Why do people struggle to lose weight?

[Zafire]

I'm going with "because it's a lot of work to lose weight but pretty easy to gain it".

This actually isn't that true either. I was a running a lot last year, and eating "better" from April until September, at which point I got Patellar Tendonitis. I was running 18 miles a week, and my diet consisted of 1600-2000 calories, LOTS of fruit/veggies. One day a week, usually Sunday, I'd eat whatever I wanted. Be that pizza, fast food, etc.

I started at 210 pounds in April and got down to 180 in September. After I was told I wouldn't be able to run for 6-12 months while requiring to do physical therapy 4-5 times a week, I stopped giving a shit and started eating whatever I wanted again. From September to March(Now), I gained all my weight back. Five months to lose it and six months to gain it, and I wasn't even being that strict with losing it.

I'm out of my rut now, and can probably start running again shortly. I still have this god forsaken injury, but low mileage isn't going to hurt it. Doctor said I should just increase the days I run if I want to increase my mileage.

TLDR; To answer your question about why it's hard to lose weight, at least for me, eating delicious food is incredibly satisfying. Feeling full is satisfying. This feeling of being incredibly full is actually something my brain wants, and it's really hard to say no. When you begin to diet, you almost never feel "full", just satiated, or "not hungry". It gets to the point sometimes where being full is all you can think about, all you want, and you can't take your mind off of it. Eating addiction is a real thing. With enough willpower, it's pretty easy to lose weight, BUT, if your life is taking a shit on you, getting that willpower can be difficult.

[Stormspark]

but you are aware of it. Thats the main thing.

Yep. I would have to gain another 20 pounds to be considered overweight. Although in my case it's near impossible for me to top 185 now no matter how much I eat.

[May90]

healthy food is expensive as fuck

I keep seeing people say this, but in my experience it isn't nearly so. Pizzas, sandwiches with mayonnaise, colas - all those things are pretty expensive. Herbal leaf teas, meat, fruits, veggies, greens, eggs, grains - at least in the US, they don't cost as much as junk food. Am I missing something?

I mean, the majority of healthy food definitely takes more time to prepare, it isn't something you put in a microwave and in a few minutes it is ready to be served... But in terms of money, it always comes out much cheaper in my experience.

[Celista]

I keep seeing people say this, but in my experience it isn't nearly so. Pizzas, sandwiches with mayonnaise, colas - all those things are pretty expensive. Herbal leaf teas, meat, fruits, veggies, greens, eggs, grains - at least in the US, they don't cost as much as junk food. Am I missing something?

I mean, the majority of healthy food definitely takes more time to prepare, it isn't something you put in a microwave and in a few minutes it is ready to be served... But in terms of money, it always comes out much cheaper in my experience.

It really is cheaper (or at least equitable in price) to eat healthfully. I can get one bunch of kale, a box of quinoa and a 2-lb bag of frozen chicken breasts and have enough for six dinners, at a cost of around $10. A fast food dinner will cost around $5 per.

[Independent voter]

It really is cheaper (or at least equitable in price) to eat healthfully. I can get one bunch of kale, a box of quinoa and a 2-lb bag of frozen chicken breasts and have enough for six dinners, at a cost of around $10. A fast food dinner will cost around $5 per.

Can you cook quinoa in a rice cooker?

[Kpmk]

I used to be a little overweight and the reason it was so hard for me was because i loved food. I loved cooking for my family and for myself, I loved taking friends to new places to try new food. Food was like a hobby for me. When I got bored I'd look cook a bunch of food and have tons of leftovers for the week.

[Halicia]

Pizzas, sandwiches with mayonnaise, colas - all those things are pretty expensive.

Are you kidding me ? those are some of the cheapest foods around. cola is literally cheaper than water around here...

and there's a reason pizza & sandwiches are used for buffets/parties... and its certainly not because of their quality. they're one of the cheapest/convenient ways to feed moderate-large numbers of people (unless you start talking about large numbers of people regularly, that would justify a cafeteria-style setting)

[Finick]

Because:

- Eating healthy is not cheap.
- Most readily available foods have added sugar and salt.
- The Sugar lobby spend billions funding fake studies against fat when sugar is worse.
- Parents are lazy and let children eat all kinds of garbage.
- Once you gain weight even if you lose it there is a new layer under the skin which makes gaining it back much faster.
- Fat children are very unlikely to shed their weight as they grow older due to bad habits.

Most of this is horribly misinformed.

- Eating healthy is cheap. You don't have to eat organic everything to be healthy, or even eat organic at all. Buying wholesale amounts of rice, beans, meats, and other staples works out to be much cheaper per meal than buying prepackaged stuff. Just to reiterate: organic =/= healtier. healthy and unhealthy is a horrible mindset to have when dealing with food in general.
- Sugar is a non issue, stop buying into the hype. The insulin response to a meal will -never- supersede the weight loss effects of a calorie deficit. Period. Plenty of literature shows up to 100g of ADDED sugar having no detrimental effect on an active persons health.
- Garbage is relative. Being so extreme and personifying foods as being good and evil is why eating disorders are so prevalent. Food is food, calories are calories.
- You will only ever gain weight in accordance to your caloric intake, so no. Can previously overweight people gain fat easier? Sure, but that doesn't mean you'll always go back to your previous weight. This goes hand in hand with being too extreme and black and white with nutrition. Sustainable life changes will lead to long term weight loss.
- This is actually pretty true, and unfortunate.

[epLe]

People confuse being full with being stuffed.

You can eat anything with moderation and maintain your weight, while avoiding ever feeling hungry.

[Celista]

Can you cook quinoa in a rice cooker?

Yep sure can.

[Demona3]

Just got back from walking my dog. Get a dog, walk it everyday, lose weight! Not hard. =P I also heard that if you cut out all sugary drinks and drink nothing but water, you'll lose 10lbs in a month.

[Turtel]

There's obviously lots of different people with different opinions, and everyone thinks they know the 'secret', but I'll just give my opinion.

I think it is just a case of energy in versus energy out. Sure, there are complexities that affect it like metabolism, hormones, thyroid conditions, or the fact that some foods' caloric content are more readily absorbed than others, but all these things just affect how much energy 'gets in' or how much energy 'goes out', none of them change the ultimate fact that you will gain weight if the energy entering your body is greater than the energy being used: it's an incontestable law of physics. Although admittedly it's impossible to determine how much energy is actually going in or out, much less use that to determine how much weight you will gain or lose.

As a consequence of this fact, exercise is not necessary in order to lose weight. All exercise does is increase your 'energy out', which lets you eat more, but you can still lose weight without exercising at all if you maintain an energy deficit. This is not healthy of course (exercise has a lot of health benefits) but it's just false to say that because you're 'too busy to exercise' you won't be able to lose weight.

Although I think perhaps most people mean something else when they say 'lose weight'. What they actually mean is 'lose fat'. In which case it is definitely not a case of just simply energy in versus energy out. I think a lot of the population actually don't understand the difference between fat and muscle, and what it takes to lose or gain either one. I know I personally didn't really understand it until my early 20s when I started reading up on bodybuilding (which I doubt very much of the population decides to do). The popular media are extremely misleading in this regard when they tout all these great 'weight loss' diets, or how these celebrities 'lost so much weight'. In reality, people don't want to lose weight, what they want is to have less fat. You can definitely lose weight without exercising, but you will be losing both fat and muscle in the process. In order to maintain (or gain) muscle, you would need to exercise.

For my own personal story. I started working out about 3 years ago, with the goal being to bulk up. I did some reading around and concluded that I needed to eat a lot of food, which is what I did. I started off making a lot of progress, gaining weight and strength pretty quickly, but then after a few months in I hit a plateau. For several months I just couldn't seem to get any stronger. I had read about this apparent plateau on bodybuilding websites, which theorised that your body had just gotten used to your exercises, and the solution was just to change up your routine, and try to increase the weight you were lifting. None of this worked.

During this time I also wasn't gaining any weight. To me it made sense: I wasn't getting any stronger, which meant that I wasn't gaining any muscle, which explained why I wasn't getting any heavier. However, ultimately, I realised that this was just wrong: I wasn't gaining any weight because I wasn't eating enough food. If I had been eating enough, I should still have been gaining weight, regardless of whether I was getting stronger or not.

Throughout this period I had maintained roughly the same diet. What I was eating initially would definitely have been considered a lot, in fact I gained weight perhaps a little too quickly at first. But after months of working out, gaining muscle, increasing my metabolism, what used to be a lot of food for me actually became what I needed to simply maintain my weight. In order to maintain a steady growth, I should have been steadily increasing the amount of food that I ate. By not eating enough, I stopped gaining weight, which meant my muscles stopped growing, preventing me from getting significantly stronger, causing my plateau. In other words, I had it all backwards.

I guess the moral of my story is that people tend to become entrenched into their way of thinking and find it difficult to change their perspective. They think that they are eating the right amount, when really they aren't.

This would explain why people get fat as they get older. Throughout their adolescence/early adulthood, their growing bodies use a lot of energy and they get used to eating a certain amount of food. However, as they get older their muscles deteriorate, their metabolism drops and what used to be the right amount of food is now too much. But they don't realise this, continue eating the same amount that they have gotten used to eating their whole life (up to that point), and end up fat, or even fatter.

[Schattenlied]

Food tastes good and people think they need to eat much more than they actually do... My brother eats 3 meals a day, with a snack (sandwich) between lunch and dinner and another after dinner... He could cut out both snacks and one of his meals and still be at a healthy calorie intake... But he refuses to believe that empty stomach doesn't = "I'm starving", it just means your damn stomach is empty.


If you want an easy way to lose weight, don't eat breakfast - drastic, I know (not), but you don't need it... If you don't eat breakfast, your body will use it's stored fuel (FAT) to get you through to your next meal, and it can do that very easily if you have enough fat on your body to feel like you need to lose weight.

An alternative to this is to simply eat a third less for each meal, but some people find that difficult, it's easier to cut a whole meal out, and then you don't have to do any extra measuring of your portion sizes... If you are waking up at, lets say 8AM, you don't need to eat a meal, and then eat a second meal a mere ~4 hours later at lunchtime, it's entirely unnecessary.

[Deleted]

Why? From an introverted point of view there's not logic to it. You slim down to look more attractive (or atleast most people do). Yet if you never or rarely socialize with people there's no point in it. Why not eat a whole cake or 12 donuts? Why not just eat what you want, and feel happy because of it?

From everyone elses point of view i'd imagine it is the immediate vs invested pleasure of it. If you're dieting to become thinner, you're investing in something that will only profit you a long time from the current moment. If at the same time you have the choice to eat something unhealthy that'll reward you immediate pleasure, it's often hard to overcome the primitive need to follow our immediate desires.

And last but not least, because most people who want to lose weight only do it because they feel people are judging them or reviewing themselves based on others opinions. Which leads to a conflict between what you actually want and what you convince your brain you want. You don't see articles saying "I lost weight because others judged me" you see articles saying "I lost weight because i was dying". If there was an actual need and desire for becoming thinner, you'd want to do it and it wouldn't be hard.

[Gemini Soul]

Not everyone's body works the same, some have busy schedules, some don't have time/money to eat healthy, some would rather eat what they like and enjoy life even if it means shaving a few years off their life if they had to eat nothing but healthy food they don't care for and exercise instead of doing things they love. Some people love to exercise, some don't, some find it boring, etc.

There are LOTS of factors when it comes to weight loss, its not eat X amount of calories per day do Y amount of exercises per day and GUARANTEED to loose Z pounds.

[satimy]

Because of corn syrup

[Gemini Soul]

Because of High Fructose corn syrup

Fixed that for you.

[Kyriani]

The biggest hindrance to weight-loss for me was always the fact that I can't stand exercising for the sake of exercising. It's boring as hell to me and I don't enjoy the fatigue and muscle pain that can accompany it. With that said, there are physical activities that I do find fun. Swimming, dancing at a club, walking around the mall, hiking at some nature preserves. The dancing at nightclubs was probably my primary source of "exercise" in my younger years and likely why didn't turn into a balloon considering how awful my diet was back then >_<. Now that I am older, don't have as fast a metabolism, and don't go out clubbing anymore, my diet had to change/improve and walking each day for at least 30 minutes helps keep things in check. I still don't like to "exercise" though. It's just so boring to me.

For general reasons why, we can start with our food production. Healthy foods are more expensive much of the time or at the very least more time consuming to prepare. If you're not much for cooking that can push you to grab more convenient and often less nutritious food options. Add to that the metric ton of unhealthy foods that flood the market, most of which do little to satisfy hunger for very long while overloading you with unnecessary calories. Knowledge of food preparation (and having the time available to prepare it), and fewer affordable options for healthy foods than unhealthy, make it easier for people to pile on the pounds.

It also doesn't help society as whole that a) manual labor isn't a common part of people's lives to any great degree unless your actual job requires it, and many (if not most) do not. The same can be said about entertainment. Instead of going outside to play sports, swing on jungle gyms, play tag, kids are growing up with smart phones, computers, game consoles, etc, all of which require little to no real physical exertion (with some exceptions).

I'm older now and my hey days are behind me so I am less concerned about my weight but I can see why even younger people have a harder time than I did managing it these days.

[Demona3]

High fructose corn syrup is the devil! Avoid this shit at all costs if you can! Also, avoid making that trip to your local McDonald's. Last time I ate there...I felt so gross afterwards. I haven't been there in like.... 5 years now? I dunno. Place is gross.

[satimy]

Fixed that for you.

High Fructose Cornsyrup really isnt that much worse than Cane Sugar. Its a slightly more potent heroin.