If you feel like you're doing everything right but still can't lose fat, it's often not a willpower issue - its your metabolism adapting to stress, restriction, and inconsistency. In this article I'll explain why fat loss becomes difficult when metabolic health is compromised, and what actually helps restore it. 

What is Metabolism?

Metabolism as it pertains to body composition refers to the amount of calories or kilojoules we require on a daily basis to carry out basic functions. We all have a baseline metabolism, which us professionals refer to as our Basal Metabolic Rate, or BMR for short. 

This metabolic rate keeps our heart beating, digestion firing, brain functioning, and moves our bodies from the bed to the couch. The more movement we have in our daily lives, the higher this metabolic requirement is going to be. 

For a 65kg person, the average BMR is around 1500 calories per day. This is assuming that the person is not doing anything. This is the amount of food required to survive. As you add activity, you require even more food to reach those baseline energy requirements. 

Clients I work with are almost always trying to eat calories which fall well below what is required to survive, and wonder why they binge at night. It's not your willpower, its the fact that you're eating too little  and your body does not like that! 

Metabolic Adaptation

When it comes to fat loss, it’s important to understand that metabolism is highly adaptive, and it can lower with excessive dieting or stress. If you eat too few calories for a long time, your metabolism will simply adapt to that - it will lower the speed in which you do things - movement, thoughts, motivation, digestion, in order to keep you alive. 

This is a key piece to understand if you're considering, or taking a GLP-1 medication. If you're interested in learning more about that please read my article GLP‑1 Medications: What They Do, The Risks, and When You Actually Don’t Need Them, as these medications can impact metabolism in various ways and require education for true informed consent. 

Metabolic adaptation is a gradual process and you will likely not even recognise that it is happening, but you'll know when it's too late - you may have slow thinking, feel shocking upon waking, food cravings you cannot control, or low mood. This is the body preserving energy to save your life, and it may even do this before you reach your goal weight. 

Body Fat and How We Lose It

Subcutaneous body fat, which is the fat you can see under your skin, is not a direct threat to your survival. This is particularly true when it’s in moderate amounts. However, we often feel that those healthy, moderate amounts of body fat are too high by society's beauty standards.

We often feel uncomfortable or disconnected to our bodies because they don't match these external standards and instead want to feel lean, fast and strong - but this does not mean that the body fat we are carrying is bad for us. 

Moving beyond that fat you can see, we have visceral fat, which hugs our internal organs.This is unhealthy, and associated with drinking alcohol, and eating refined sugar and fried food. As this is a threat to our survival, the body will lose this first. 

Often people start dieting and they feel better but look 'the same', this is because this fat is breaking down first. We get frustrated here, and quit the diet, blowing out on junk because ‘what’s the point!?’ It hasn't even had a chance to get to your ‘other’ fat yet, the fat you hate so much.

So we have visceral fat that your body wants to lose, and subcutaneous fat that it doesn't care about. Generally speaking, you'll only have negative metabolic adaptations if you are trying to lose weight too fast or if you're not overweight 'enough' for your body to care. 

Weight Loss From Unhealthy vs Healthy Weight.

Unhealthy and burdensome body fat levels are easy to lose, with simple caloric reduction or increased movement. Even switching out the sugar, vegetable oils and alcohol will help, short of even worrying about your calories. 

This is because in order to reach a particular level of unhealthy body fat or obesity, excess caloric consumption needs to be there, along with high stress levels, impaired sleep, low movement and a high level of inflammation. Often the gut is impaired here too. All of these symptoms are suggestive of damaged metabolic health, which is why the weight came on. 

In this case of unhealthy levels of fat, and particularly visceral fat, losing weight is actually important for the health of the organism, so there isn’t really a ‘wrong’ way to go about a diet. The body will feel happier if you lower its toxic load, take it for a walk, or diet. The fat on your body will replace the calories you're missing, and this will have a positive impact on your metabolism. 

That being said, if you try to diet too fast it may fail, and if you want to read more about that read my article; Why Diets Don’t Work (And When They Do).

If you’re a healthy body weight with a relatively healthy diet, then changing your body composition becomes somewhat of a scientific process. Lowering calories will not just ensure you lose body fat, as your body doesn't want to lose that fat. Doing so puts you at risk of negative metabolic effects and it's not really even worth it unless you want to lose it for something specific, like a bodybuilding competition - as unnecessary weight loss will just come right back on. 

Has Your Metabolism Adapted?

If you have a history of dieting, and you are constantly trying to limit food intake so no ‘not gain weight’, then your body will have adapted to a dismal calorie level in order to survive. 

In this scenario if you choose to diet, it looks like this; your metabolic rate is already low, and your body doesn't consider that to be healthy. You cut the calories lower, below what you need to survive, and the body, rather than losing that body fat you don't like (but which your body does like), it increases cortisol (stress hormone), lowers energy expenditure, holds on to body-fat, and in more serious cases where your willpower supersedes this survival mechanism, it starts to add more fat cells, in preparation for that time that you do decide to eat again. 

So in summary, if you’re unhealthy weight, dieting will not add to stress, it will reduce it. If you’re a healthy body weight, then dieting is more likely to add stress to the body. 

Reverse Dieting to Repair Metabolism

To lose body fat in this circumstance, the only option you have is to increase caloric consumption for as long as needed in order to return the metabolic rate to a healthy place. Once it has adapted to higher calories, you can then lower them in order to stimulate fat loss. 

Just as a metabolism downregulates when calories are chronically low, it will upregulate when calories are becoming chronically higher (to a point, as once over this point we gain body fat). This is called Reverse Dieting, and you can watch my youtube video on this here, 

Dieting is not simple when you’re a healthy weight, and it’s even less simple when you have been dieting for your whole life. The only solution is to stop dieting and increase your food. 

Remember that as women, our job is to create life, and we need body fat for healthy hormones, and a healthy menstrual cycle. The body does not care what you look like, it cares if you can carry a healthy baby full term. 

For some women, this body fat level is 18%, but for others it is 30%. For those of us with 30%, this sucks and it often causes us to constantly diet, to no avail. Constant dieting increases the stress in your body, lowers your metabolic rate, and signals to your body that it is in danger, and when in danger, fat loss goes out the window. 

Also note that those bodybuilders you see who look absolutely insane, and diet from year to year have a few things going for them, including genetics, and drugs. Their bodies don’t feel unsafe when they’re leaner, and the drugs override these ‘danger’ signals anyway as they take the woman away from being a woman, and closer to being a 'man' hormonally. 

Getting lean as a woman is a much more sensitive process than it is if you’re a man. 

Increasing vs Decreasing Stress

In summary, if you’re an unhealthy weight, any diet will do, as you are decreasing the stress on your body by dieting. The key is to stop dieting and return to higher calories once you’re done. 

If you’re a healthy weight, whether or not it's a weight you like, then you are increasing the stress on your body by dieting. So your job is to find a way that minimises this stress, and most often this means you need to take time out to repair your metabolism before you even attempt to lose weight. 

If you don’t repair your metabolism, and you start dieting from a poor metabolic position, each dieting attempt will just prime your body to store more fat, as the more fat it has, the more fuel it has available for the next famine that comes around. This is exactly what will happen if you're relying on a GLP-1 medication and you then decide to go off it. 

if you want to dive deeper into this topic, check out my article; Myths You Believe About Your Metabolism That Keep You From Losing Weight

If this pattern feels familiar to you, check out my coaching page where I support women exactly like you in rebuilding metabolism and losing weight that lasts. To learn more about nutrition in a way that does not feel like deprivation, check out my Nutrition for Women Course right here on this platform

Remember your body doesn't know what you want psychologically or emotionally, it knows what it needs, physiologically. You think you want to fit into your favourite jeans, but your body thinks you’re lost in the jungle with no food in sight - again - and it will hold on to that fuel in order to protect you, and provide essential energy to keep your reproductive capacity alive. 

I hope that helps!

 Jen x