Introduction
If you have tried time and again to lose weight, you know how frustrating it can be. You try diet after diet. You restrict calories, perhaps limit your consumption of a specific food group like carbohydrates or fats, and still those stubborn pounds remain. But the truth is that successful weight loss does not depend solely on what you put in your mouth. Yes, calories consumed should equal calories burned, but many more factors are involved in the process of putting weight on and the process of taking it off. That’s why this book was written. Based on the latest information on why people gain weight and why they have so much trouble losing it, Why You Can’t Lose Weight fills you in on the many factors, from lifestyle issues to hormonal dysfunction, that may be stopping you from successfully dropping pounds. More importantly, it guides you in treating these problems so that you can improve your lifestyle, enhance your overall health, and finally succeed at weight loss. There are very real reasons—beyond calorie intake—that can cause weight gain. Here, for the first time, is a book that helps you understand and identify these reasons and steer a true course to weight-loss success.
Why You Can’t Lose Weight begins by providing basic information about how your body deals with food. Why does your body burn some of the food you eat as energy and store some of it as fat? What makes you hungry in the first place? Chapter 1 answers these questions to provide a clear picture of what’s going on inside your body.
Part I of Why You Can’t Lose Weight looks at lifestyle practices that can frustrate your attempts to lose weight. Exercise, fiber intake, sleep, and water are all crucial to the weight-loss process. If you neglect any of these important elements, it becomes more difficult to stick to or benefit from even the healthiest of diets. Stress can also affect weight, as can food addictions. Each chapter in Part I examines one of these issues so that you can understand it, recognize it, and adopt healthy lifestyle practices that will contribute to a healthy weight.
A number of health disorders, too, can cause you to gain weight and make it difficult to shed pounds. Part II targets several common problems that can contribute to excess weight, including food allergies, chronic inflammation, thyroid hormone dysfunction (hypothyroidism), toxic buildup, and chronic yeast infections. You will learn what these conditions are, how you and your health-care providers can detect them, and how you can take steps toward not only the relief of symptoms, but also a healthier, slimmer body.
To lose weight, your body must produce and appropriately respond to thousands of important biochemicals, such as estrogen, insulin, and serotonin. That’s what Part III is all about. Each chapter looks at a biochemistry-related problem, including depression, female hormone imbalance, insulin resistance, male hormone insufficiency, and neurotransmitter (brain chemical) dysfunction. Also included is information on how your genetic makeup can influence the way you gain and lose weight. Again, you’ll learn how these disorders can be recognized, how they affect your body, and what you can do to restore a healthy biochemical balance and body weight.
For each problem discussed, Why You Can’t Lose Weight tells you about the different approaches you can take to greater health. For instance, if chronic inflammation is preventing you from shedding weight, you can eliminate inflammatory foods from your diet, take anti-inflammatory nutritional supplements, and use a moderate exercise program to normalize your body’s inflammatory response. If this multilevel strategy sounds a little overwhelming, turn to Chapter 20, Putting It All Together. Here, you’ll discover vital information on selecting and following a healthy diet, choosing and using supplements, and setting up a safe and effective exercise routine, all with the goal of creating a customized, easy-to-follow weight-loss plan. You’ll also learn a little more about some of the professionals who can provide further information, guidance, and support. The Resources section, which begins on page 207, offers additional assistance by filling you in on diagnostic laboratories, supplement companies, and professional organizations—everything you need to know to work towards a slimmer you.
As you read through this book to pinpoint the cause of your weight problem, keep in mind that the body is a complex piece of machinery and that its many functions are interrelated. For this reason, there may be more than one factor that is undermining your efforts to lose weight. For instance, low thyroid function, covered in Chapter 10, may cause depression, which is addressed in Chapter 13. You have to treat both problems if you want to feel better and reach your desired weight. Fortunately, several of the get-well strategies discussed in the book—regular exercise and a healthy diet, for instance—are useful in relieving a range of problems. Nevertheless, if you treat one disorder and find that you are still unable to lose weight, it makes sense to read the remaining chapters to learn if other factors may be at work. A good way to start your detective work is to take the self-test that appears at the beginning of each of the first three parts. (See pages 13, 63, and 113.) Once you complete each test and review your scores, you will have a clearer idea of whether your weight problems are caused by lifestyle habits, health disorders, biochemical dysfunctions, or, perhaps, a combination of these factors.
I don’t have to tell you how dangerous excess weight can be. Being overweight or obese increases the risk for thirty-five major diseases, including diabetes, heart disease, stroke, arthritis, sleep apnea, and cancer. Excess weight has such an impact on health that recently, the National Research Council cited obesity as one of the chief reasons why life expectancy for Americans lags well behind that of other developed nations—even though we spend more money on health care than any other country.
If you have tried one-size-fits-all weight-loss plans only to find that those added pounds simply won’t go away, it’s time to learn exactly what’s keeping you from shedding those pounds. With Why You Can’t Lose Weight, you’ll discover how to lose weight, keep it off, and enjoy radiant health.
