You may be puzzled as to why you’re not losing weight. Losing weight isn’t easy. You could do everything right – change your diet to try and eat healthy, go for long walks or set time aside to exercise, even doing fasted cardio or trying fad diets – and still come up short in the results you might have expected. For many, this might be frustrating enough to give up on the mission altogether.

But before you despair, run through this checklist from former New York Met coach and trainer Jeff Cavaliere.

Five Reasons Why You’re Not Losing Weight

1. EXERCISE ISN’T THE FASTEST PATH TO WEIGHT LOSS

You might be searching how to get a slim waist, or how to lose weight from your thighs, and think exercises like sit-ups or squats might be the right way to achieve those specific results. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case – you can’t “spot reduce” fat, unfortunately, it clings to some places easier than others – but Cavaliere says diet is actually the key, rather than exercise. So, if you are focused on exercise and ignoring your diet as a way to lose weight that may be one of the reasons you are not losing weight.

“We know that spot reduction isn’t possible, but beyond that, it’s the idea that exercise is the fastest path to weight loss that is flawed”. Cavaliere says we need to focus on changing our diets, taking in less calories in total, and more healthy food specifically. It doesn’t matter what kind of exercise we do – as long as we do enough during the week to offset what we do eat.

2. FASTED CARDIO

One of the biggest weight-loss trends right now is fasted cardio, doing exercise on empty to encourage your body to burn fat. But running on empty is a horrible experience, and studies show it makes no difference to our fat-burning, regardless whether you eat before or after a run.

“When it comes to cardio, research has yet to prove that doing cardio in a fasted state provides any additional benefits to fed cardio,” writes Cavaliere in his YouTube video description. You’re more likely to enjoy your workouts if you’re not starving – and you’re less likely to get up and do fasted cardio if you dread it every day.

3. “CLEAN EATING” MISTAKES

Chicken. Fish. Vegetables. Rice. All of these foods are cornerstones of a healthy diet, and it’s easy to swap out pizzas and pies for these tasty, healthy alternatives. However, what if it’s a breaded chicken katsu curry, dripping with thick, creamy sauce?

Cavaliere recommends that we shouldn’t consider ourselves clean eaters just because we’ve swapped a single ingredient. You may eat chicken or fish more, but was it prepared in a healthy way? Soaked in vegetable oil and roasted, or tossed in a little olive oil and lightly grilled? Once you begin to look at the way your food is prepared, you’ll start to discover all the different changes you have to make in the way we approach food to lose weight.

If you’re looking to prepare favorites healthily, you can swap the greasy frying pan or oven for one of our best air fryer or best health grills recommendations.

4. DIETS WITH NAMES

Keto. Atkins. 5:2. Intermittent fasting. If you’re planning on dropping weight rapidly, it’s easy to jump on board a heavily restricted, well-marketed eating plan and watch the lbs drop off. But unless you’re planning on sticking to these diets forever (and some of them are so restrictive, it would be all-but impossible) you’re inevitably going to put weight back on once these diets end.

Cavaliere recommends “long term lifestyle solutions” rather than quick-fix diets. Slow, sustainable weight loss and muscle gain is the best way to go about it, rather than hoping for an instantaneous drop in fat.

5. YOU’VE GIVEN YOURSELF A TARGET DATE

This tip ties in very closely with the last one. If you’ve got a big event coming up, like a birthday, wedding or big social function, you might be tempted to try everything to look good for it, only to pile the weight back on afterwards.

As Cavaliere mentioned, slow, sustainable lifestyle changes are the ticket rather than quick fixes. Don’t put a date on your weight loss – a healthy life is for, well, life, not just for the Christmas party.

Click here to read more about why you’re not losing weight.