Why is it so hard to lose weight but so easy to gain weight

[Appleday11]

I have been trying for the last two years to lose weight. It took me about six months to lose three pounds. Then I went to my parents for Christmas, ate more than I usually would and I put on three pounds in one week. Three months later i havent been able to shift the three pounds. I go out walking every day, I go to the gym three times a week. I eat pretty healthily. I only let myself have snacks one day a week. The rest of the week is soup, salads, chicken etc. I hate the mental exhaustion of trying to lose weight.

Why does it take so long to get weight off, but so little time to put weight on.

1. you need more protein it helps with feeling full. Same with water
2. download my fitness pal. Pay for the upgraded version. Find out how many calories you need to your height and activity level (lightly active) to lose 0.5 - 1 lb a week.
3. track everything and aim for 100g minimum protein a day. Keep to the calorie amount
4. walk 8-10 thousand steps a day. Don’t add the calories from your waking to your daily calories

If after doing this consistently for a month you haven’t lost any weight then go to the doctors as ask for a thyroid test.

I wasn’t overweight but due to a diagnosed heart issue I have changed my food a lot. The main thing I have not given up but eat only once or twice a month is cheese. I have upped my fibre intake. Porridge with seeds and nuts every day and to compensate this extra food a smaller lunch and dinner where I cut the main carb, also a big increase in pulses. Also a big drop in the caffeine I drink. Just one proper tea a day, vey occasionally two and now water and green tea.

I am taking part in a study on health currently and lost 3 pounds in a month with these changes. It was not planned.

There’s lots of great advice on here OP about protein, high volume, low calorie eating and weighing absolutely everything you eat.

You mentioned myfitnesspal and not getting on with it. Try a free trial with Nutracheck it’s similar but I find more user friendly and foods are UK based.

When you’re overweight it’s helpful to look at where that’s come from to see how to get it off. Is it grazing kid’s leftovers, calories from liquids either alcohol or high sugar drinks. Maybe evening snacking or weekend treats? It’s too easy to gain weight. Getting it off is hard, but doable if you’re honest with yourself and consistent over the months. Good luck.

I never said people are overweight because they aren’t eating enough. I said that eating too little can slow your metabolism somewhat a make it harder to lose more weight as we are biologically guarded against becoming underweight.

To be overweight in the first place obviously you must have been consuming more calories than you were burning but that’s not what the conversation is about. It’s about why it can be hard to lose weight.

This is really helpful, but it's not what the OP claimed.

And this is really helpful too.

I lost 2 stone on low carb and another 2 with the help of mounjaro. Low carb really helps with cravings. Carbs just spike my blood sugar and make me feel hungry. Cut out the bread and pasta, more protein, more fat, lots more veg, non carb snacks. Took 2 years but is staying off and I don’t even think about rice, potatoes or pasta. Do miss bread but ration to 1 slice for breakfast. You will be surprised how much butter / oil/ cheese you can eat and stay in calorie deficit when there’s no bread / cake / biscuits in the picture.

It is a lot easier if you have the weight to lose. The calorie deficit required to lose 3lbs for someone who has a lot of weight to lose is obviously less than for someone who doesn’t have all that much to lose/is not even overweight or obese/etc. If you really have it to lose, though, I’d suggest using the app NutraCheck. Calorie counting is as worthwhile as everyone says it is. You can’t possibly know how to create the calorie deficit you need to lose weight without knowing as precisely as possible what you’re eating in calories vs. burning in exercise. Good luck!

You just have to ignore the hunger. For me, it was about reframing what hunger meant for me as a sensation. It was always a bad sensation, like pain, that meant I needed to go eat something.

Instead, I started treating it as a good sensation. "Ah, I'm hungry, my diet must be working"

Intermittent Fasting.

Youtube Dr Jason Fung.

But the absolute nub of this is that your grandfather was never a pregnant woman. Whatever the article says, it isn't relevant to your argument. My belief is that the link between these women and their children's obesity is more likely to be behavioural, i.e. over feeding and over protecting, both of which are understandable but absolutely nothing to do with genetics.
There's no shame in gracefully conceding that you are wrong. There is in being rude to strangers.

Also to note that if you want to measure butter for toast or a spread of some sort if you put the whole tub on the scales then take what you’re using out then the difference between the two weights is how much you have eaten. Much more efficient than trying to weight tiny amounts of spread but guessing stuff like that can lead to gross over or under estimations because they’re calorific

If this is what you're after have you looked at Noom? I've used that programme to successfully lose weight and what I found really helpful was all the psychoeducation around eating as well as the nutritional teachings around healthy food choices. It's really helped me to start embedding habits to make healthier choices that actually work for me. (I also like that Noom doesn't view foods as good, bad or off limit, so I've been losing weight while still keeping my weekend glass or two of wine and some chocolate in my daily living!)

Your body is designed to preserve mass for the next drought/ period of starvation. It's not realise that the danger actually is abundance. That's why it's so much work, you are essentially working against your own biology.

I think this was likely due to the foetal distress caused by having a starving host mother rather than a genetic trait passed down simply because a relative was starved - starving in adulthood doesn’t change your genetic make up.

This

I can shock myself with how quickly I can gain weight, think my record was a stone in a few weeks. Some people don’t put that on over a lifetime!
I have to control myself constantly every day to stay a size 10, it’s shit.

It can potentially cause epigenetic changes rather than changes to the actual DNA coding sequence. See the Dutch study I linked to above where grandchildren of women who were starved during pregnancy were affected

That’s so interesting! I wonder if it could be the same for descendants of starved men or it has to originate during pregnancy

Epigenetics is really interesting and quite a new field.

I've lost over 8st but been thoroughly stuck since last summer going up and down the same few pounds. Have been counting/weighing everything this year and despite being in what should be quite a chunky deficit nothing more is coming off - am wedged at the top end of a healthy BMI range and wanted to lose 10 more lb to give me a bit more wiggle room.

Have decided that after two years of being very focused I cannot face doing it forever so I am going to shift focus to weight training for a while (I currently run 4x a week and don't eat back the calories) and think about eating to gain strength for a while. The scales are doing my head in.

Exercise tends to make you hungry and can cause you to eat more. There are many studies, around 70 or so, which show exercise does not cause weight loss. Prof Tim Spector spoke about this is one of his podcasts.

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=459380977152186

Exercise is good for things like mood and stuff like that but it does nothing for weight loss.

What are the biological guards and how are these overridden?