There are two major reasons why someone might not be able to lose weight even when they’re eating very few calories and believe they’re hitting their macros:
Your metabolism has slowed and you’re not actually in a calorie deficit
You might think you’re eating less food than you burn, but in reality, this isn’t the case.
If you’ve crash dieted or engaged in repeated bouts of dieting throughout your life, you’ve trained your metabolism to burn fewer calories. The same thing occurs when you’ve been dieting for a while and hit a weight loss plateau. Your metabolism has slowed to the point where your food intake and calorie expenditure are the same despite being on a low-calorie diet. The result? You won’t lose weight.
When you engage in extreme or regular dieting, your body fights to erase the calorie deficit you’re trying to impose on it. This happens as an evolutionary mechanism to keep you alive during periods of starvation and is accomplished in several ways:
Thyroid and testosterone levels decrease so that you burn fewer calories
Sympathetic nervous system activity declines so that your organs burn fewer calories
NEAT (non-exercise activity thermogenesis) is reduced spontaneously so that you burn fewer calories as a result of fidgeting and moving around less
Since you’ve lost some weight, your body is smaller and will require fewer calories to operate and move around
Eating less means you’ll burn fewer calories digesting your food
To lose weight, you’ll need to create a deficit by slashing calories even further than they are. Even if you don’t lose weight the first week or two on the Avatar system, your calories will be reduced each week until you do start losing weight. Unfortunately for those with a slow metabolism, this may mean eating much less food than you’re comfortable with, and in this case you should consider changing your goal to reverse dieting.
You’re not actually hitting your weight loss macros
There are several reasons why you might not be actually hitting your target macros:
You’re succumbing to the urge to overeat
You might be experiencing intense hunger, food cravings, urges to binge, changes in mood, and reduced will power, which can all result in falling off the diet bandwagon and overeating. Even if you are compliant most of the week, a few bad days here and there can really sabotage your progress. For more on this, check out our articles: 6 Ways To Beat The Urge To Binge & 4 Steps To Beat Binges Before They Even Happen.
You’re not tracking everything.
It’s easy to forget to track certain foods such as beverages and condiments, and having an extra untracked chip or two can really add up. Even if your app says you hit your macros, you can’t trick your body.
You’re eating out too often.
Eating out can sometimes require some estimation, and it is easy to underestimate the macros in restaurant food. If you eat out a lot, this type of error can really add up.
You might be entering the wrong macros for a food
If you’re using an app like MyFitnessPal to track your food, you’ll need to realize that the macros for some of the entries are flat out wrong! Do your best to only use verified entries when logging your food items.
You might be eating a whole lot of "calorie free" foods that aren’t really
Calorie-free sauces, sweeteners, spray butter, sugar-free jello, and similar items may display suggested serving sizes that allow the label to say "calorie-free," but the actual amount you eat is closer to 15 or 20 calories. While there’s no need to ban these items, you need to realize that they do still have calories. If you eat a lot of them (as many dieters do in an attempt to combat cravings), then your calorie count will start to add up.
You’re not accurately measuring serving-sizes
You need to measure everything you eat—especially if you’re new to flexible dieting. A tablespoon of peanut butter and a cup of ice cream don’t look like much, so it’s easy to underestimate on these things and kill your weight loss progress.
Outside factors are causing artificially high weigh-ins
Many factors may cause fluid retention and artificially increase your weigh-in. This includes things like:
Menstrual cycle
Poor sleep
Stress
Use of certain medications
High sodium meals prior to weigh-ins
Certain health conditions (for example, kidney issues)
If you’re 100% compliant on your macros and believe that fluid retention is artificially increasing your weight, you might want to wait to weigh yourself until this passes. Or, if you know that you tend to experience frequent weight fluctuations from fluid retention, you may decide to weigh yourself every day or at least several times a week and enter your average weight. This will wash out some of the error from fluctuations. To implement these more frequent weigh-ins, turn on the Log Daily Weights feature in Advanced Features of the app.