Unlocking Your Fitness Potential: How Hormones and Metabolism Really Work
Despite what we’ve long been told, losing weight is not a simple matter of “eat less and exercise more”. Millions of women are made to feel bad by this common misconception: that they just need more self-control when it comes to weight loss. Oftentimes, the real key to losing that weight, gaining energy, and improving your mood lies with your hormones. Weight loss resistance is often hormonally based in women. Today, we’re going to talk about the hormones that have the greatest effect on our weight—not to mention our mood and happiness!
Before we get into the conversation about hormones, I want to address the issue of calories. Many times, people immediately turn to counting calories and try to restrict calorie intake. So the question is: is this a good thing to do? Well, as I mentioned earlier, the idea that all you have to do is eat less and exercise more totally oversimplifies what’s going on and all it really does is create a lot of guilt and frustration. Now I won’t say that sheer calories don’t make any difference because they do. Calories do count in a broad general way. If you’re simply consuming way too much energy in your food, your body is going to store all that excess energy as fat, for the most part … so calories do factor into things.
However, using the calorie counts of foods to determine what to eat completely ignores how food is metabolized in your body for optimal health. Sure, you could perhaps lose weight on 1,200 calories a day only by eating bread and pasta, but your body won’t be able to build the lean muscle mass you need to burn fat efficiently and there will be huge amounts of insulin generated to metabolize all those carbs—which is going to counteract all your efforts.
One of the main hormones that plays a role with weight and metabolism is cortisol. We know that your body makes cortisol in response to stress and we know that most of us have way too much chronic stress and as a result, our cortisol is off. High cortisol levels cause a lot of trouble over time: depleting brain chemicals like serotonin, interfering with sleep, and causing you to store fat, especially in your belly. High cortisol is also linked to depression, food addictive behaviors, and sugar cravings. It increases protein breakdown in the body, which can lead to muscle wasting and osteoporosis, or low bone density. Long term, it increases the risk for hypertension, high cholesterol, heart disease, and it also suppresses the immune system which can lead to increased allergies, infections, and cancer. Now let’s look at another hormone that plays a role in metabolism and weight loss.
To understand the role of insulin, we need to understand the blood sugar cycle. It starts with you feeling hungry, either because you have low blood sugar, or because of your normal routine of eating at a particular time, eg. 12 noon is lunch time. You may reflexively reach for a refined carbohydrate, such as a cookie. Maybe you actually eat several of them and enjoy each one. Then a little while later, you get a sugar high, a result of having a really high level of blood sugar. But your body doesn't like the situation at all. In fact, it reacts as if it's an emergency, recruiting the pancreas to release insulin because there is too much sugar in the bloodstream. Basically, when blood glucose increases, insulin is released.
Now, what does insulin do? Well, insulin binds to the receptors on your body’s cells, which causes those cells to unlock the channel that glucose passes through into the cell, where it can eventually be converted into energy. Insulin makes it so that the cells take up glucose, pulling it out of the blood stream, and reducing your blood sugar level. This effort is the body's attempt to reach a state of balance. Now, this process can actually cause too much insulin to be released, especially if there was a really dramatic spike of blood sugar. When too much insulin is released, this causes blood sugar levels to go really low causing you to feel hungry. For some people, it’s that shaky, spaced-out, uncomfortable feeling. And so the cycle repeats. This whole rollercoaster, as you can imagine, is a chemical and biological stress on the body. The stress response and the inflammatory response is constantly activated and that is very harmful for your health.
Insulin is also a fat storage hormone, which means it encourages the body to store fat, which is not helpful, especially when people are trying to lose weight. Once the body has used all the glucose it needs at a particular time, any excess will be stored. It gets stored first in the liver and muscles as glycogen—which is basically a whole bunch of glucose molecules all bundled together for storage — and glycogen is a form of short-term energy storage. It can easily be turned back into glucose when needed. If all the glycogen stores in your muscles and liver are full, then the body turns the excess glucose into lipids, or fat. And fat is long-term energy storage and isn’t as easily converted back into available energy. Fat stores are tough to shift, and this leads to obesity. So balancing blood sugar is one of the most important things you can do to reduce biological and chemical stress so your body can heal and rebuild, and reduce risk of serious diseases.
A third key hormone is the thyroid—a butterfly-shaped gland located in the area of your neck just below the Adam’s apple—is part of your endocrine system and regulates your metabolic rate and exerts a significant effect on the function of nearly every organ in your body. Your thyroid gland acts as the gas pedal of your metabolism. It controls how fast or slow you burn calories and your metabolic rate. When women have hyperthyroidism, they make too much thyroid hormone, which can cause major health issues. A more common condition is hypothyroidism, which occurs when the body doesn’t make enough thyroid hormone. And this is quite common. It can happen at any age for a woman but it becomes particularly common near the start of menopause. In fact, about 26 percent of women in or near perimenopause have this problem.
When the thyroid is sluggish and not producing enough thyroid hormone, it can cause: fatigue, weight gain, hair loss, depression, constipation, dry skin, and many other problems! Thyroid dysfunction is something that a woman can get checked for through her regular doctor, and it’s important to have a low threshold of suspicion for this and to get checked, because like I said, it’s a very common condition. There are, in fact, other hormones that play a role in our metabolism, but these 3 are the big ones.
Now that we’ve learned some of the underlying issues and factors, including the hormones involved in preventing our weight loss efforts, let’s talk about some more practical strategies. First, let’s discuss dietary approaches for balancing hormones. It’s important to choose complex carbs over simple carbs. This is a key way to prevent insulin spikes and balance the blood sugar roller coaster. All foods stimulate your blood sugar but simple carbs like white bread or cookies cause the most extreme spikes. So you want to opt for whole grains or more complex carbs. Maybe add in brown rice and vegetables instead. When you eat a diet that is rich in fiber, fruits, and vegetables, as well as whole grains, your body will have a much more steady level of blood sugar, given that it takes much longer for the body to digest complex carbs. Unfortunately, it's simple for a person to just eat sugar, such as bread and pastries, which are not far from literally being pure sugar. The body doesn't have to work very hard to break down those foods and release the sugar into the bloodstream. It takes much longer for the body to digest complex carbs, so those are the types of carbs to favor.
It’s also important to include more protein into your diet. Similar to the complex carb strategy, including protein helps balance blood sugar by slowing down digestion, which also slows the absorption of any carbohydrate-based food you consume along with it. This of course lessens the intensity and frequency of the blood sugar roller coaster. These two strategies together is why it’s a good idea, for example, to eat an apple with almond butter. Not only does the almond butter add some protein to the snack, it also requires added time for digestion. Eating complex carbs and proteins, and especially a combination of the two, avoids excessive insulin release and subsequent hypoglycemia, and keeps the blood sugar nice and stable.
Next, remember to include healthy fats. Fats are an essential part of the diet because they help with growth, development, regulate hormones, help absorb fat-soluble vitamins like A,D,E, and K, and reduce inflammation. Fats also affect blood sugar because fats have much more complex molecular structures than simple carbohydrates. It takes the digestive system longer to digest them—similar to complex carbs and protein. However, not all fats are created equal. Let’s review the key types of fats
Trans Fat.This is the lowest quality fat and should be avoided as much as possible. These fats are designed to give food flavor and increase their shelf life. Trans fats have also been shown to accelerate aging and increase risk for heart disease and cancer.
Saturated Fat. Saturated fat is generally solid at room temperature and while considered healthier than trans fat, the quality and quantity of consumption of these fats should be monitored. Saturated fat can be found in meats, dairy, some baked goods, fried foods, and palm-based oils such as palm kernel, palm oil, and coconut oil.
Unsaturated Fat. And of course the 3rd fat to look at is considered the healthiest of all fats. They’re the unsaturated fats and they’ve been shown to improve blood cholesterol levels and decrease inflammation, among other health benefits. There are 2 types of unsaturated fat: Monounsaturated fats which are usually liquid at room temp (can be found in foods like peanut, canola, olive oil, avocados, nuts, seeds) and Polyunsaturated fats which are usually liquid at room temperature. Polyunsaturated fats can be found in foods like sunflower, corn, soybean, flax-seed oil, walnuts, flax seeds, fish like salmon, mackerel, trout, and herring.
Another hormone that may affect your weight is actually connected to sleep. Multiple studies have found that people who don’t get enough sleep are more likely to be overweight and obese. One explanation is that when you don’t get enough sleep, your body produces less leptin (which is a hormone that signals the body that you’re full) and more ghrelin (a hormone that tells the body you’re hungry). This delivers a one-two punch: the higher levels of ghrelin make you feel hungrier but the lower levels of leptin keep you from feeling satisfied. Sleep is also an excellent way to prevent and manage that adrenal overload that’s causing so much excess cortisol to be produced.
Knowing everything we now know, how do we increase muscle mass and boost our metabolism with exercise? As women grow older, muscle mass typically decreases and fat increases. Exercise reverses the trend, no matter what age you start. Women who exercise regularly can look forward to, on average, twenty more years of productive living than those who don’t exercise. People often turn to exercise just to try to burn off all their excess calories. But it’s really not that simple. To burn off all those excess calories, you would have to do a ton of exercise. Have you ever used one of those machines that tells you how many calories you burned? You can be on a stairmaster for 45 minutes and at the end it tells you that you burned basically the amount of calories contained in an apple. It’s important to remember that it’s not about burning off excess calories like a simple matter of arithmetic. The key is increasing your lean muscle mass by doing weight or resistance training on a regular basis.
Through weight or resistance training, you’ll be turning up your metabolic rate and your resting metabolic rate, and that’s going to help you with weight loss or weight maintenance. Regular exercise also decreases insulin resistance, which helps your body burn carbohydrates more efficiently, making fat storage much less likely. Exercise can also have an emotional impact on a person. For example, exercise can help you look better, even if you don't lose a lot of weight. In some instances, your waistline becomes smaller, despite the fact that your total body weight remains unchanged. It’s truly incredible to think about all of the different interconnected processing occurring in your body and how your hormones and metabolism plays a big role in weight loss. Now that you’ve learned the basics, I highly recommend checking out my ultimate guide to nutrition, found on my blogs page to continue your education on healthy weight loss!
