Kat & Tshepi

Why do I still gain weight when I eat so little?

Hi there, welcome back to the second week of the 2024 weight loss challenge. We hope the first week’s tasks went smoothly and you are excited about going further on your own weight loss journey. If you haven’t started with the first week’s action points, you still have a chance to do them now since they are all about planning and setting up for your weight loss journey. The first week action points are for preparing to launch your best version ever, so give it a go as you have nothing to lose but stand to gain. You can visit the 2024 Weight loss challenge dedicated page for all the information on the challenge.

This week, we would like to answer the question raised at the beginning of this post , why do I still gain weight when I eat so little?. Many people experience the problem of gaining weight whilst they are consuming less food and maybe even whilst exercising more. This is not a great experience and it is so discouraging when you are on a weight loss journey. There are several reasons why this is happening :

1. Your metabolism has slowed down and is making do with the little food you eat.
2. Although you have reduced your food consumption, you are still eating in surplus of your caloric requirements.
3. The type of food you eat are not supportive or conducive to weight loss (e.g they don’t include sufficient vitamins and minerals that support metabolism or fat burning).

These reasons can be addressed and treated separately, but for this week’s post we would like to address them with the same solution, Eating more of whole natural foods. Eating more whole unprocessed foods as opposed to processed foods provides you with nutrients and energy that is conducive to your weight loss efforts, this fulfills your body’s natural energy and nutrition requirements. The above mentioned 3 reasons for not losing weight whilst eating less can be addressed by the consumption of whole foods:

1. Whole foods boost metabolism due to their diverse nutritional profiles.
2. Whole foods are generally very low in calories in comparison to processed foods.
3. Whole foods are packed with quality micronutrients (Vitamins & Minerals) and have no additives and preservatives which are alien and challenging to the body.

Ensuring that your diet is consisting mainly of whole unprocessed foods is the easiest way to address many weight loss and health issues. Whole foods are foods that are in their natural state or as close to that state as possible(minimally processed foods), these include foods such as fruits and vegetable, beans and seeds, meats, and whole grain rice and breads . The easiest way to identify and verify whole foods (although this is overly generalizing) is to ask yourself “Does this come from a factory? “, “Does this look like natural food?”

The problem with processed food is their incredible and shockingly high caloric content, even eating less of these foods is not so helpful because their calories far exceed their natural counterparts, so you still end up eating way more than you should. For example, the calories of 100g of potato is around 100, whilst the calories of 100g potato chips/crisps is around 500, not good. Another example, is eating a fruit versus drinking fruit juice, a fruit contains whole natural nutrients and sugar, a person is normally content with eating 1 fruit at a time. Fruit juice on the other hand contains more than one fruit, additives and possible added sugars, and you are most likely to drink a bit more of it (e.g It take 3 apples to make 250ml apple juice).

This brings us to this week’s task. The action point for this week is to identify and create awareness of the processed foods(high calorie foods) on your diet:

1. For every meal you are eating, identify how many food items are whole natural foods and how many are processed foods. Are you happy with what you identified? Is there anything missing?

Doing this action daily will help you to be aware of the amount of food items that are high in calories but with little nutritional value on your plate, these are the foods that we eat and think that we don’t eat a lot because they seem so small and negligible . On the other hand, this action will also help you to be aware of the amount of natural food that you consume, in most cases this amount is way less than it should and it highlights the high nutritional value you are missing out on when these foods are not included on your plate.

That’s it for this week, it is about a simple habit for creating awareness of the type of food you mostly consume. Remember to continue with tracking your progress at the end of each week as prescribed in step 4 of WEEK 1.

Until next week, we wish you all the best and stay blessed.

Kat & Tshepi