There is no one reason. It will be tied up in diet, exercise, stress, previous bouts of dieting, muscle loss. Your reason is individual to you as will be the solution.

This is why we benchmark and measure. Hopping on the scales once a week and hoping for the best is not the way to go.

It’s counterproductive and rarely works. The phrase ‘I am on a diet’ is setting you up for failure. Eating plans that suit your body, taste, culture and lifestyle set you up for success.

Dieting inevitably results in plateaus, followed by weight gain. Diet and failure a number of times are a disaster for your long-term maintenance of weight and muscle mass.

You can’t get around the fact that calorie intake is important and that you might need to make some changes. You might call them sacrifices in the beginning but when you start to see and feel the benefits you will be more than happy with the trade-off.

If you are dieting, you are likely to feel deprived, and deprivation is the single most sited reason for people abandoning their diet. The feeling of deprivation is the killer that drives people back to old bad habits. We try and work on a way of eating that has you satisfied. If your two large flat whites (300 calories) are your die in a ditch for food, we work around that. If it is 2 flat whites and 2 glasses of wine (750 calories) we might have an issue.

A few beers at night is my die in the ditch sustenance. It relaxes me, transports me away to far-off exotic places. Take away the beer and I get that sense of deprivation that makes me question whether the effort is worth it.

So I work around it and don’t stress about it.

There are hundreds of them. Feel full on fewer calories. Feel fuller longer.

The mantra at the gym is ‘eat more protein’ and ‘eat fewer carbs’, but it’s not that simple. We can put a bit of science on the plate rather than random acts of intervention.

Burn calories and stave off hunger. Learn the exercises that work.