Sleep, Stress and Weight Loss

Nervousness, sleep and eating problems should be held before the GP visit. In case you are losing weight, it is a result of one of the following:

💥Calorie deficit
💥Physical activity load
💥NEAT level
💥Sleep
💥Stress

A calorie deficit is 99% percent of the weight loss. If you are not losing weight, you definitely don’t have the calorie deficit. Don’t rely on the absolute numbers, you may think “I’m eating 1200 calories per day, it’s 100% deficit”. Unfortunately, no — if you are not losing weight, you aren’t in the calorie deficit.

There are plenty of reasons why you can’t lose your weight on 1200 kcal daily:

💥You are experienced dieter (yoghurt diet, vegan diet, Mediterranean diet, etc.) and till your 30s, your muscle mass is almost absent. If in the gym, you start with 1 pound weight — this is your case. Lack of muscle mass — lower energy spendings.

💥You are a couch potato and your NEAT level is near zero. It can be tracked through comments like “10 years ago, I was able to lose 3 kg per month on 1600kcal, but now I can’t lose even 1 kilo per year.” It means that your activity level was higher in your 20s, so you need to increase it. I haven’t seen the data, but it is reasonable that the lack of muscle mass is lowering the NEAT level — it is hard to maintain the activity level.

💥And the last factors — sleep and stress. Both of them can rapidly raise cortisol and affect the production of the related hormones. Moreover, these factors can keep your water level too high or increase the ghrelin level making you too hungry. Maintain the calorie deficit under such circumstances is hard and very uncomfortable.

However, every point of the mentioned above can be fixed before the GP visit. Thus, if you are not losing weight, don’t panic and spend hundreds on unneeded laboratory tests, just try to sleep well for several days in a row.

Honesty test: Who’s a couch potato? Me! I’m too lazy to walk more than 8K steps daily.