10 reasons why women find it difficult to lose weight

Jan 24, 2025

TOI Lifestyle Desk

Women’s unique weight-loss challenges

Losing weight can be uniquely challenging for women due to biological, hormonal, and lifestyle factors. From slower metabolism to societal pressures, understanding these obstacles can help create more effective and sustainable weight-loss strategies for women

Hormonal changes

Hormonal fluctuations during menstruation, pregnancy, and menopause can disrupt metabolism, increase appetite, and promote fat storage. These natural changes make it harder for women to achieve and maintain consistent weight-loss progress.

Emotional eating

Stress, anxiety, or emotional challenges often lead women to emotional eating, relying on high-calorie comfort foods that derail healthy eating habits. This can create a cycle of frustration and hinder consistent weight loss efforts.

Sleep deprivation

Mothers and busy women lack the proper amount of sleep and have changed their hunger-regulating hormones, including ghrelin and leptin. This promotes increased cravings, lower energy levels, and a higher tendency to determine unhealthy choices.

Busy lifestyles

Many women have busy lives juggling family, work, and social life. It leaves them with little time and space for preparing meals or undertaking regular exercise. It brings imbalance in a daily routine, thus making it difficult to achieve weight-loss stability.

Societal pressures

Unrealistic beauty standards push the females toward crash diets or unhealthy practices that harm metabolism. More often, such pressures end in temporary weight loss followed by weight regain and making results hard to achieve for long.

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Body composition

Women’s bodies naturally carry more fat than men’s due to reproductive needs. This higher fat percentage makes weight loss a slower process, as the body prioritizes maintaining fat reserves for hormonal and reproductive functions.

Slower metabolism

Women generally have a lower basal metabolic rate than men, meaning they burn fewer calories at rest. A natural slower metabolism in women makes losing weight more difficult and requires greater efforts in diet and exercise.

PCOS and other issues

Other health issues, including PCOS, imbalances in the thyroid, or an imbalance of hormones, are common in women. Such diseases might slow one’s rate of metabolism, increase fat storage, and even make losing weight very difficult.

Lack of strength training

Many women center their workout regimes on cardio. They forget strength training, an essential component to increase metabolism and burn more calories for sustainable weight loss. Therefore, many neglect this aspect of their fitness regime

Common diet myths

Fad diets promise quick results in terms of weight loss, but they’re usually unsustainable and nutritionally unbalanced. Such diets may show temporary success among women, who eventually regain lost weight, further complicating healthy eating habits

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