How To Lose Weight Without Feeling Tired

Is it possible to lose weight without losing energy?

Not if you’re following a traditional diet. Diets that tell you to eat less and move more not only result in fatigue, but they don’t help you lose weight!

The reason you can’t lose weight without fatigue is that there’s more to the story than calories…

Cutting calories won’t help you lose weight and will cause fatigue

The weight loss stress

Let’s say you want to lose weight. So you start a diet that cuts 500 calories a day. When you start, you’ll likely feel hungry throughout the day and a great deal of fatigue – especially during your workouts. But you push through! And for the first couple of weeks, you lose almost a pound each week. Until your body adapts. That’s when weight loss stops. But you’re still tired and hungry!

You see, cutting calories is a stress to your body. And your body needs to keep all of your systems perfectly balanced. So to fight the stress of eating fewer calories, your body simply reduces the amount of calories it needs.

Now that your body has adjusted to needing fewer calories, those 500 calories you’ve cut aren’t a deficit. In fact, your body has accepted this calorie deficit as the new normal, and you stop losing weight. Even though you still experience fatigue, low energy during your workouts, and strong hunger signals!

This is why weight loss plans are so frustrating. And why they seem to work in the beginning but then never hold up over the long term. There’s more to weight loss than calories. Much more.

Weight gain over the years

If weight loss was easy, developed countries would not be facing the current obesity epidemic. In the past 40 years, humans weigh more than ever before. Consider the following (alarming) statistics:

• Worldwide obesity has nearly tripled since 1975.
• In 2016, more than 1.9 billion adults, 18 years and older, were overweight. Of these over 650 million were obese.
• 39% of adults aged 18 years and over were overweight in 2016, and 13% were obese.
• Most of the world’s population live in countries where obesity kills more people than undernutrition.

Do you really think that the tripling of obesity levels since 1975 is simply because you’re eating too much?

Granted, the modern diet often consists of high-calorie, low-nutrition food. Calories do indeed play a role in weight gain. But I think it’s also clear, given the exponential rise in weight gain, that there’s more going on than just eating too many calories.

Is exercise the missing piece?

What’s combined with nearly every diet?

Exercise. If you want to lose weight you need diet and exercise.

Or do you?

First, let me state that exercise is incredibly important. There are thousands of excellent studies citing the many health benefits of exercise. And I completely agree with them.

But exercise does not automatically lead to weight loss. When you are trying to lose weight, exercise works the same way as reducing calories.

Sure, exercise can help. But it’s more likely that it will end up adding to your fatigue. Decreasing your calories through diet and then asking your body to do high-intensity exercise is a sure-fire way to feel exhausted!

What happens to your appetite after exercise?

It increases. So how the heck are you supposed to eat fewer calories and work out? Through sheer force of will. But you’ll feel miserable the whole time you’re doing it.

Exercise is not the secret to weight loss.

Much like reducing your calories, adding an exercise plan is an overly simplistic way to approach weight loss. Just like when you reduce your calories, after exercising for a while, your brain re-adjusts the calories it uses for basic functions. And suddenly you’re no longer losing weight.

More proof that diet and exercise don’t result in weight loss

Consider a groundbreaking study known as the Women’s Health Initiative. One part of the study looked at the effects a low-fat, low-calorie diet and exercise plan would have on weight loss. Researchers estimated the average women would lose approximately 32lbs of bodyweight each year.

Seven years later… the women who followed the diet and exercise recommendations had an average weight loss of less than one pound!

In seven years they had an average weight loss of 0.88lbs compared to the women who didn’t reduce their calories or exercise. Even though these women stuck to both their diet and exercise routines for 7 years, they were still unable to effectively lose any weight!

Another study found that obese individuals who were given diet and exercise plans had a failure rate of almost 100%.

Neither of these studies tracked fatigue or energy levels of participants. If they did, I would not be surprised to learn that the majority of participants felt a decrease in energy while implementing the nutrition and exercise changes.

Don’t feel guilty about your own struggles to lose weight. It’s not your fault. You’ve been given the wrong information.

Keep reading to learn the real reasons you can’t lose weight. Plus I’ll tell you what you can do to lose weight and keep it off – and how you can do it without experiencing any fatigue!

The real reason you can’t lose weight

The real reason you can’t lose weight – no matter what diet you try – is because you’re not dealing with a calorie problem.

Do you decide when you’re hungry?

Of course not. Your hunger signal is mediated by a hormone named Ghrelin. You can decide whether or not to listen to the hunger signal. But the signal itself is not under your conscious control.

In much the same way, you cannot decide how many calories to burn performing bodily functions.

The calories-in/calories-out hypothesis is far too simplistic. It fails to consider the intense effect your hormones have on weight gain.

Control your hormones, control your weight. The real reason you can’t lose weight is due to a hormone imbalance.

The one hormone that ensures you can’t lose weight

With a lot of fatigue-related conditions, cortisol can be the villain of your weight loss drama. But there’s another hormone that’s even more likely to cause weight gain and contribute to fatigue.

That hormone? Insulin.

When you eat, your blood sugar rises. Insulin is the hormone responsible for taking the sugar in your blood and transporting it into your cells. Having too much sugar in your blood is dangerous. Diabetes is the medical condition in which you have excess sugar in your blood and inadequate amounts of insulin. Insulin protects you from high blood sugar levels.

However, insulin is also a storage hormone. When there’s excess energy (glucose/sugar), insulin instructs your body where and how to store it.

The first thing insulin does with energy storage is it converts glucose into glycogen. Think of glycogen as glucose stored away in mason jars within your pantry. The pantry is your liver.

Should your energy levels dip, all your body needs to do is take a jar of glycogen out of the pantry and convert it back into glucose. It’s a super easy process.

But your pantry is only so big. Once it’s full, there’s no more room to store food. Such is the case with your liver. Your liver can hold a decent amount of glycogen. But once it’s full, the glucose need to be stored somewhere else.

Fortunately, your liver has a neat trick – with the help of insulin, it can change that extra glucose into fat.

Where does that extra glucose go? Right to your waistline.

This happens because of instructions from insulin. Insulin is the hormone that’s causing you to gain weight and makes it difficult to lose weight.

How could insulin be the cause of your weight gain?

I know what you’re thinking – insulin is for people with diabetes. And you don’t have diabetes.

Let’s start by explaining what insulin does on a typical day.

When you eat, your blood sugar rises. The amount your blood sugar rises depends on how much sugar was in the food you ate. Foods higher in carbohydrates will raise your blood sugar far more than foods high in fat or protein.

With elevated blood sugar comes the release of insulin. The higher your blood sugar level, the more insulin is released. If there’s room to store the excess glucose in your liver, the glucose is converted to glycogen and placed inside your liver for safekeeping. If your liver’s glycogen storage facilities are full, the excess glucose is stored as fat – usually around your midsection.

Then, some time goes by and you get hungry again. The hunger signal is triggered by a drop in your blood sugar levels. Low blood sugar also equates to low insulin levels. At this point, your liver will start to convert some of its stored glycogen back into glucose. If you use up all your glycogen stores, your body will then start to burn fat in order to raise its blood sugar levels.

What I’ve just described is a healthy response to insulin. That’s what is supposed to happen. For most of us, that’s not what happens. And the breakdown of this system is the reason you can’t lose weight.

The vicious insulin cycle

When you eat too much glucose or eat too often, your blood sugar never falls into low ranges. This means your body never gets a break from producing insulin.

As I mentioned, insulin is the hormone that instructs your body to store glucose. And if you eat a lot of sugar, the glucose is usually stored as body fat. Chronically high levels of insulin are the reason you can’t lose weight. High levels of insulin results in high levels of body fat accumulation.

Even if your doctor tells you that your blood sugar looks great, you still may have continually high levels of insulin!

If you want to lose weight, you need to balance your insulin levels. I’ll show you how to do that below. But first, a deeper dive into how insulin could also be causing your fatigue!

The insulin-fatigue connection

When you eat, your blood sugar rises. In order to combat high blood sugar levels your body releases insulin. Insulin brings your blood sugar back into safe ranges.

But what happens when you have too much insulin?

As I described above, being overweight or obese is the result of having too much insulin in your system, not calories.

When you have too much insulin, what do you think happens to your blood sugar?

It gets low. Sometimes too low. All that circulating insulin can push too much sugar out of your blood and into your cells. This results in low blood sugar levels.

When your blood sugar drops, your body releases the cortisol hormone to increase blood sugar levels. Cortisol is the sister hormone to insulin:

Insulin lowers blood sugar.
Cortisol raises blood sugar.

If you have chronically elevated levels of insulin, you’re going to need more cortisol to keep your blood sugar balanced. Should this situation occur for years, your brain will become concerned about the high levels of cortisol circulating through your body.

Remember, cortisol is a stress hormone.

High levels of cortisol tell your body it’s under stress. And your brain doesn’t like to feel stressed for long periods of time.

When this occurs, your brain decreases cortisol production.

What’s the number one symptom associated with low cortisol levels?

Fatigue.

This is how being overweight adds to fatigue. Suffice it to say, if you want to lose weight AND avoid experiencing fatigue, you need to balance insulin levels.

Now I’ll show you how to do that!

How to lose weight without losing energy

By now you’ve probably realized that my recommendations on losing weight go strongly against conventional advice.

Cutting calories and increasing exercise will not help you lose weight and keep it off. But it will result in high levels of fatigue. And a lot of frustration.

When you’re overweight, your liver is overflowing with excess sugar. Your body has to put that sugar somewhere. The safest place to store it is in fat cells. Being overweight is caused by excess glucose/sugar storage.

Therefore, your number one priority should be to lower glucose/sugar storage!

That right there is the secret to weight loss. To do this, you need to lower insulin levels. Insulin is released when you eat. The more sugar you eat, the more insulin is released.

In order to reduce insulin levels, you need to:

1. Eat less often
2. Eat fewer foods that are easily converted to sugar – namely, carbohydrates. Especially refined carbohydrates.

There are three rules you need to follow. These will balance your insulin levels which will help you lose weight without feeling tired.

1. Eat real food

Refined carbohydrates raise insulin levels more than any other food. If your food doesn’t rot, don’t eat it. If your food comes in a bag or a box, don’t eat it.

The more you process/refine a food, the less fiber it contains. Fiber helps to control sugar content of the food. Processed foods are low in fiber and are very high in sugar.

High sugar = high insulin

The simple act of avoiding processed foods will bring a dramatic reduction to your insulin levels.

2. Eat more healthy fats

Replace your favourite carbohydrates with healthy fats like:

• Avocados
• Olives
• Fatty fish
• Coconut oil
• Nuts and seeds

Instead of toast or bagels for breakfast, have a couple of eggs. Choose nuts or seeds instead of granola bars. Instead of pasta, opt for fatty fish like salmon.

Your body hardly releases any insulin when you eat foods that are high in fat. Swapping carbohydrates for fats will dramatically lower your insulin levels. Which, of course, will increase both your energy and your weight loss!

3. Practice fasting

The best thing you can do to reduce elevated insulin levels is fast. Remember, insulin is released when your blood sugar rises, which is any time you eat. By eating less often you create a dramatic reduction in insulin levels.

Start with a 12 hour intermittent fast and slowly build up your fasting muscles. 24 hour fasts are an incredible means to lower insulin levels, but I am not recommending you starve yourself. Once you slowly work up to this level you will not experience intense hunger pains. And note – long fasts are not for everyone! Please read my intermittent fasting blog before beginning.

 

Ok, now you know the secrets to beating weight loss fatigue and dropping those pounds for good!

 

Now, I want to hear from you!

What strategies have helped you lose weight without feeling tired?

Leave your answers in the comments section below!