Your hormones could be the missing link in your weight loss journey!
Losing weight in an unbalanced body is nearly impossible. Not only is it incredibly hard - it also harms your health. Choosing a lifestyle or diet that harms your hormones, will only worsen any health or weight problem you’re currently dealing with.
4 Hormones You Need To Balance First, Before You Can Lose Any Weight.
Are these hormones blocking your weight loss?
1. Stress Hormones
Too much stress might be the reason you gained weight in the first place, or why you’ve trouble losing weight at the moment. Here's why.
Stress Makes It Impossible To Burn Fat
Did you know that as long as you're stressed, it's physically impossible to burn fat? That's why you'll crave much more sugar in stressful times than you normally would! Now how does that work?
You need oxygen in your cells to be able to burn fat. Unfortunately, stress keeps oxygen from reaching your cells, forcing your body to remain in a "sugar-burning mode". You can compare sugar burning with burning newspapers, you'll constantly need more paper to burn. Sugar is a dirty and inefficient fuel source compared to fat. When your body can use fat for fuel it's like burning beautiful logs of oak, which will keep you warm and satisfied for a long time. Fat is much healthier and sustainable fuel for your body.
Also read: 3 Ways Stress Affects Your Body & How To Stop It Immediately
Stress Triggers Other Hormone Imbalances & Problems That Block Weight Loss
Unfortunately, stress causes many other health problems as well. For instance, the imbalances in your sex hormones could very well be induced by your chronically high-stress levels. When you're constantly stressed, you'll need an unhealthy amount of stress hormone (cortisol) and your stress system will start to “steal” from your other steroid hormones such as progesterone, throwing off your sex hormone balance.
Chronic stress can also cause gut problems, giving way to bad gut bacteria. The prolonged activation of your stress system can even cause insulin resistance and has an inflammatory effect on your cells.
Stress is so much more than work and worries. Do you want to empty your stress bucket? Join our free masterclass!
2. Sugar Hormone
Do you have frequent sugar cravings? Are you having a hard time skipping a meal without feeling dizzy or low in energy? Do you crave something sweet after every meal? You’re probably suffering from insulin resistance.
Sugar Addicition & Insulin Resistance
Insulin resistance is the result of eating too much sugar and comfort carbs, eating too often, and an overactive immune system. Because of continuously high blood sugar levels, your body is forced to produce too much of the blood-sugar-regulating hormone insulin, to help sugar get out of your blood and into your cells.
The insulin overload eventually makes your cells insensitive to insulin, which makes it impossible for sugar to enter your cells. Because sugar isn't reaching your cells anymore, your body will make you think that you need to eat more sugar; even though you have too much of it in your blood already. At this point, you've become insulin resistant.
Also read: Always Hungry? How To Kill Your Sugar Addiction Before It Kills You
Why Diets That Ignore Insulin Resistance Are Doomed To Fail
When sugar doesn't reach your cells anymore, but you’re in sugar burning mode, your body will always feel like it needs more energy (more food). It'll be very hard to stick to any diet because you’ll feel energy depleted as soon as you cut down on meals, which will trigger even stronger sugar cravings.
A lot of popular diets are calorie restrictive or make you eat certain foods in unusual proportions, making it even harder to stick to your weight loss plan. And once you’ve finished these diets and reached your ideal weight, you’ll be gaining weight again in no time if you haven't fixed your insulin-resistant cells.
Beating insulin resistance and all of its symptoms can only be achieved if you really commit to making a lifestyle change for good.
A healthy diet avoids refined sugars and processed foods; is low in high-glycemic foods; high in plant-based fibers, minerals and vitamins; and won’t make you eat more than 5 times a day. It'll recommend you to move more, especially on an empty stomach and relieve stress and inflammation.
3. Misfiring Sex Hormones
Regardless the type of hormone imbalance, ignoring your hormonal health makes it virtually impossible to shed any weight.
Estrogen Dominance
One of the most common hormonal imbalances in women nowadays is estrogen dominance: when estrogen levels are too high compared to progesterone levels. Estrogen stimulates fat retention, resulting in weight gain. To make things worse, estrogen itself is produced in fat cells. So the higher your fat percentage, the more estrogen is produced in your body.
When you suffer from estrogen dominance, and you start a diet without restoring your estrogen-progesterone balance first, you won't get the weight loss results you want. And even if you do manage to lose the weight, estrogen dominance will soon trigger weight gain again. The process is so much easier when you first restore this hormone imbalance.
Low Testosterone Levels
Losing weight is just as hard when you suffer from low testosterone levels. Testosterone (in men AND in women) is the hormone that promotes fat burning and muscle building. Naturally, it becomes virtually impossible to get or stay in shape when you’re low on testosterone.
Also read: This Is What Happens When You Suffer From Hormonal Imbalances
Luckily, there are ways to address your weight and hormone imbalances simultaneously. By choosing the right diet for your body type, and do mental and physical exercises built to balance your hormones, reduce inflammation and heal your metabolism, you can achieve everlasting weight loss.
If you follow this path, you won’t get trapped in yo-yo-ing back into your old weight and can finally experience what it feels like to feel healthy and happy again without the struggle!
4. Gut Problems
A fourth common factor that triggers weight gain is bad gut health. Your gut is one of the most import systems in our bodies to promote weight loss and is closely related to hormones.
Gut health determines whether certain nutrients, vitamins, and good bacteria can enter and whether bad substances are rejected. If your intestines aren’t functioning well, bad substances can enter your bloodstream and other body systems, slowing down your metabolism and activating your immune system.
Also read: The Ultimate Guide To Gut Health & How To Hack Gut Problems
A problematic gut might very well be the reason you started to gain weight in the first place! A malfunctioning gut barrier means you can’t process your precious nutrients the right way and will lead to digestive problems such as bloating, constipation, diarrhea, belly aches and... weight gain.
If you start dieting without taking your gut barrier into consideration, you’ll probably notice that your digestive problems worsen.
When you suffer from bad gut health, you should prioritize a diet that's high in fibers (from plants), low in sugar and carbohydrates and that doesn’t contain toxic antinutrients such as gluten or legumes which will further damage your intestinal wall.
What To Do When You Have Hormones Blocking Your Weight Loss
Now you know that it could be your hormones blocking your weight loss. Imbalanced stress-, sugar-, and sex hormones, as well as poor gut health, are 4 reasons why you aren’t losing any, if not gaining weight.
But beware that health and weight problems are almost always a combination of all these factors. Chronic stress, insulin resistance, misfiring sex hormones, and gut problems often go hand in hand.
You should, therefore, be very considerate when it comes to any diet and lifestyle changes. A diet that ignores these problems will only worsen them and won’t give you the results you’re looking for.
When we speak of a “diet", we never mean a short-term diet such as the restrictive fad diets that are so popular. For us, a diet literally means “a way of eating”. It’s far more permanent and always with consideration of your hormonal balance, body type, metabolism, gut, stress-level or any other system that's influenced by your nutrition.
If you eat, move and rest to balance your body first, the rest will fall into place.
The nutrient-dense, hormone-balancing and metabolic-healing recipes, exercises and workbooks in our Personal Body Reset Program are specifically designed to solve any hormonal imbalances while helping you lose weight. We’ll always put the emphasis on getting healthy first. Losing weight is just a result of that!
You’ll see the real results of addressing health issues reflected in your waistline already in 6 Weeks.
x Laura
