Hey, guys. Kristin Shaffer here with another episode of FABulously Fit Friday, and today we're going to be talking about all of those emails that we get where people are frustrated because they just can't lose weight. Now every situation is different, and every individual is different. We find that most people are more alike than they're disalike and most of the times the reasons that they can't lose weight are pretty much the same. It pretty much comes down to the same five things that I see all the time. Now keep in mind that the assumption here is that we've ruled out any potential medical reason that you might not be losing weight. So I'm assuming that you've been to a doctor, and you've got that all flushed out and now you're just looking, "Okay. I know there's nothing wrong with me medically. How come I can't strip off these fat pounds?" So let's go through these five reasons and see if any of these ring a bell with you. The first one is eating processed foods rather than, what I call, "source foods." Now processed foods are foods that have been through some sort of a manufacturing process before they've gotten to your table. Some of the big no-nos that I see in a lot of individual's diets that are trying to lose weight in the processed food categories are meal replacement shakes and meal replacement bars. A lot of these meal replacement shakes and bars, especially the ones that you get in grocery stores or in drug stores, they have a tremendous amount of sugar in them, so watch those labels. And if you're not running a marathon or working out at the time that you're eating those sugars, they're likely going to be stored as fat and it will sabotage your progress. Even processed foods that are within your macros, if you have a training program where your trainer has given you macros to stay within or in a calorie range that is approved by your meal plan or the plan that your trainer gave you, processed foods still can really inhibit your weight loss, and here's why. Let's take bread for instance. Whole grain breads typically have some sort of a flour in them, and in order to create that flour they manufacturer takes any of the ingredients and they grind them down, and grind them down, and grind them down. They add water to them and they make this flour-like pasty-like substance. Well when you grind down whole foods into these fine, fine, fine particles it makes it much easier for our bodies to digest them. So rather than our body having to work at it to digest a substance, it an digest it very quickly, absorb it into the bloodstream and turn it into glucose. So what happens is, that quick absorption into the body, it doesn't allow the body to process all of that absorption fast enough so your body is naturally going to store that in fat rather than sort of slowly burning like it would with source foods that take a lot longer to digest and slowly release the nutrients into the body. Source foods are the foods that have been picked, plucked, or harvested. It's foods that are as close to the source as possible. So if it's vegetables, for instance, they've been plucked from the ground and don't have any sort of sauces or sugars or salts added to them. So canned vegetables, for instance, probably would not qualify. Fruits that have been plucked and are in its whole form, they're not in canned form where there's been any added sugars, or salts, or sauces to them, that would be considered a source food. And then your lean meats that have been recently harvested and not gone through a manufacturing process where all sorts of chemicals and sugars or sauces or extensive salts have been added to it, that would be considered a source food as well. So if you're trying to lose some weight I really want you to take a look at what you're eating. Is it source foods, or is it processed foods? You really want to minimize those processed foods and stay as close to source foods as possible. The second thing that I see all the time is individuals that underestimate the number of calories that they're eating every day. Essentially, a whole wad of us, and I've done this to myself too, we lie to ourselves. If we're keeping a food journal we may not write down those cookies that we ate, or we may just sort of happen to forget all that fruit that we took in. All of those little bits and bites that we eat throughout the day and sometimes even throughout the night, they all add up and you have to make sure that you include those in your daily calorie intake when you're keeping track because you'd be really surprised how those calories can add up very quickly and sabotage your weight loss. The other part of this that I see is people underestimating portion sizes. Before I owned a food scale and started measuring all my food, I tried to measure food just by portion sizes. So if it said half a sweet potato or half a medium sweet potato, I would estimate what the half a medium sweet potato was and I would call it good, and I'd write down those calories. Well, what I found when I bought a food scale, and you can get these on Amazon.com for I think 25 dollars (they're really inexpensive and well worth it), but what I found when I bought my food scale and I weighed those same foods on the scale I was just shocked at how many more calories I was taking in a day than I thought. Then it was like, "Oh. Bingo. No wonder I wasn't losing weight the way I thought I should be losing weight." So make sure that you're not lying to yourself. Make sure that you write down everything that you're eating and account for those. And watch out for those portion sizes. Get a food scale if you can. It's a well worthwhile investment. The third thing that I see with a lot of individuals that are struggling to lose weight is that we expect too much, too fast. We may have been clipping along for years just eating whatever we want and gaining a lot of fat pounds, and then as soon as we go on a diet all of a sudden we're micromanaging our weight and our progress. Have you ever done this? You check the scale every single day to see where you are? What we need to do whenever we get on a better clean eating diet and lifestyle is we just have to relax and we have to let things happen. We have to understand that it takes time. When we're eating all sorts of junk food, you know, we certainly don't weight ourselves every day and checkin, so it's kind of psychological when we start any sort of clean eating program and exercise program that all of a sudden we are just hypersensitive to what's going on with our body, and we're weighing ourself like everyday and we're looking in the mirror all the time. That can really sabotage your efforts. The best way to proceed forward with a new lifestyle of clean eating and exercise is to just relax and let it happen. If you have a plan from a trainer then just trust in that trainer's plan. If they've been doing it for a long time they know what they're doing. Trust them. Relax. Maybe weigh yourself whenever you're going checkin with your trainer. If you're not with a trainer then weigh yourself once every two weeks maybe, but not more than that and just let it happen. If you're doing this on your own without a trainer then weigh yourself once every week or two weeks, but just try not to obsess about it. Don't be looking in the mirror all the time looking for changes. Just relax, and do what you need to do. Do your weight training five times a week. Cardio three times a week. Plan your meals out. If you haven't seen the video on preparing your meals for the week, I'm just a huge proponent of that. I talk about that and how to do it, and you can see that video right here if you want to check it out. Just make sure that you prepare yourself and have a plan, and if you do that you will be successful but you got to give yourself some leeway. You know, relax and let it happen. Give yourself months, not weeks, to let it happen. What tends to happen is, if we're obsessing about our new lifestyle and we're constantly thinking about what we're eating and how we're exercising, we're looking in the mirror all the times, and we're checking our weight every day, well we're very likely to get extremely frustrated when things don't happen as quickly as we're expecting them to and then we go into the scenario of yo-yo dieting. Now how many of you have done that? That's where we get on our diet for three or four weeks, or maybe two weeks, and then we're off for a week because we fell off the wagon and now we're binging on junk food again, and then we say to ourselves, "Okay. I got to get serious about this again." Then we do it for a couple of weeks and then we get frustrated because things aren't going the way we expect them to or something happens in our life, a stressful situation which I'll get to in just a second (that's the next thing we're going to talk about), and then we fall off the wagon and we're onto the old habits that we had. Maybe we only ate one or two meals a day, we grabbed a latte on the way to work, and then we had a dinner when we got home through the McDonald's drive-through. So what that creates is this yo-yo dieting and you won't have the weight loss progress that you're looking for. Now, linked to yo-yo dieting is also what I call schizophrenic dieting. This is when we don't trust our trainers and we're constantly looking for other opinions on, "Is the right meal plan for me," and, "How come I'm not losing weight as fast as I thought I would? Let me get other opinions for all sorts of people." Now what I've often seen in cases like that is typically the plans from the trainers are really, really good. The individuals that are on the plan typically just haven't given it enough time or they're not really following what the trainer told them to do. Go back to number two, underestimating your calorie intake. If your trainer is giving you a plan and they tell you grams of foods to take in you're just kind of eyeballing it and estimating what portion size is, it's very likely you're underestimating the calories and no wonder you're not losing the weight that you thought you should be losing at this point. Or you're taking in all sorts of calories and not logging them. You're lying to yourself, and you're lying to your trainer. So what1 I generally recommend in a case like this is make sure you give your trainer's plan1 a sufficient amount of time doing exactly what they told you to do before you go out1 and get a second or third opinion. If you can honestly say, "I've done absolutely everything1 that my trainer has told me to do and I'm still not making the progress that I expected1 to make at this time," well then, absolutely. You need to get another trainer. And then1 the fifth and final reason I see that people stall in their weight loss progress, and this1 is probably the biggest reason I see, is that it's never the right time. There's always1 something going on in our lives, right? That's just life. That's the way it is. We have brother1 or sisters that need our help, or parents and children that need our help, or we lose1 our job, or we get sick, or something happens in our lives. That's just the way life is,1 and if we keep postponing getting ourselves onto a clean eating, healthy lifestyle until1 all the stars are lined up and we say to ourselves, "Well, I'll do this when?" It will never1 happen. So the best recommendation I have for you is to just start. Just get going,1 and no matter what happens in your life, make sure that you're still putting yourself first.1 That means eating clean and taking time to exercise because if you're not healthy, you1 can't take care of anybody else. Hey, we're women. We're really good at taking care of1 other people, but if we don't take care of ourselves first we won't have the best of1 ourselves to offer to all of our loved ones. So that's it for today's FABulously Fit Friday.1 I would love to hear your questions and comments below, so leave comments below. You know how1 that goes, and if you have some other questions that you would like addressed in FABulously1 Fit Friday leave those comments below too because I do read them and I try to respond1 whenever I can. I absolutely love you guys. You're so awesome. So thanks for joining me1 today and I can't wait to see you at the next FABulously Fit Friday.