Why is It so Hard to Lose Weight
- ahwcweb
- Dec 2, 2025
- 5 min read
We are in the full swing of the holiday season. Holidays can be especially challenging if we are trying to lose weight. Often during the holidays we leave off our routine of utilizing the special gift of our muscles throughout the holidays.
What can we do differently this year to help us. While we have discussed portion control and temperance in the past, in this blog I would like to focus on Metabolism; because when it comes to metabolism, not all pounds are created equal. A pound of fat and a pound of muscle may weigh the same, but they behave very differently inside your body. Understanding this difference can reshape how you think about fitness, strength training and weight management.
Muscle vs. Fat Metabolism
Muscle tissue: Burns roughly 6–7 calories per pound per day.
Muscle is metabolically active—it supports movement, repairs itself, and is constantly undergoing protein turnover.
Fat tissue: Burns roughly 2–3 calories per pound per day.
Fat cells (adipocytes) are mostly storage units for triglycerides.
They contain some protein and water, but they don’t perform much active work.
This makes them metabolically “cheap” to maintain.
Tissue Type | Calories Burned per Pound per Day | Function |
Muscle | 6-7 calories | Active tissue, supports movement, repairs, protein turnover |
Fat | 2-3 calories | Energy storage, minimal metabolic activity |
Fat is essentially your body’s energy reservoir and is important for emergencies, such as when you go longer than expected between meals or are fasting, sleeping, or engaged in extensive physical activity.
While fat burns very little fuel through the it, it has immense compacity to store fuel (calories). Each pound of fat stores 3,500–4,100 calories.
The Metabolic Power of Muscle
Muscle, on the other hand, is the real driver of your resting metabolism because it constantly requires energy to sustain itself because it is metabolically active tissue that constantly uses ATP (adenosine triphosphate – your energy generator) for maintenance, repair, and contraction, even at rest.
Because muscles are always “on” metabolically, far more calories than fat tissue. This explains why building muscle increases your resting metabolic rate and supports long-term weight management.
Muscle and Weight Management
Let’s look at this another way:
Building muscle boosts metabolism: Adding 10 pounds of muscle will raise your daily calorie burn by ~70 calories.
Losing fat lowers metabolism: Dropping 10 pounds of fat reduces your daily burn by ~20–30 calories. So if you are losing fat but are not building muscle, your metabolism (calorie burning rate) is dropping, and to maintain weight loss you will have to continue eating less and less to compensate for the decreased metabolism. Therefore as you lose fat, you will also want to build muscle to keep the metabolic rate elevated as much as possible.
Strength Training is Essential: Strength Training increases muscle mass and therefore helps offset the metabolic slowdown that often comes with weight loss.
Fat may be a massive energy bank, but it’s muscle that keeps your metabolism humming. If your goal is sustainable weight management, focus not just on losing fat but also on building and maintaining muscle and eating food that will aid in reducing fat storage: foods as grown – fruits, vegetable, legumes, roots, tubers, and whole grains. Strength training isn’t just about aesthetics, it’s about keeping your body’s engine running strong throughout the holiday season and beyond.
Blue Skies and Happy Holidays!
Dana West, RDN, LD, ACLMDIP
Dana holds a bachelors in Dietetics and is board certified in Lifestyle Medicine, with emphasis in human nutrition, physiology and nutrition education. She is registered with the Commission of Dietetic Registration and is licensed with the state of AR. Dana has a passion for helping people embrace health and conquer disease and has been doing so for nearly 30 years.
She is the co-founder and president of Abundant Health Wellness Center with a goal to help you achieve your best health and the creator of the Start a New YOU!® online program to reverse inflammation so you can start feeling better day by day. She hosts 5-12-day reversing disease immersive health retreats to help you put all the pieces together to experience health now.
Dana has written three books:
Start a New YOU!® Cookbook: An anti-inflammatory cookbook avoiding common food allergens with a 2-week menu with all the recipes.
Start a New YOU!® Reflections: A health devotional highlighting the Ten Essentials for Health™ that she covers in the Start a New YOU!® Program to reverse inflammation and chronic disease.
References:
Last Call to Help Us Transform Lives with our 2026 Matching Fund
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At Abundant Health Wellness Center, we believe in healing the whole person—mind, body, and spirit. Through our life-changing Start a New YOU!® Disease Reversal Programs and immersive Health Retreats, we’ve helped many individuals reclaim their vitality, rediscover purpose, and rewrite their own wellness stories.
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