Why You're Not Losing Weight (Even When You're Eating "healthy")
- Maxwell Snider, RD
- 5 days ago
- 4 min read
You swap chips for trail mix. Soda for green smoothies. You're sweating over your stove at home more than you eat out.
You're eating the healthiest diet you've ever had, and you're still not seeing the results you want.
Sound familiar?
Don't worry, there is a better and easier way.
What You've Been Told About "Healthy Eating"
You've probably heard things like:
"Just eat more vegetables"
"Cut out all the sugar"
"No more processed foods"
"Eat a salad with every meal"
"Buy organic"
"Eat only whole foods"
But blanket statements like this get thrown around like their the key to better health.
The truth is, they are vague, oversimplified, and out of touch with the complexity of life.
What no one tells you is that healthy eating and eating for weight loss isn't just about the type of food. It's also about the balance, proportion, and purpose of that food.
It's about getting the right nutrients to support your goal. Enough protein to stay full, enough fiber to feed your healthy gut bacteria, and enough carbs and fat to give your body the energy it needs.
And food isn't just fuel. It's emotion, it's social, it's entertainment, it's culture, and much more.
Being fueled isn't the only reason we eat, and that's completely normal.
But at the end of the day, if your meals aren't keeping you satisfied, it does not matter how "clean" they are.
Clean is just a word influencers who don't understand nutrition use to coax people into buying something from them.
So, let's talk about how you actually get results
Eating For Appetite Regulation And Gut Health
When people think of eating for weight loss, they focus on things to take away from their diet:
Sugar
Fast Food
Chips
Ice Cream
Soda
And that is part of it. Portion control will always be part of weight loss.
But the bigger part is adding things to your diet that will help you feel full, fueled, and satisfied. Without this, you will end up hungry, low energy, and deprived. This is why so many people are unsuccessful in weight loss.
These "other things" I am referring to are protein and fiber.
Protein For Health and Weight Loss
Everyone knows protein is important, but few understand why. If you're not eating enough protein, you'll be at a higher risk of losing muscle, and you'll find yourself in the pantry much more often.
Retains Muscle
While dieting, you lose weight from fat AND muscle. Protein not only helps to build muscle when resistance training, but it also helps to maintain muscle when losing weight.
Regulates Appetite
Have you ever eaten a big meal and still felt hungry just 30 minutes after eating? It was probably because you didn't eat enough protein.
Eating protein triggers an increase in your fullness hormones, like GLP-1, which is what Ozempic helps to make more of. Protein also lowers your primary hunger hormone, ghrelin.
The result is that you feel full for longer while retaining more muscle.
Fiber For Gut Health and Weight Loss
Upwards of 90% of adults in North America do not eat enough fiber.
Fiber is the indigestible part of your whole grains and vegetables. But just because it isn't digested doesn't mean that it isn't beneficial. Fiber does 4 very important things.
Fiber Feeds Get bacteria
Fiber feeds the healthy bacteria in your gut. Feeding these bacteria keeps them healthy and produces short-chain fatty acids that support your immune system.
Fiber Keeps You Regular
Fiber adds bulk to your stool and helps to pull water into your intestines, making sure that waste products are removed from your body.
Fiber Helps With Appetite Control
Fiber helps to slow down your digestion, better absorbing the nutrients you eat while feeling fuller for longer, making it easier to regulate portion sizes.
Fiber Binds To Waste Products
Some types of fiber (especially soluble fiber) can bind to bad cholesterol and carry out environmental toxins and microplastics through your stool.
In summary, fiber helps to take the trash out of your body and helps you to feel full.
Most Common Mistakes People Make
The common mistakes people make while trying to lose weight are:
Too little protein
Clients I have had who don't eat enough protein describe their appetite as never-ending. They always find themselves snacking on high-calorie foods, making it hard for them to maintain or lose weight.
No meal structure
If you don't have set meal times or a system to follow, you'll make lower-quality dietary choices and likely miss out on protein and fiber.
Too many healthy fats
When people start to eat healthy, they tend to swap their "unhealthy foods" out for healthier foods high in fats, like trail mix. These are very healthy foods, but fat is very high in calories, which makes it easy to overdo it.
Too many liquid calories
Calories that come in the form of liquids like smoothies, soda, and juice are easy to consume in excess because they taste good and don't fill you up the same way food does
To avoid these mistakes, you need to do something different from what most people do.
What To Do Instead: Build A More Balanced Plate
To avoid all these mistakes and get enough of the right nutrition, you need the right system.
You need to eat 3 meals per day following the plate model.
The plate model suggests using the plate to measure your portion sizes of foods to make sure you get enough of what you need, but not too much.
This looks like:
1/4 to 1/3 of a plate full of protein foods
1/4 to 1/3 of a plate full of carbohydrate foods
1/3 to 1/2 a plate of vegetables
This model will help you meet your protein and fiber goals without spending all day tracking your diet.
I will write an article on this specific model in more detail in the future.
7-Day Weight Loss Meal Plan
Even with all the right information, applying it can be challenging.
To help with this, I've created a 7-Day Meal Plan for Fat Loss, which I've linked in the button below.
Check it out, I hope it helps.
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