Not long ago someone in one of my coaching groups asked, “Why is it so much harder to lose weight than it is to gain weight?”

I thought this was a great question, because this client’s right: For most people, losing your weight, even with a program that works as well the Code Red Lifestyle™, is harder than gaining it all back.

So what’s the deal? Why do our bodies want to gain weight more easily than they want to let it go?

The main reason is: Storing fat is what they’re designed to do.

In our society today, food is abundant. Stores, restaurants, vending machines, the Internet–it’s everywhere.

But for the vast majority of human history, that was not the case. Everyone had to hunt, forage for, and/or grow their food.

So in those rare times when food was abundant, we’d eat as much as we could, and our bodies would store it as fat, to get us through the lean months when food was hard to come by.

That’s how our bodies evolved, and a few decades of food abundance aren’t enough to undo all those millennia of human evolution.

The next reason it’s so much easier to gain weight than to lose it may be due to weight loss resistance.

I’m not talking about the medical kind, that certain health conditions supposedly cause.

I’m talking about the kind that happens after years of losing and re-gaining your weight.

When it takes effect depends on the person.

You may actually have it going on, or you may just believe you do because of society’s bullcrap myths about why you “can’t” lose weight; or because you don’t have your custom numbers that you get with a Code Red custom program.

But I have had clients with bona fide weight loss resistance. They can lose weight, it’s just at a slower than average rate.

Your body also likes to pack on weight more than it likes to drop weight because of something called homeostasis.

It’s a fancy way of saying your body likes to settle, or return to its baseline.

In a lot of ways it’s a good thing, such as your body wanting to fight off disease or the flu and return to a baseline of health.

But if you’ve been overweight for years and years, being overweight may be your body’s baseline, and, for a while, it’ll want to return to that.

NONE of these reasons why it’s easier to gain weight than it is to lose it mean you cannot lose your weight and keep it off.

All it means is what I already tell you: That you cannot make a temporary change to lose your weight, then go back to the food and habits that got you fat and sick in the first place.

Permanent weight loss requires permanent change.

The sooner you can embrace that, the sooner you’ll get to enjoy a life free of obesity and hopelessness.