For two years I did everything right, or at least everything I had been told was right. I counted calories. I gave up wine on weeknights. I walked most mornings and pushed through workouts I did not enjoy. And the scale barely moved. Some months it crept up anyway, no matter how carefully I logged every meal.
I want to tell you what I eventually learned, because I spent so long thinking the problem was me.
For a while I genuinely believed I simply was not disciplined enough. I would look at the maths, calories in and calories out, and it seemed so simple on paper. If it was not working, the only explanation I could come up with was that I must be quietly cheating somewhere, eating more than I realised, moving less than I thought. So I tracked harder. I cut more. And still, nothing changed.
The thing that finally moved the needle was not another diet. It was asking my doctor for actual lab work, instead of a scale reading and a shrug.
The word I had never heard applied to me
That is when I first heard the words insulin resistance.
My fasting glucose had always come back "normal", so I had assumed my metabolism was fine. What nobody had checked was my fasting insulin, which turned out to have been quietly elevated for who knows how long.
This is the part I wish someone had explained years earlier. Insulin's job is to move sugar out of your blood and into your cells. When your cells stop responding to it properly, your body simply makes more of it to get the same job done. Your glucose reading can stay perfectly normal for years while your insulin climbs behind it, because your pancreas is quietly working overtime to keep that number looking fine.
The test was normal. The test was also not the test that would have found it.
Insulin does something else too. It tells your body to store fat rather than release it. So even on a genuinely low calorie day, I was working alongside a signal that willpower was never designed to argue with.
I want to be careful here, because I believed something for a while that was not quite true. Insulin resistance did not make losing weight impossible for me. It made it slower and harder than the same effort would have been for someone whose insulin was behaving. That is a very different thing from what I had been telling myself, which was that I was failing. And there is a genuinely encouraging piece to this: losing even 5 to 10 per cent of your body weight is one of the most reliable ways to improve insulin resistance itself. The two work on each other. It is just that starting from where I was, the first turn of the wheel took more than it should have.
The second signal, and why I was always hungry
The other piece was leptin, and this one explained so much.
Leptin is made by your fat cells, and its whole job is to tell your brain that there is enough stored energy and you can stop feeling hungry now. In theory that signal should get louder as you carry more body fat. In practice, years of stress, broken sleep and repeated cycles of dieting had made my brain far less responsive to it.
My brain was reading the situation as scarcity rather than plenty, and responding exactly the way a brain is built to: increasing hunger, easing off the metabolic accelerator, and holding on to every bit of stored energy it could.
That is the part that used to make me feel almost betrayed by my own body. It was not stubbornness. It was biology doing precisely what it believed was required.
Nothing was happening on its own
Once I understood that, several other things clicked into place.
My thyroid panel came back only mildly off, nothing dramatic, but enough to matter. My cortisol was high, which made sense given how many years I had spent running on stress and too little sleep. I was also edging toward perimenopause, and nobody had mentioned that shifting hormones alone can change where and how your body stores fat, entirely separately from anything on your plate.
None of these were happening in isolation. They were all feeding one another.
What actually helped
It was not eating even less.
It was giving my body a reason to trust that food was safe and predictable again. A way of eating that did not demand constant insulin spikes. Movement chosen specifically to improve insulin sensitivity rather than just to burn calories. Better sleep, which I had been treating as optional for a decade. And support built around what my own lab results actually showed, rather than a generic list off the internet.
That last point matters more than any of the specifics. What worked for me was built on my numbers. Yours will be built on yours, which is exactly why the testing comes first.
If any of this sounds like you
The single most useful thing I did was walk into an appointment asking for specific tests rather than describing a feeling. Fasting insulin alongside fasting glucose, rather than glucose on its own. Thyroid function in full, not just TSH. Vitamin D. Inflammatory markers. Something to look at cortisol.
Ask for the numbers. Then ask what they mean. You are allowed to do both.
If you take one thing from my experience, let it be this. If you are doing everything you know how to do and it still is not working, you are very likely not lazy, not broken, and not imagining it. You may simply be trying to out-discipline a hormonal signal that no amount of willpower was ever meant to override on its own.
Test first. Then build the plan around what your body is actually telling you.
xoxo VX Diary
This is a personal account shared for general awareness, not medical advice, and not a diagnosis or a treatment plan. Lab results need interpreting by a doctor who knows your history. Please speak with a healthcare professional before changing how you eat, exercise, or before starting any supplement, particularly if you are pregnant, trying to conceive, breastfeeding, or taking any medication.
Body & Hormones · Insulin Resistance · Leptin · Metabolic Health · Shared Story