When I talk to people about their health and weight, the most common phrase I hear is that they feel stuck. It shows up in almost every message, podcast comment, or YouTube reply I receive. People tell me that they have changed their diet, started exercising, cut out sugar, stopped drinking, or even run dozens of miles each week, yet the number on the scale refuses to move. I know that feeling intimately because in 2022, after running the Honolulu Marathon and training with more discipline than I ever had in my life (up until that point at least), I stepped on a scale and saw 195 pounds staring back at me (I should have been in the 160s). I was shocked because in my mind I was doing everything right. I was running thirty to forty miles per week, eating what I assumed was a reasonably healthy diet, and living as an endurance athlete. Yet the data did not lie. I had gained weight and was trending in the wrong direction.

This moment forced me into a level of honesty I had been avoiding. Even as someone who teaches healthy living and breath training as an Athlete with Asthma, I realized that I had blind spots that were affecting my ability to reach my goals. Most importantly, I realized that feeling stuck is not a personal failure but a sign that something deeper needs to be understood. What I discovered during that season of life led to three core reasons that changed everything for me that I will share with you in this blog post (and in the YouTube video linked here and podcast episode linked here). These are the same insights that helped me lose thirty pounds in ninety days and keep it off years later.

Reason 1: Training Harder but Eating More

One of the most painful realizations I had was that training harder often makes you eat more without even noticing it. When I became a marathon runner, I told myself that running forty miles per week meant I could eat whatever I wanted. Friends and family reinforced this idea by saying things like you must be able to eat anything since you run so much or you deserve that extra pizza because you exercise so often. These comments seem harmless, yet they create a quiet permission structure that encourages you to justify overeating. Looking back, I now see that I was using exercise as an excuse rather than understanding it as one pillar of a much larger system.

This is exactly what many people experience when their weight plateaus. Exercise becomes both the justification for eating more and the illusion that everything is fine. You can run marathons, do CrossFit, take HIIT classes, ride your bike for hours, or lift weights every day, but if food consumption subtly increases alongside the training, the scale will not move. In some cases you might even gain weight like I did. This was not because training is ineffective but because training alone cannot outrun overeating. Once I saw this clearly, I had to confront the truth that working out does not cancel out calories. It simply supports a healthier body that still requires intentional tracking.

Reason 2: Changing Your Diet Without Understanding the Numbers

Another major reason people stay stuck at the same weight is that they change their diet without understanding their numbers. This is the trap I fell into when I started eating mostly vegetarian meals and assumed I was automatically making healthier choices. While the quality of my food improved, the quantity quietly increased. I was eating more calories than I realized, even though my meals were packed with vegetables and high quality ingredients. I convinced myself that healthier food could be eaten in unlimited amounts.

The truth is that from a weight loss standpoint, your body does not distinguish between two thousand five hundred calories of cake and two thousand five hundred calories of vegetables. Your metabolism certainly responds differently, and the nutritional value is not even close, but the math itself does not change. If you are eating more calories than your body burns in a day, you will either plateau or gain weight. This is why people who switch to keto or become pescatarian or give up processed foods often lose weight at first and then stall. The initial metabolic shift creates momentum, but without understanding the numbers, the progress reverses.

When I finally calculated my baseline caloric needs, everything shifted. At thirty four years old, weighing one hundred sixty five pounds, my body requires around sixteen hundred calories a day to maintain basic functions if I did nothing but lie in bed. On days when I run two or three miles and lift for forty five minutes, my burn might increase to around twenty two hundred calories. That means that if I want to maintain my weight, I have to stay under that number. If I want to lose weight, I need to create a caloric deficit of roughly five hundred calories per day. Once the math became part of my daily awareness, the plateau ended almost immediately.

Reason 3: Willpower Doesn't Work

The third reason people stay stuck is that they rely solely on willpower while living in an environment that constantly works against them. This was another painful truth I had to face. Brian Johnson, the billionaire longevity expert behind Blueprint, often says that you are not fully at fault for your unhealthy habits because your environment shapes your choices more than you think. When you drive past fast food restaurants every day, watch television commercials filled with ultra processed foods, or scroll through social media saturated with ads for snacks and comfort foods, you are fighting an uphill battle.

Dr. Benjamin Hardy, author of Willpower Does Not Work, has shown through his research that willpower is a limited resource. It can work for short bursts but eventually collapses under the pressure of a poor environment. Even if you master training and diet, your surroundings can sabotage your progress. If your home is filled with chips, candy, cookies, soda, or alcohol, eventually you will eat or drink them. If your social circle only meets at bars, restaurants, or parties, eventually you will participate in habits that do not support your goals.

Changing your environment does not require moving to a new city or buying a new house. It begins with small adjustments. You can stop watching TV with ads, replace social scrolling with a book, take different routes home to avoid fast food, surround yourself with people who care about their health, and remove tempting foods from your kitchen. These changes accumulate and reshape your habits in profound ways. They certainly reshaped mine.

The Three Pillars That Finally Helped Me Break Through

After discovering these three reasons for my weight plateau, I built a system that integrated movement, tracking, and accountability. These are the three pillars of healthy living that I now teach in my Healthy Living Guide. Since I was already running thirty to forty miles per week, movement was never my issue. What I lacked was structure and numerical awareness. Once I paired movement with tracking my calories, everything began to shift.

Accountability became the final piece. When you share your journey with someone else, when you allow others to support you and you support them in return, you create a positive environment that makes progress easier. You begin to live in a context where healthy choices feel natural rather than forced. Together, these three pillars helped me lose thirty pounds in ninety days. More importantly, they helped me maintain my weight for years. I now know exactly how to adjust my goals whether I am preparing for a race or simply maintaining everyday wellness.

Taking Control of Your Weight and Your Life

If you are stuck at the same weight, you are not broken and you are not alone. You may simply be missing one of the three insights that changed my life. You might be eating more because you are training harder. You might be changing your diet without understanding your numbers. You might be relying on willpower while living in an environment that quietly sabotages your habits. All of these are changeable. All of these can be rewired.

The moment you decide to integrate movement, tracking, and accountability, everything shifts. You take your power back. You begin to understand your body with clarity instead of confusion. You reclaim your health instead of surrendering to frustration. I believe in this process because it worked for me when nothing else did. It can work for you too.