Weight gain is most often blamed on the one primary culprit: food intake. Let’s end the misconception, though, and look at a more accurate reason behind putting on unhealthy amounts of weight. Weight loss resistance is exacerbated by other situations like nutritional deficiencies or toxicity caused by an excess of certain nutrients, inflammation, stress on your metabolism, a poor internal ecosystem, toxins and even genetic predispositions.
We may just consider them chemicals that circulate in our bloodstream, but hormones control the majority of the body’s vital processes, including weight maintenance. One particularly notorious hormone often found in excess is insulin. It is the root cause of weight gain, chronic diseases, and inflammation. Your body may be set in a fat-storage default mode that no longer looks at how much you eat or what you eat. You must get your metabolism functioning optimally in order to benefit from a healthy diet that does not rip you away from your favorite foods and ensures your efforts to maintain a healthy weight are not in vain.
There are many key hormonal players that influence our relationship with weight gain and many are mostly unknown. They sabotage your efforts in maintaining healthy weight levels by creating an imbalance that affects the way your body reacts to the conversion of food into absorbable elements. You may have that one friend that eats like there is no tomorrow but maintains a healthy enough weight; infuriating as it may be, hormones and metabolic rates go a long way in explaining that strange phenomenon.
The bottom line is to eat healthily and support your weight loss efforts with balanced meals, but let’s take a brief look at some of the other factors that may be affecting your waistline.
Thyroid
The stubborn weight that will not drop off no matter the intensity of your efforts may be a sign of thyroid imbalance. The thyroid gland secretes the hormones thyroxine and triiodothyronine, which regulate many vital processes in your body and organs such as the heart, brain, liver, kidney, and skin. Hypothyroidism, which is having lower than normal levels of thyroid hormones, is a major contributor to the symptom of weight loss resistance and is characteristic of a thyroid disorder. Statistics show that low thyroid function, also known as hypothyroidism, plagues one in five women and almost 50% of these cases go undiagnosed.
This condition itself is caused by factors that contribute to weight loss resistance, like a lack of essential nutrients, high stress levels, and a build-up of environmental toxins. Hypothyroidism usually kicks in due to gluten intolerance, whichis often leads to thyroid-targeting autoimmune diseases such as Hashimoto’s.
Cortisol
This notorious stress hormone may also be behind your weight loss resistance. Chronic stress is a leading contributor to weight gain because it makes metabolic processes go askew. Metabolic pathways are activated by cortisol, lowering cellular insulin reception and causing weight gain.
Weight Gain & Your Thyroid
Cortisol is responsible for our primal fight-or-flight instinct. Released by our adrenal glands, it activates a series of processes in our body that strengthen our bodily functions in order to fend for ourselves in stressful situations. Cortisol readies the body by slowing down digestion and metabolism and pumping your heart rate to make you function at a higher energy with better sensory and motor skills.
This fight-or-flight mechanism adapts us to cope with stressors in our daily lives but, when produced in excess, it becomes counterproductive. Long periods of unchecked stress lead to high levels of cortisol continuously circulating in your bloodstream, resulting in higher blood sugar levels, fat-storage instead of fat-burning, high blood pressure and cholesterol levels, and muscle loss.
It is imperative that you make sure your hormone levels are balanced while trying to maintain healthy weight levels; otherwise, your efforts may be in vain as these hormonal imbalances will find a way to make your weight stagnate at unhealthy levels.
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