergency, fight-or-flight situation. Yet, if the sources of the stress linger, it grows ever more unlikely that you will be able to maintain a calorie deficit to begin with, let alone experience sustainable weight loss even if you could keep your daily calorie intake at a manageable level.

The effects of stress are best understood in the context of the dominant hormone that it produces: Cortisol. Once cortisol is created, it causes your body to simultaneously crave and conserve its resources so that it is prepared for danger. Straight out of the gate, you’ll be tempted to crave more food, which can cause your calorie intake to trend upward.

This is damaging enough, but if you consume high-calorie foods, alcohol, or sugar as a result of your body’s cortisol increase, these foods will prompt a further increase in cortisol levels all on their own. This vicious cycle will not only hinder weight loss efforts, but are likely to have you gaining weight as well.

Further complicating things is the fact that cortisol will also break down the proteins in your muscle tissue. Therefore, if you are stressed, and you happen to see lower numbers flashing across your scale, you might be tempted to think that you’re losing fat, but it is more likely that you’re viewing the effects of muscle loss.

Overestimating Caloric Burn from Exercise

As often as exercise is cited as a weight loss tool that can help you create a calorie deficit, it can be very difficult to rely on exercise for the primary purpose of burning fat for a whole host of reasons. 

While exercise is not only valuable, but borderline essential for mastering your metabolism and achieving overall health, it is unwise to lean on the calories burned through exercise as your go-to method for creating a calorie deficit.

The Tracker is Inaccurate

The calorie trackers of different pieces of cardio equipment are theoretically supposed to be using the same Metabolic Equivalent of Task (MET) calculators if you’re performing an identical exercise at the same degree of challenge from one piece of equipment to another. Even so, the readout screens tracking how many calories you’ve burned during exercises may vary markedly from one machine to another.

The reality is that the number of calories you’ve burned during exercise — even exercises performed on machines that track expended calories — is a best guess even under the most ideal of circumstances. To avoid wild overestimations as to the productivity of your training, you may not want to rely exclusively on the figure provided by your tracker to determine whether or not you’ve created the sort of caloric deficit you’ve been hoping for.

For the record, your calorie tracking app probably isn’t much better in terms of accuracy, so you’re better off thinking about your workouts in terms of their functional benefits to your body as opposed to what the potential calorie-reducing outcomes might be.

Your Attempts to Ease the Burden are Unaccounted For

Even if the calorie trackers on your cardio machines aren’t 100-percent accurate, they are at least attempting to take into account your weight, and how much energy it takes to move that weight at the speed and difficulty level selected during your workout routine.

Well, if you grasp the handles of your treadmill to hold yourself steady, or lock out your arms to drastically reduce the percentage of your weight supported by the stair climber, you are intentionally making the physical activity easier. As a result, the number on the display showing your number of calories burned actually has little connection with what you’ve actually burned.

In short, if you’re tracking your weight loss progress on the basis of calories that you haven’t actually burned, you may actually be operating in a calorie surplus as opposed to a calorie deficit.

Eating Back Exercise Calories: A Common Mistake

It is exceedingly tempting to reward yourself for working out by snacking on foods that you enjoy. Sadly, this is often presented as an inducement to exercise during the early stages of a weight loss journey. 

The belief is that once you’ve created a calorie deficit, you can munch on something that you usually shouldn’t eat under the circumstances, and everything will turn out fine because you’re still maintaining a slight calorie deficit.

In theory, this sounds okay, even if it’s suboptimal. In practice, people often overestimate the number of calories burned during exercise, and then consume far too many calories in the aftermath of their training session. In essence, every time they’re burning 200 calories on a treadmill, they’re celebrating the effort by consuming 400 calories worth of french fries.

Hormonal Fluctuations: Menopause, PCOS, and Thyroid Issues

Aside from a few reasons that are attributable to your direct actions, another factor that might make it challenging for you to lose weight in a calorie deficit is if you suffer from certain medical conditions or have specific underlying health issues. These health issues can destabilize valuable hormones and hinder your ability to both lose weight and gain muscle.

The bodies of women who are proceeding through menopause will experience a decrease in their levels of the hormones estrogen and progesterone. This can result in increased fat stores, and also the relocation of fat stores to the stomach region.

Similarly, the development of polycystic ovary syndrome — or PCOS — can lead directly to insulin resistance. When this happens, the amount of insulin in your bloodstream will increase, leading to a commensurate boost to your appetite. Certainly, this will also place you at risk for unwanted weight gain.

Last but not least, an underactive thyroid is also likely to lead to unexpected weight gain. Your thyroid is a gland that produces hormones that play a role in a wide variety of body functions, several of which are metabolic in nature. If your thyroid isn’t functioning optimally for whatever reason, it may result in an unexpected increase in body fat.

The Impact of Alcohol: Empty Calories That Add Up

If you’re asking the question “Why am I not losing weight in a calorie deficit?” and you happen to have a strong penchant for imbibing alcoholic beverages, that may be your answer.

First of all, many alcoholic beverages are high in calories; this is especially true of certain beers and mixed drinks. If you’re a habitual social drinker, and you socialize frequently, drinking just a few of the wrong drinks can undermine any chance you had of losing weight on that particular day.

On top of the disruption caused by the calories from alcohol, there’s the unique way your body responds to its presence. In essence, once you consume a drink, your body perceives alcohol as poisonous, and begins to do everything in its presence to get rid of it. 

Once that happens, fat oxidation is reduced as your body burns the calories from the alcohol first, and therefore will burn fewer calories from other sources. To put it mildly, the hour or so after you’ve consumed alcohol is the wrong time to eat a cheesecake, as your body stores consumed food as fat more rapidly after you drink.

Focusing on the Scale Instead of Overall Health

People don’t always want to hear this piece of advice, but the number on the scale isn’t everything, at least not all the time. While it’s certainly true that if you’re overweight — or even struggling with obesity — monitoring how much food you’re consuming in an effort to lose weight is a smart move, weight loss isn’t always something to be prioritized.

When it comes to recomposing your body, getting adequate nutrition — including quality sources of protein — is essential to preserving your muscle math and your overall health. Neglecting to acknowledge the necessity of certain types of food or vitamins is going to be a detriment to your long term health if you sacrifice those nutrients for the sake of losing weight.

As you progress along your weight loss journey, you will hopefully adopt a series of healthy behaviors that will permeate every aspect of your life, from eating and sleeping practices to workout habits. If you adopt enough of these habits and maintain them for a long enough period of time, it’s reasonable to suspect that you will eventually lose body fat if it’s at an unhealthy level.

Conclusion: Rethinking the Calorie Deficit Approach

If you find that you can’t lose weight in a calorie deficit, hopefully you now recognize that there’s probably a good reason for it. In order to be in control of your own weight management process, the key is to acknowledge every piece of food that’s going into your mouth, and also control all of the other factors in your life that might be causing you to either lose weight or gain weight. 

That way, no matter what your current weight may be, you’ll know how to adjust your calorie needs and your habits in order to achieve the body type you want.

References:

1. Benton D, Young HA. Reducing Calorie Intake May Not Help You Lose Body Weight. Perspect Psychol Sci. 2017 Sep;12(5):703-714. doi: 10.1177/1745691617690878. Epub 2017 Jun 28. PMID: 28657838; PMCID: PMC5639963.

2. Ong HS, Sze CW, Koh TW, Coppack SW. How 40 kilograms of fluid retention can be overlooked: two case reports. Cases J. 2009 Jan 8;2(1):33. doi: 10.1186/1757-1626-2-33. PMID: 19133159; PMCID: PMC2628868.

3. Nedeltcheva AV, Kilkus JM, Imperial J, Schoeller DA, Penev PD. Insufficient sleep undermines dietary efforts to reduce adiposity. Ann Intern Med. 2010 Oct 5;153(7):435-41. doi: 10.7326/0003-4819-153-7-201010050-00006. PMID: 20921542; PMCID: PMC2951287.