SO you've tried dieting and exercising every day and you're still not losing any weight.

It can be so demoralising and frustrating when you think you're doing everything right and nothing happens.

But you know what? A few tweaks can make all the difference.

Many of us find ourselves holding onto fat because our poor bodies are stressed out.

We try to starve and overwork them, and then expect them to play ball when we want to shed fat.

The key is to reduce both mental and physical stress:

1. Give yourself a break

Working out like crazy can actually stop you from burning fat because cortisol tends to store abdominal fat as a response to stress.

Too much HIIT and we start producing a load of cortisol – the stress hormone.

Back in the day, constantly running around might have been indicative of you running away from a man-eating mammoth or hunting for days on end in the midst of a famine.

We might be super sophisticated today, but our bodies still haven't caught up.

If you're smashing spin, step, cardio, weight classes every day, your body still thinks that you're in danger.

The result is that the body clings to fat (because it's not sure if it's about to experience a period without food) and also muscle.

May says: "Low-intensity activities such as walking, cycling and running at a steady pace and done for at least 30 minutes at a time, can encourage your body into its fat-burning zone, so it can access the fat stores for a more efficient fuel source.

"Shorter high-intensity bursts will instead use glycogen stores in muscle instead of fat stores – but this will increase your fitness so make sure you incorporate a little into your exercise line up."

2. Eat more spice

Spicy foods have been found to increase our metabolism and stimulate the body's ability to burn fat.

But eating chili is only going to work if you're also eating a balanced diet.

Try switching from your regular brew to green tea as well – six cups a day have been shown to help increase metabolism.

Registered dietician Helen Bond previously told The Sun that the hotter chilies are, the more capsaicin they contain. So you could interpret that as the hotter your curry, the more fat-burning potential.

3. Try intermittent fasting

Beyonce, Liv Tyler and Ben Affleck are all fans of intermittent fasting.

The concept is super simple – limit the number of calories to a certain timeframe.

That can either take the form of the 5:2 diet, which is where you eat only 500kcals twice a week and then eat your normal amount on the other days, or the 16:8 fast.

The latter requires you to go without food for 16 hours and then eat your day's amount of calories in an eight hour period. Typically, that just means going without breakfast and having your dinner a little earlier.

Science now tells us that 14 and 16 hours is the best fasting window for burning body fat and losing weight.

Intermittent fasting is so good because it gives the digestive system a break and after 12 hours, all the glucose has been cleared from your bloodstream.

It's then that your body starts to use its own body fat for energy.

After a meal, it takes around five hours to absorb the nutrients from the food, and during that process, the body prefers to use carbs as fuel – meaning that it won't touch the existing fat stores.

Giving yourself 12-16 hours rest in between eating, however, means that the body will use up existing body fat.

The 5:2 is a little harder to do (most of the 16:8 happens when you're asleep) but if you can control how much you eat on two days, there are no rules for the other five.

4. Prioritise sleep

Sleep is so important because it's only when you're totally at rest that your body can repair.

That's when your muscles grow and recover – crucial for changing your body composition and bringing down that body fat percentage.

A 2010 study by the University of Chicago found that when those on a diet got a full night’s sleep, more than half the weight they lost was fat.

When they cut back on sleep, not only did this reduce the amount of fat loss to only one quarter, but they also reported feeling hungrier.

Without adequate rest, your satiation and hunger hormones, leptin and ghrelin, will be out of kilter. This can encourage cravings, in particular for sweet foods.

Last year, scientists found that people who get between seven and nine hours most night also have fewer hunger pangs.

5. Get your hormones checked

And if none of that works then it's worth going to your GP to have a checkup.

You could have an underactive thyroid which is making your metabolism sluggish, or something as common as PCOS which can make belly fat especially hard to shift.

A hormone test can tell you whether there's something else at play and once you know either way, you can work around it.

80 per cent of women with PCOS have insulin resistance, meaning that they can't metabolise sugars properly.

For them, following a keto diet might be the best option because it's so low in sugars of any kind.

Claire Goodwin, AKA The PCOS Nutritionist advises women on how to reverse their symptoms via their diets and lifestyles and while she stresses that there's no one way of treating PCOS (because there's more than one type of it), keto can be effective for weight loss.

"A small pilot study on overweight women with PCOS found that a ketogenic helped to reduce body weight by 12 per cent. The keto diet also helped to lower testosterone too," she writes on her blog.

"70-80 per cent of women with PCOS have insulin resistance. High levels of insulin increase testosterone which cause the facial hair growth, acne, hair loss, and missing periods. Therefore, any diet which helps to improve insulin resistance and stabilise your blood sugar is worth looking into.

"One study found that a keto diet helped to reverse type 2 diabetes in 10 weeks. These results were maintained for up to a year with an average weight loss of 30lbs.

"But remember it’s not the only way to reverse insulin resistance. Studies have shown there are many other dietary strategies that can have a similar outcome."

And even she says that long-term keto can result in gut issues and loss of periods (the very thing many women with PCOS are trying to treat!).

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