I know you asked yourself: Why is it so difficult to lose weight?

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I guess this question put all of us at the same level, it’s an easy guess because at some point in our life we all wish to be able to lose some weight. The technical answer to this question is “because we eat more food than we need”, quite disappointing eh? However, luckily for you I have more points to add to this. Let’s first start with a fact, everyone is able to lose weight, people are capable of self-control (at least for a few days) and when we put enough effort we are all able to lose weight, the problem is maintaining it!! Sometimes it seems no matter how hard we try, even after weeks of nazi-style self-discipline, a couple of days of lowering our guard seem to cruelly inflate our belly like a balloon. Why? Is that all about diet and eating healthy?Here there are some points to consider:

• Gaining or losing weight takes time, we tend to be quite disappointed when the effects of our diet are not immediately visible and we let this discourage us and we let go.
• have you ever wondered why even when people eat the same food and the same amounts we can still see opposite effects? We need to realize that we are not able to digest food on our own, our body uses millions of bacteria that live in our intestine to break food down and make it easier to digest. A result of a healthy diet is also a good balance of “good” and “bad” bacteria in our digestive system. It takes long time to build this balance and it’s very easy to cause imbalances. Every time we eat snacks, not only we introduce more calories in our body, but we are also stimulating the growth of “bad” bacteria. If we do it once in a while it’s not a big deal, the problem is that eating snacks is a habit for most of us, you draw the conclusions..Anyway, the lack of the adequate bacterias in our digestive system is also the reason why when we travel we often get stomach aches when we eat the local food. After few days we start incorporating the right bacterias that will help us digest these new foods and in fact we rapidly get used to new foods when we travel.
• If you want to understand why we regain weight so rapidly let’s just look at people that were able to stay thin after losing weight. A study monitored the behavior of thousands of people that undergo a diet, the people that regained weight more rapidly were the ones that were not doing any exercise. However, even people that were doing exercise were among the ones that regained weight, that’s because they were not paying attention to what they were eating anymore. Instead, the group that maintained a good shape were the ones that were combining balanced diet and exercise. In other words losing weight is not a one and done thing, it takes continuous effort. Another proof of this is that another common trait of people that lost weight was the fact that they were weighting themselves everyday, therefore losing weight was always in their mind and they were actively working on it. Sorry, maybe that’s not what you wanted to hear, but that’s the truth. 
• Be aware of procrastination, that is a bad behavior that torment all of us. Often we are overconfident in our abilities to do something and we genuinely believe that we can do something later. How many times did you find yourself in front of a delicious dessert and told yourself “fuck the diet, I will be good from tomorrow, not today”. You know if I am right here..
• it’s not your fault, losing weight it’s hard otherwise there would not be fat people in the world. As we discussed more in detail in this post, our habits also change our perception of things. Lack of sleep was proven to alter how we perceive food, increasing the pleasure we get when we eat therefore making it much harder to stick to the diet, read more about it here. Another point to be made is that when we gain weight we also increase the number of our fat cells. When we fast, each fat cell produces hormones that stimulate our appetite, resisting food for skinny people it’s easier because they have less fat cells, instead, a diet for an obese person is an extremely difficult task because their body is literally screaming for food. Unfortunately, it is very difficult to decrease the number of fat cells. When we lose weight they become smaller but most of them are still around and keep stimulating our appetite. The best thing to do is to remain thin, if you gain weight once, it will be more difficult for you to resist food.
• Please don’t overcook your food. Do you know why mastering fire was so great for the mankind?Because it allowed us to cook food. For our body it is very hard to digest raw food, on the other hand, we are able to digest much more from cooked food. That was a critical thing when food was scarce, it allowed us to survive, but today we definitely have too much food around us, and you should know that overcooking foods rich in carbohydrates like pasta is not good for you. Italians eat pasta “al dente” for a reason…
• there are groups like “weightwatchers” that try to keep track of what they eat using a trick. They assign a score to each food, the more calories a food has the higher the score, they fix a certain daily score and try to never exceed it. This is easy to do when you eat always the same things, but when you eat a wide variety of food it is very difficult to keep track of everything. I am not advocating limiting the variety of food you eat, but I am just saying that when you eat always the same things it’s easier to maintain a balanced diet, just make sure the food you eat contains all the essential amino-acids and other nutrients our body needs.
• A study found that generally we are pretty good at keeping our weight under control during the week, maybe it’s because we are being active and our busy work life doesn’t allow us to indulge in food so much, but most of us gain weight during the weekend or during the festivities like Thanksgiving or Christmas. Now you are definitely going to hate me for having said that..but again it’s the truth.

I hope with this article I managed to convey some points that will be helpful for you. In my opinion we don’t love ourselves enough. I don’t mean from a narcissistic point of view, yes looking good has its own advantages, but you should love yourself more and maintain your body healthy. Accept yourself for what you are even if you have few extra pounds, but start loving yourself enough to renounce to some of your comforts and start actively working out in achieving better health. Your look will also benefit from this and you will kill 2 birds with one stone.