Why can I not lose weight?

There are many possible reasons that might prevent you from losing weight, for example:

Medical Reasons

• Some hormonal imbalances, like prescription of the wrong HRT medication
• Hormone based disorders like Hypothyroidism
• Fluid retention due to defects in the fluid excretion / recycling mechanism in the kidney

These factors need to be clarified with your GP before you embark on any program.

Metabolic reasons

You may have a sluggish metabolism, which can dramatically lower your base metabolic rate, i.e. the amount of calories you burn while resting. The most common causes are:

Repeated crash diets:
If you force your body repeatedly and over long periods of time, to live on a very low calorie diet, it will accomodate this by reducing and even shutting down all non-essential functions. As a result your base metabolic rate can be significantly reduced compared to other people.

Insulin Resistance
A diet of processed foods, Fast Food and Softdrinks is extremely high in sugar and can put the metabolism into a state similar to diabetes called Insulin Resistance, which is also often a precursor to type2 diabetes. As a result, sufferers of Insulin Resistance often feel very tired for no apparentreason because all carbohydrates are simply converted to sugar and then to fat instead of energy. Find out more about Insulin Resistance.

Loss of enzyme activity
Fast foods and processed foods contain certain chemicals to preserve them, to give them more flavour, to achieve a certain mouthfeel, to make them appealing. These chemicals are normally excreted via the kidney if they are water soluble, or modified in the liver to make them water soluble. However, both kidney and liver only have a limited capacity to do this. Long term regular consumption of such foods can lead to an accumulation of some chemicals in our tissue and modification of enzymes and other proteins by binding of breakdown products.

Deep fried foods are prepared in oil at high temperatures, which is very hazardous as the hot oil readily reacts with the oxygen in the air, destroying the chemical structure of the oil by oxidising the double bonds. Even worse, the side products are highly reactive oxygen radicals, which are capable of modification of proteins and DNA in our cells, which is known to be involved in processes leading to cancer.

Depression
Depression and weight gain are often a vicious circle: comfort eating, lack of motivation for exercise leads to weight gain, the weight gain aggravates the depression even further etc.

What can be done?

These obstacles are important issues which are central to our personalised weight loss plans. We use only natural methods to treat these problems. The use of drugs or extreme diets is condemned to fail in the long term because they fail to address the underlying problems.