The Truth Behind Why You Can't Lose Weight: Part 3

Today we are talking about “Why You Can’t Lose Weight and What to Do About It: Part 3.”

The most common question I get when women come to join the 3-Keys group is Why can’t I lose weight?

Why is it so hard?

Why isn’t it coming off?

And for the last two weeks we’ve been answering that exact question with a very real, clear and clinical answer:

The reason you can’t lose weight, and by that we mean burn fat, because at the end of the day that’s really what we want, we want to burn fat, the reason you can’t do it is because you are suffering from a damaged metabolism.

Part 1 we talked about your mitochondria, your metabolic machinery and how important they are.

Part 2 was the powerful fat controller and metabolic hormone called insulin.

If you haven’t seen those, please take the time to go back and watch them. They will give you the answers you are looking for!

For part three, I want to talk about how our age has impacted our metabolisms.

Because there is no doubt about it, the more trips around the sun we have taken, the harder it is to lose weight.

And why is that?

If it’s just a calorie in vs calorie out math equation, it shouldn’t matter our age. We could just always create a calorie deficit and lose weight.

But that’s not how it works in the real world at all.

And it’s not because we are less active as we age, because that’s not always true.

There are many Zumba and pilates instructors that have gone through menopause doing the same amount of activity and yet even the Pilates instructor finds herself with a little belly she never had before.

One of the reasons it is more difficult to lose weight is also our age.

But why?

Well, there are three main reasons:

First is because metabolic damage is layered on over time. Each year we get less efficient and less sensitive to insulin.

When we are less sensitive to insulin, our insulin resistance goes up.

When our insulin resistance goes up, we put on weight and it’s very hard to get off.

Muscle soaks up a lot of sugar and as we lose muscle mass due to aging, about 3% per year, we lose our insulin sponge. We lose the opportunity to store sugar and lower our insulin.

So our ability to secrete the right amount of insulin and our ability to be sensitive to that insulin decreases over time.

So that’s the first reason our age makes it harder.

The second is the change in other hormones like estrogen and progesterone.

Interestingly, estrogen helps protect us from too much insulin. We don’t fully understand how this works, but estrogen helps our livers to release the right amount of sugar between meals. When our estrogen decreases over time, especially during menopause, we lose that protective benefit and we end up swimming in too much insulin.

The loss of estrogen also shifts the way we hold the weight. Estrogen tells the body to hold weight under the skin on our hips, buttocks and thighs. That is a good place for fat storage. Under our midsections and under the skin.

When our estrogen starts to decrease, which happens as early as our 40’s, we start to respond to the androgens now present in our blood and we start to store fat more like a man in our bellies.

And if you have insulin resistance, you start to store fat around the organs instead of under the skin. Which is more dangerous place to store fat. Or worse, you start to store fat in your organs which is how type 2 diabetes and other chronic disease starts.

I call this the perfect storm. You have lowering estrogen as you have rising insulin which puts you at the perfect metabolic spot to accumulate body fat.

The third reason it’s harder to lose weight as we age is our metabolic rate.

There is a foundational amount of energy we burn to live. We burn this energy to breathe, think, walk to the kitchen, open the fridge and grab the eggs.

Most of us over the years have done restrictive calorie counting type diets. Noom is the newest darling on the block but it is really a 1400 calorie diet.

Our metabolisms are very smart. They are not going to burn more energy than they have coming in for long.

If you were concerned about survival and you started eating less food, what do you think your body is going to do?

Do you think it’s just going to keep burning up the same amount of energy as when you were eating?

No, it’s not.

It’s going to sense that less energy is coming in and adjust the amount of energy going out.

So, by the time we are 50, 60, 70, we have done a dozen or so low calorie diets and played wack a mole with our metabolic rates.

By the time women get to me, they are maybe burning 1000 to 1200 calories and that’s it.

You have to repair your metabolic rate if you want to burn fat. You will only burn the fat for energy if you need it.

If your metabolic rate is only 1200 calories, your food will hit that mark and you won’t reach into your fat stores to make up the difference.

And cruelly, exercise doesn’t help much if you are insulin resistant as you just burn sugar. Then you are left absolutely starving and not losing weight.

We are going to talk much more about this issue next week. Because increasing your metabolic rate without gaining weight or stimulating the wrong hormones is an art and not many professionals know how to do this like I do.

So those are the three big reasons that our age also makes it more difficult to lose weight.

1. We become more insulin resistant over time.
2. We have less protective estrogen.
3. We have messed up our metabolic rates through diets.

There are more reasons such as our eating habits, our years of low-fat living, and our love of diet soft drinks, but these are the big three. The biological three.

So what can do about this?

Well, we can increase insulin sensitivity and lower your insulin by changing how you eat and that will fix #1 and #2. Because the estrogen loss is only a problem because it leads to more insulin.

So with all the issues we’ve discussed in the last three weeks, the answer to why you can’t lose weight is because you have a damaged metabolism.

The solution is to repair your metabolism so that it can burn fat.

This is what we do in the Freese Method. It repairs that damage in 12 weeks then shifts into a long-term eating pattern that is easy to stick with to help protect this fit and fresh metabolism you now have.

Considering all the time and stuff that can damage your metabolism, 12 weeks to fix it is like a small miracle. I’ve done 16 weeks and 8 weeks, even tried 4 but 12 weeks is the sweet spot and that is incredible news for all of us.

Imagine decades of metabolic damage healed in 12 weeks.

That is how bad your body wants to be back in balance. It knows what to do. It wants to be there. It will whip right back into shape if given the chance.

You absolutely have what it takes to lose weight, you just have to fix your metabolism first!