November 12, 2024

Fat loss isn’t always as simple as cutting calories and upping your cardio.

While the basic principle of weight loss comes down to burning more energy than you consume, the human body is an intricately complex system, with various factors influencing fat burning, muscle gain, and metabolic health.

Most people think that exercising more or drastically cutting calories is the golden ticket to fat loss. But if you’re already leading an active lifestyle, eating clean, and still not seeing the results you're after, it could be due to one or a combination of often-overlooked factors. From the timing of your meals and snacks to the hidden impact of stress hormones, there's much more going on under the surface than you might realize.

This article uncovers five top reasons why your body isn't shedding fat (despite a healthy diet and a regular exercise regimen)—and how to resolve or avoid each problem to transform yourself into a fat-burning machine. From myths like eating six small meals a day to lose weight, to believing a post-workout protein shake is crucial for revving up your metabolism or boosting muscle recovery, you'll explore the latest in modern nutritional science to get your body into a lean, fat-burning state.

You'll also get to discover the exercise paradox—where too much or too little movement can derail your fat loss efforts. Sedentary office jobs can destroy your metabolism, but at the same time, overdoing cardio or weightlifting can flood your body with cortisol, a stress hormone that encourages fat storage. The key is finding balance, whether through strategically timed movements during the day or optimizing recovery through adequate rest. Both undertraining and overtraining are sneaky culprits in fat-loss resistance and knowing when to move and when to rest can make all the difference, which we'll dive into throughout this article.

So, before you throw in the towel on your fat-loss journey, let's take a closer look at these common roadblocks that could be slowing your progress. By addressing these hidden factors and making a few key adjustments, you’ll unlock your body’s full potential and finally start seeing the results you’ve been working toward.

Ready to turn your metabolism into a fat-burning furnace? Let’s dive in.

5 Reasons Diet & Exercise Aren't Producing the Fat Loss Results You Desire (And How to Shed Unwanted Weight)

If you’ve been sweating it out at the gym and sticking to a diet yet still aren’t seeing the results you want, it’s time to reconsider your approach. Below are five critical reasons why your current routine may not be effective, along with strategies to help you turn things around.

1. Snacking and Post-Workout Calories

When it comes to diet and exercise, plenty of myths can derail your fat-loss efforts, especially around snacking and post-workout calories (for more information, you can check out this article). In this section, I'll break down some of the top misconceptions and explain the science of meal frequency, fasting, and post-workout nutrition to help you make smarter choices for fat loss and optimized performance.

Myth 1: Six Small Daily Meals Are Better Than Two or Three Meals

The theory that you need to eat six small meals throughout the day to keep your metabolism elevated is a myth that I am guilty of having preached to many of my fat-loss clients.

But it has long since been debunked by science. While digestion does produce a thermic effect that increases your metabolism, the bump is slight.

Frequent snacking increases glycemic variability and prevents you from getting the gut- and longevity-boosting benefits of fasting. It also keeps your blood sugar levels elevated and shifts your metabolism into sugar-burning mode, which does not allow your body to tap into its stored fat for fuel. In fact, there is no evidence that eating more than three meals per day boosts your metabolism, helps you lose weight, or aids in appetite control.

On the other hand, if you eat only two or three meals per day in a compressed feeding window, your body burns fat and releases more anti-aging and growth hormones.

So eating six small meals per day may be worse for your waistline than eating two or three larger meals spread throughout the day.

Myth 2: Short-Term Fasting Negatively Impacts Your Metabolism

The belief that you will enter “starvation mode” if you don’t eat frequently is also false (you can find out more about the benefits of fasting here). It takes about three days of complete fasting or up to four weeks of extreme caloric restriction for your body to downregulate metabolism and thyroid activity.

Research has shown that short-term fasts, such as daily, overnight twelve-to-sixteen-hour fasts, actually increase your metabolic rate due to an increase in norepinephrine, one of the hormones that signal fat cells to break down. You don’t necessarily have to reduce your caloric intake, especially if you are active. The trick is to eat less often, not to eat less. 

Myth 3: You Need a Recovery Snack Immediately After Working Out

Another common myth is that you need a protein shake or giant bar from the gym fridge immediately after a workout (for more information on this topic, you can check out this article).

The idea behind eating right after finishing a workout is to maximize muscular adaptations, repair damaged tissues, and rapidly shuttle glycogen into muscle for ample anabolic growth during a limited window of maximum carbohydrate absorption (twenty minutes to two hours after training).

But in every study looking at the benefits of immediate post-workout eating, participants ate after exercising in a fasted state, usually to exhaustion—and frankly, most of us are not jumping out of bed to exercise for 90 to 120 minutes with no fuel. So unless you want to gain significant mass (for example, if you are a high school or college football player trying to get to the next level by putting on 20 pounds), as long as you ate at some point prior to working out, there is no need to drop everything to slug down that post-workout protein drink. Your blood levels of amino acids and stored carbohydrates will still be elevated from any eating done prior to your workout—meaning that for a 5 p.m. visit to the gym, your body can metabolize your breakfast or lunch for fuel.

In fact, occasionally waiting a couple of hours after you exercise to eat may boost growth hormone and testosterone levels.

Unless you are performing two-a-day workouts within an eight-hour window, there is no need to drop the barbell and hustle to your gym bag for a shiny, wrapped recovery snack.

Ultimately, calories are calories, and it will be harder to lose weight if you have a habit of mindlessly munching on random handfuls of almonds, taking sips of sugary kombucha, polishing off your kid’s leftovers, or force-feeding snacks in an effort to “keep the metabolism elevated.”

Want to discover more about avoiding snacking and reducing hunger and cravings? You can check out these resources:

• The Hunger Games – Is Being Hungry Bad?
• A Simple Six-Step System for Eliminating Food Cravings
• Reduce Hunger By 30%, Cravings By 40% & Calorie Intake By 18% WITHOUT Ozempic? The New, Natural Extract That *Crushes* Appetite, With Dr. Edward Walker
• The New Probiotic Strain That Allows You To Eat Carbs Again, How GLP-1 Peptide Actually Works And Why It’s Not Intended For Everyone, With Pendulum’s Colleen Cutcliffe.
  
• What Do Food Cravings Mean? 21 Common Food Cravings And What You Can Do About Them.

2. Not Moving Enough

Whether I am standing, lunging, kneeling, sitting, leaning, or in any other position during a day of work, I stop a few times an hour for a quick burst of activity such as kettlebell swings, a sprint up the stairs, jumping jacks, or a handful of burpees.

Heck, I even pull over my car frequently during road trips to crank out push-ups, duck into the bathroom at restaurants for forty air squats in a stall, and do elaborate stretch routines at the back of airplanes. If I’m stuck sitting for long periods with no option to stand, I’ll do soleus push-ups, or even isometric exercises like pressing my palms or thighs together in a hard ten-to-twenty-second contraction. 

I don’t do this because I am a hyperactive freak who is addicted to exercise (though I do get restless pretty quickly if I don’t move frequently). Rather, weight loss requires an expenditure of energy greater than the intake of energy through your diet.

Beware of a Sedentary Lifestyle

The brutal truth is that for most people, sitting for eight hours a day does not expend enough energy to counterbalance breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks, no matter how much exercise they perform at the beginning or end of the day (you can check out this article to discover more about the dangers of a sedentary lifestyle). Even in people who exercise, habitual sedentary behavior is associated with metabolic syndrome, increased risk of obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and premature mortality. When you are regularly sedentary for extended periods, your blood sugar levels go haywire because a low level of physical activity causes unfavorable changes in insulin signaling, glucose transport, and the activity of lipoprotein lipase, the primary enzyme responsible for breaking down fats.

The solution?

Move more, especially at work, which is when people tend to move the least. Even in a traditional cubicle-based office, it is not difficult to duck away to the bathroom for air squats, the parking lot for jumping jacks, or the stairwell for stair climbs.

Research suggests that the effects of being sedentary, including insulin resistance, are partly independent of the amount of time spent in moderate- and vigorous-intensity physical activity. In other words, if you spend the majority of your day sitting or just standing there with your knees locked, that hour you spend at the gym isn’t doing you many metabolic favors. Sitting and even static standing may even place you at risk for heart issues during exercise because a hard workout at the end of the day becomes an attempt to force blood through “kinked” vessels.

Remember this: while a formal workout at the beginning or end of the day is not necessary for weight loss, low-level physical activity throughout the day is. 

For more information, you can check out my interview on Optimize Yourself: “The Solution to Your Sedentary Lifestyle.”

3. Too Much Exercise

Not only do you not lose weight when you don’t move enough, but you also don’t lose weight when you move too much (you can discover more about this topic here).

That may not be what you want to hear in an era of self-fulfillment and self-identity through exercise, with hard-core CrossFitters trying to stay on the whiteboard, Navy SEALs inspiring housewives to get up at 4 a.m. to crush the day and go to the pain cave, and a physical culture all about zero days off, no pain no gain, balls to the wall, and going HAAM (Google that one if you’re curious).

Don’t get me wrong. I am not opposed to going to the pain cave, consistently going to the gym, and exercising more than the average person (especially if you are trying to climb your own Everest, such as training for a triathlon or a Spartan Race or, well, Mount Everest). However, excessive exercise can lead to elevated levels of cortisol and inflammation, and we live in an era of overtrained, inflamed folks with hormonal dysregulation and cortisol coming out of their ears (if you don't believe me, check this out).

To gain strength, you have to tear muscle fibers by lifting moderately heavy weights, which tells your body that it needs to build more muscle in that area. To tear your muscle fibers, especially if you are already a trained individual, you have to push your muscles past their comfort levels. So to get stronger, you must lift weights beyond what you can comfortably handle.

Why You Shouldn't Push Yourself to Your Limits in the Gym Every Day

Increasing endurance involves a similar approach: you must encounter exhaustion and push the borders of your stamina to build everything from red blood cells to new mitochondria. But you don’t need to do so every day. Indeed, consistently difficult daily training is accompanied by serious physiological complications (check out this article for more details).

One study concluded that severe overtraining leads to immune system damage, fatigue, mood disturbances, physical discomfort, sleep difficulties, and reduced appetite. Even during the recovery stages of this study, fatigue and immune system deficits persisted if individuals pushed themselves to the brink of overtraining.

The fix? Take days off. Take more days off if you are older.

Most hard-charging high achievers under forty benefit from at least one day of rest and recovery per week, and most folks over forty benefit from two to three such days. This doesn’t mean couch and dark-chocolate-face-stuffing time. It just means you scratch your “I must make my body better” itch via activities such as sauna sessions, easy yoga, breathwork, a cold soak, a massage, some trampolining, a nice hike (not the one with a brutality rating of five stars on your trails app), or anything else that allows you to enhance your body without beating it to shreds.

4. Chronic Cardio

No gym seems complete without a whole room or hallway dedicated to the rat-on-a-wheel glory of treadmills, stationary bikes, elliptical trainers, and—my favorite—steppers.

But cardio tends to be vastly misunderstood as a fat-burning tool, and there is even an ongoing debate between meatheads and endurance junkies over what good or harm cardio does. The general belief among park joggers is that running melts fat off the belly like butter, while those who eschew cardio say it can harm your heart and even make you fatter.

The truth is a bit more nuanced than “cardio is good” or “cardio is bad.” Cardio does not directly make you fat, especially since the daylong low-level physical activity I endorse in this article could technically be classified as cardio.

The Health Risks of Too Much Cardio

But cardio is not risk-free—especially the type that involves long marathon-training death marches, multi-hour cycling sessions, or the excessive, draining slog on the lineup of cardio machines at the gym. For example, legendary ultramarathoner Micah True died in 2012 at age fifty-eight during a typical “easy” twelve-mile run. The results from his autopsy showed signs of Phidippides cardiomyopathy, characterized by an enlarged and scarred heart, elevated cardiac risk biomarkers, and small patches of cardiac muscle damage that can lead to heart arrhythmias and even sudden death.

Unless you consistently run extreme distances, it is unlikely you need to worry about suffering (or pronouncing) Phidippides cardiomyopathy. But True’s death (as well as many other such instances detailed in my book Beyond Training) illustrates that long bouts of cardio, while they may significantly improve endurance, are not necessarily the best for your health—or your waistline. In fact, one of the problems that many endurance athletes become frustrated with is an inability to shed fat.

The reason for this is simple: endurance training and chronic cardio create a state of extreme metabolic efficiency.

When you engage in aerobic exercise, your body wants to work as efficiently as possible while producing the greatest amount of physical output. So if you’re performing long cardio sessions with increasing volume and frequency, your body will attempt to shed unnecessary, excess weight and store usable energy it can draw on during these sessions.

HIIT vs. Intense, Drawn Out Cardio Sessions

If you are already active, you can engage in short, high-intensity interval cardio sessions and switch cardio modes frequently, meaning that if you do three intense cardio sessions per week, you could alternate between swimming, cycling, and running.

One study found that after twenty weeks of training, the participants who performed HIIT (high-intensity interval training) lost more body fat than those who engaged in steady-state endurance training (like long, slow treadmill runs). HIIT is also effective for preventing and managing insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes.

Most HIIT sessions last about thirty minutes at most, so you are getting a lot more bang for your buck than if you were to spend an hour tooling along on a treadmill.

As far as long, slow aerobic cardio is concerned, you need less than you think if you’ve engineered your routine for low-intensity physical activity throughout the day. For example, once a week I’ll go on a long hike or bike ride for around two hours. If you’re sprinkling in HIIT and moving naturally each day, that’s ample “structured” aerobic exercise time for improving cardiovascular fitness from week to week without overtraining on excessive cardio.

Obviously, if you decide to do an Ironman triathlon or marathon, you’ll need more cardio than that, but don’t fool yourself into thinking it’s healthy or the best strategy for fat loss. 

For more information on HIIT workouts, you can check out these resources:

5. The SAID Principle

The SAID principle is one of the first principles I learned in my undergraduate exercise physiology courses. It stands for “specific adaptation to imposed demands” and means that your body will eventually adapt to the demands you place upon it.

If running is your only form of cardio or push-ups are your only form of upper-body training, your body will become so adapted to those demands over time that it burns fewer calories and experiences fewer gains in response to these stimuli. As a result, you see fewer and fewer results from that tried-and-true exercise regimen that seemed to work so well for twelve weeks.

Perhaps there is something to adopting the latest workout fad found in the last health magazine you read (“Get the Six-Day Beach Body You Deserve with These 12 Bodyweight Moves!”), then dropping it for an entirely new routine once the next magazine arrives a month later (“Norwegian Volume Training for a Better Butt!”). Sometimes the best workout plan is the one you are not currently doing. Not only that, but the best time of day to work out is often whatever time you are not currently working out, the best length of time for a HIIT cardio workout is anything shorter or longer than what you are currently doing, and the best sport for shedding pounds is whatever sport you are not currently playing.

Sure, you want some consistency and a reliable routine that keeps you motivated, but if the scale isn’t budging, sometimes randomness and variety are the answers.

The following are six specific modifications you can make to minimize the effects of endless repetition.

MODIFICATION #1: COMBINE EXERCISES

If your regimen includes a lot of weightlifting, you can combine many lifts into dynamic movements. If your current routine has you performing a set of squats and a set of shoulder presses, for instance, you can shock your muscles by combining the lifts into one single squat-to-shoulder-press movement. You can also do lunges and curls, vertical jumps and push-ups (a burpee), or medicine ball lift-and-throws.

MODIFICATION #2: IMPLEMENT ACTIVE REST PERIODS

Rather than resting between weight-training sets, do a thirty-, sixty-, or ninety-second cardio boost or core exercise. For example, between sets of pull-downs or presses, run to the stationary bike and sprint for a minute, or hold a front plank. The metabolic demands of your workout will completely change. (This is my usual workout mode at hotel gyms because of the potent combination of strength and cardio training, called concurrent training.)

MODIFICATION #3: TAKE IT OUTSIDE

Instead of your usual forty-five-minute jaunt on an elliptical, grab a set of dumbbells or a weighted backpack or vest and hit the hiking trails. The unpredictability of undulating terrain can significantly increase physical demands and throw your body new curveballs.

MODIFICATION #4: CHANGE THE CENTER OF GRAVITY

If you usually use a barbell for lunges, switch it up and try using dumbbells, kettlebells, or a medicine ball instead. Don a weighted vest or weighted backpack during a walk. For a cable exercise, move the cable up or down a few notches and come at the movement from a new angle. The altered weight positions and angles will force your body into an entirely new metabolic situation.

MODIFICATION #5: WORK OUT AT A DIFFERENT TIME OF DAY

Been working out in the morning for the past few years? Throw your body for a loop and hit the gym an hour before dinner. The whole workout will feel entirely different. If you normally exercise after lunch, turn lunch into a nap session and hit the gym for an early-morning workout instead. The only folks for whom this trick isn’t such a great idea are those suffering from poor sleep: exercising at random intervals throughout the day isn’t great for your chronobiology.

MODIFICATION #6: SAME WORKOUT, DIFFERENT TOOLS

Add to your home gym or workout bag a few extra tools that you can bring out when the going seems to have gotten too easy. Rather than cranking out push-ups and squats on the floor, use a vibration platform. Try blood flow restriction (BFR) bands for a rowing machine, bike, incline walk, or bodyweight workout. Use a restricted breath-training device for a HIIT workout. Wear a weighted vest for any workout you feel you’ve gotten used to. The added bonus of this tactic is that it can make a stale workout more interesting and give you a chance to try new biohacks or tools while doing exercises your body is familiar with. 

These are just a few ways you can switch up your workouts and minimize repetition. When in doubt, follow this rule: Don’t go more than four weeks without significantly changing some staple of your exercise program.

For more recommendations on workouts that'll switch things up, you can check out these resources:

• 5 Unconventional, Woo-Woo Workouts Every Fitness Enthusiast Should Add To Their Repertoire.
• How To Stay Fit For Life: The Official Top 10 Countdown – Part 1
• How To Stay Fit For Life: The Official Top 10 Countdown – Part 2
• Biohacking Your Limits: Unlock Peak Performance and Fulfillment | Ben Greenfield
• Beyond Training: Mastering Endurance, Health, and Life w/ Ben Greenfield

Summary

In the pursuit of fat loss, you might find yourself trapped in the cycle of conventional dieting and exercise routines—often overlooking critical factors that can hinder your progress.

As you've just explored, several common misconceptions—like the need for frequent snacking, excessive exercise, and chronic cardio—can lead to stagnation in your weight loss efforts.

Ultimately, the key to achieving lasting fat loss lies in a holistic approach that encompasses mindful eating, regular movement, balanced exercise, and recovery. By breaking free from outdated beliefs and embracing a more science-backed strategy, you can streamline your path to a healthier, leaner you. The journey to optimal fat loss is about understanding your body and making informed choices that support your unique metabolic needs.

If you're also looking for more insights into your health and wellness, you'll be happy to hear that I just finished updating and editing my best-selling book, Boundless. The brand new version of Boundless covers everything you could possibly want to know about optimizing your health and longevity, including how to boost your mitochondrial function, reboot your circadian rhythm, increase your libido, manage chronic conditions, enhance your mind using new smart drugs and peptides, reverse aging, improve sleep, burn fat, maintain health routines at home and while traveling, and much more!

If you're ready to uncover a treasure trove of the latest science-backed strategies for improving every aspect of your mind, body, and spirit, you can click this link to pre-order your new updated copy of Boundless.

Additionally, if you have any questions, comments, or feedback, you can drop me a line in the comments below, and I'll be sure to respond!