Why You Can't Lose Weight Even When You're Doing Everything Right

You're eating well, you're moving your body, you're doing everything you've been told to do, and the scale is not moving. Maybe it moved a little at first and then it stopped. Maybe you've been at this for months and you cannot figure out what you're doing wrong. Maybe you've started to wonder if there's just something fundamentally broken inside you that nobody can explain. I want to say something to you directly before we go any further. You're not broken. You're not failing. But you are likely missing one piece of information that changes everything, and it's it has nothing to do with just trying harder. I'm Dr. Ashley Lucas. I'm a PhD nutritionist, a registered dietitian, and I'm the founder of PhD Weight Loss, where we have helped over now 13,000 people collectively drop more than 480,000 pounds. I have sat across from thousands, thousands of clients who were doing what looked like all the right things and still couldn't drop the weight. In nearly every single case, the answer has been very similar. It wasn't their effort, it was their insulin. If you've been stuck for a while and you are ready to understand what's actually going on inside your body and not just try harder again, that's the exact work we do at PhD Weight Loss. Just go to myphdweightloss.com or click the link in the description to learn more. Here is the reframe I need you to make, and I need you to really let this land. Weight loss is not a willpower problem, it's a hormonal environment problem. We have been sold this story for decades. And the story says you just need to eat less, you need to move more, you need to create a calorie deficit, and the weight will come off. It's that easy. On the surface, this sounds logical, but the model is missing the most important variable in the entire equation, and that variable is insulin. I'm not saying that we defy the law of thermodynamics, but your body is not a simple math problem. It's not a simple in-and-out equation. It is a biological system that is run entirely by hormone signals. And as long as one of those signals, specifically insulin, but there are a few of them, as long as those signals are telling your body to store fat, it does not matter how clean you eat or how many steps a day you log. The body will follow the hormone over the effort every time. So I want you to understand that this is not a personal failure. This is physiology, and once you understand it, everything for you can change. Now, let me start by explaining what insulin actually does inside your body, because a lot of people have only ever heard of it in the context of diabetes. This affects every single person who has ever struggled to drop weight. Insulin is a hormone produced by your pancreas. Its primary job is to manage glucose or sugar. Glucose is basically sugar. It is sugar in the bloodstream. Every time you eat, especially when you eat carbohydrates or sugar, your blood glucose rises. This is a normal, good, healthy response. Your pancreas releases insulin to bring that glucose or those sugar levels in your bloodstream back down by shuttling that sugar into your cells for energy. So, so far so good. That's what we want. That's insulin doing its job. Now guys, insulin is also a fat storage hormone. When insulin is elevated, your body is in storage mode. The door to your fat cells is open, but it's open to receive fat, not to release it. Fat burning requires insulin to be low, right? We need the switch to burning fat to be on, which means insulin is low. They go in opposition here. It is biologically impossible to burn stored body fat in significant amounts when insulin is chronically elevated. I want you to think of it like a switch. Insulin flips the switch to store. When insulin is low, the switch flips to burn. Most people who are struggling to lose weight are living with that switch permanently stuck in the store position. They have no idea that this is the case. So let's talk about for a minute what's keeping that switch stuck. Even when you think you're doing everything right. The first culprit is something most people never suspect. Things like hidden sugar. Salad dressings, protein bars, flavored yogurts, even vanilla. Everyone always asks me, "Well, does vanilla count as a flavor?" Yes, vanilla is a flavor. Smoothies, all of the smoothies that you get at the tropical smoothie places, all of these places, lots of hidden sugars. Whole grain breads and wraps. A lot of folks like to go to Chipotle and they'll be like, "Okay, I'm gonna do the healthy option. I'm gonna get the wrap instead of the burrito." But same thing. And then we think, "Oh gosh, I'm not gonna get the wrap or the tortilla. I'm going to get the bowl that has a ton of rice and beans." Same thing. All of these foods carry a health halo. They're marketed to us as good choices, but many of them are quietly spiking your blood sugar and your insulin significantly multiple times a day. Each spike is small, but the cumulative effect is enormous. It's huge. Now, the second culprit is meal timing. Even if what you're eating is super clean, when you eat matters more than a lot of people realize. I always tell our clients at PhD Weight Loss, I want you to think that there are 4 macronutrients, 4 main things: protein, carbs, fat, and meal timing. When you eat is just as important as what you're eating. Now, eating just carbohydrates in the morning before you've built any metabolic momentum sets off this insulin cascade that will impact your blood sugar for the entire rest of the day. Skipping meals also, and then eating just huge amounts at night creates a surge of insulin when your body is least equipped to handle it. I used to be like this, uh, when I was a professional ballet dancer. I would eat all day long and I would just graze throughout the day. Now, if you do this like I did, even on the healthiest foods, it keeps insulin elevated continuously and your body never gives a break to be able to have some of these low insulin windows that it really needs to access stored fat. The third culprit is chronic stress and poor sleep. Now I know that it doesn't sound like a nutrition problem, but it absolutely is. When I have clients at PhD Weight Loss and they're doing all the right things, eating at the right time, eating exactly how we're telling them to do, and if they do not see weight loss, I know it's either sleep or stress. Cortisol is your primary stress hormone, and I have done so many videos on the topic of cortisol. If you feel like high cortisol or high stress is a big thing impacting your life, then head on into the description and I'll share a link with you on a video where I do a deep dive on the topic of stress and cortisol. The deal with cortisol is that it directly raises blood sugar even when you haven't eaten a single thing. Elevated cortisol means Elevated insulin. It means your body is in a protection and storage mode regardless of what you put on your plate. And if you are a woman and you're in perimenopause or menopause and you have a lower estrogen state, when you have low estrogen and you have elevated insulin and elevated cortisol, it is a perfect storm to put more fat on in your belly area. Now, what about sleep? If you are sleeping poorly, If you are running on empty, if you are operating under constant pressure, your hormonal environment is working directly against your fat loss goals. The fourth culprit, and this one I know is painful to hear, is that you may simply not be eating enough. A lot of clients come into me and they are holding onto 60 pounds, 80 pounds of excess fat mass on their body, and they are not eating very much. Now, I know that this sounds counterintuitive, but chronic undereating is one of the most powerful powerful triggers of metabolic slowdown. When you don't eat enough, your body reads that as a threat. This is actually everything I did around my PhD and my research looked at the impact of our metabolism when we chronically undereat. And I will tell you guys that it will slow our metabolic rate. I saw it over and over again when I was doing my research. It elevates cortisol when you chronically undereat. I was a master at this, by the way, when I was dancing professionally. It slows your thyroid function and it holds onto fat with everything it has because fat is your body's emergency fuel reserve and it's not gonna release it when it believes that you are in a state of scarcity. I see this all the time for clients who come into PhD Weight Loss. I lived it myself, right? These are clients who are barely eating and cannot understand why they're gaining and it is super frustrating. Now, stabilizing blood sugar is the foundational shift that makes everything else work. The more we are able to regulate our blood sugar throughout the day, the more we're gonna be able to get insulin down into that healthy state so that we can burn fat for fuel. I specifically formulated GlucoCut Plus to help your body manage blood sugar naturally, to support your body's own natural GLP-1 levels, and to reduce the cravings that come when insulin is chronically elevated so you can start creating this lower insulin environment your body needs to actually burn fat. Now, this is not a shortcut. It is not a magic pill, but it is really helpful in supporting your biology as you go through and create these lifestyle changes that are necessary, by the way, if you want to drop weight and keep it off sustainably. You can find it at drashleywellness.com. The link is in the description with a special discount for you. Use code ASHLEY10 to get a special discount. What does it actually look like to work with your hormonal environment instead of against it? Let me walk you through the foundational shifts. The first shift is to lead every single meal with protein. If you've listened to any of my videos before, you know that I talk a lot about protein and the importance of starting your meal with it. So like the first thing that you want to touch your mouth in your meal is protein, not carbs, not even fruit. Protein first. When you eat protein before anything else, it's going to help blunt the blood sugar response of everything that follows. It's going to trigger full signals. It's gonna keep insulin lower through the entire meal, and you're gonna be much more less likely to overeat on carbs and kind of these hyperpalatable addictive foods and just end up overeating. It will really help you with this. This one change alone can begin to reset the pattern your body has been in for years. Second shift is to eliminate liquid sugar entirely. Juice, oat milk lattes, sweetened coffee drinks, sports drinks, even most smoothies, unless you have built your smoothie intentionally around protein and fiber. Liquid sugar bypasses every satiety mechanism. That means every full signal your body has and drives insulin harder and faster than almost any solid food. Also, fructose, which you often find in liquid sugar, goes straight to your liver and it's gonna have a higher chance of storing around the liver and in the belly and develop as fatty liver. Just, you want to cut out the liquid sugar. If you are drinking anything with sugar in it on a regular basis, that is one of the first places to look. The third shift is to eat in a way that creates a low insulin window, multiple low insulin windows ideally throughout your day. That means structured meals. Breakfast, lunch, an afternoon snack for most people around 3 to 4 PM, and dinner. You want to do this instead of that constant grazing that I mentioned earlier. It means spacing your eating intentionally so insulin has room to come down before meals, right? Give your body a break. Fat burning happens in those windows. The more of them you can create, the more access your body has to store fat as fuel. Now, one really important thing that we talk about with our clients at PHD weight loss is to have a 12-hour window between the last meal of the day and your first meal the next day. So let's say you finish dinner ideally at 7 PM, you're not going to eat again until at least 7 AM. The reason why is to give your body this window where it can really focus on burning fat for fuel. The fourth shift is to take sleep and stress seriously as metabolic tools. Now I am right here with you. I know that it's difficult to take it seriously. You think, what the heck? You know, going to bed late, waking up early, it's not that big of a deal, but it is massive. You cannot outeat a cortisol problem. I remember I was coaching a client, Tim. This was like probably 2 years ago, and he had a really stressful job. He was a contractor and he was building this like 14,000 square foot square foot home for a fellow who was just about to pass away from cancer. And the, the man wanted to see his house completed before he passed away. And the amount of stress that my client was experiencing to get this done for his client and his family was so massive. He was doing everything that he could possibly do, and his weight loss went from 2.5 pounds per week down to like 0.5. The minute he was done and finished his goal, finished the home, and got to see his client experience that, the weight sped up again to 2.5 pounds per week. Nothing else changed, you guys. It is really massive. I've seen this over and over and over again. Now, sleep, we talked about briefly. Sleep is when your body repairs hormonal function. It helps to regulate appetite signals, and it does the metabolic work of the day. So your target is 7 to 9 hours of quality sleep. It is not a luxury. It is a biological requirement for sustainable fat loss. If stress is high and if it's matched with short sleep, which is really less than 6 hours of sleep a night, then you're gonna be in a state where fat loss is much more difficult for you. Now, if this is the case for you, I would love for you to share your situation in the comments below. If you've been through something like this and you were able to overcome and break through the pattern, share with us how you did that. Give us tips. We're all here together in this community and you can help each other, and I read all the comments. Now, the fifth shift is to eat enough. Enough protein to protect your muscle, enough calories to keep your metabolism running at full capacity, enough food that your body does not register a threat and tighten its grip on every fat cell it has is really important. If this is a struggle for you, I completely understand, and I am still right there with you on some days. Whatever you can do to help support your body in getting the fuel is massive. So if you know that you're gonna have a crazy day tomorrow, the actual first steps of self-love, which most of us need when we are struggling with our weight and with our body, is to do something the day before for your future self. So let's say, you know, it's Tuesday and Wednesday is going to be insane. The number one thing you can do for your future self, your Wednesday self, is to do something Tuesday night to support your body the next day. So this might be like putting your electrolytes in your water the night before and making sure that you've already meal prepped so you have lunch ready so that when you go through your crazy day, you can grab it out of the fridge and take it with you. Eating enough and preparing your day for your body is the one of the number one things you can do to support healthy and sustainable fat loss. This is one of the biggest things we help people with at PhD Weight Loss, and the beautiful thing about it is that we never ever count calories, but we do make sure that every client is adequately and strategically fueled because restriction is not the answer. This is all about repair, getting your body out of survival mode, getting yourself out of that threat mode. Now, here is what I really hope you walk away with today. If you have been doing everything right and not seeing results, you have not been failing. You've just been fighting against this hormonal environment that was never addressed. The effort is real. What you are dealing with is real. It's not just in your brain, not just in your mind. The strategy though was incomplete. Your body's not stubborn. It's not broken. Your body actually never makes a mistake. It was not working against you, even though it feels like that. It is doing exactly what a brilliantly designed biological system does when the signals it receives says to store, to protect, to hold on as tightly as possible. When we can change the signals, when we can stabilize insulin, reduce cortisol, fuel ourselves adequately, then the body's gonna naturally stop holding on. It finally feel safe enough to let go. Now, this is not a theory. This is what I see happen every day with real people who tried everything else. The body responds when the environment is right, and you can build that environment starting right now. Now, if you want to see exactly what a full day of eating looks like to keep insulin low, to burn fat naturally, to eliminate cravings, I've put that together for you in a video right here. It's one of the most practical things I've made, and it maps directly onto everything we just covered. You just can click over here to watch it next. And if this is the kind of information you've been looking for, please subscribe so you don't miss what's coming. I put out new content every week, actually multiple times every week. Remember, you gotta step up to make the change. Lead with your heart, train your mind, and do not negotiate with your body. I'll see you next time.