3 key hormones critical for weight loss, for over 40’s
There were 2 pieces of information that completely impacted my ability to lose weight and also keep of off for good once I hit 40. In this article I am going to talk through the first, which was understanding over hunger, which is caused as a result of an imbalance in our hormones.
Until I learnt about hormonal imbalances, I had always thought that urgent feelings of hunger were normal and something that needed to be addressed, right away. I remember finding weight loss so difficult, as whilst I tried to stay on the diet, these overwhelming feelings of hunger would just get stronger and stronger and I had no way of reducing them.
It wasn’t until I learnt about hormonal imbalances and the impact these imbalances have on our feelings of hunger, that I was able to actual take steps to reduce those urgent cravings that had always blocked me from losing the weight I wanted.
I remember the first time I learnt that when you have insulin in your blood you cannot burn fat. I instantly thought, why in all my years of dieting and binging had I never heard this before?! It is something that when you think about it, makes complete sense. But it was something that never seemed to be talked about. In fact a lot of what I had heard, was that smaller frequent meals were the way to go.
This knowledge lead me down a path to learn all I could about hormones, and through this what I learnt is that whilst there are a heap of hormones, the 3 that I really focussed on to deal with these urgent cravings, to help me lose weight were:
Insulin, a fat storage hormone, whose job is to clear the blood of sugar
Grelin, the hormone that tells you when you are hungry. This is that grumbling feeling you get in your stomach, and
Leptin, the hormone that is responsible for letting you know when you’re full.
When we have elevated insulin, it impacts both Grelin and Leptin, which can then cause an imbalance, resulting in our body sending us false hunger signals.
So many of my clients have found, similar to me, that weight loss is hard because of those urgent cravings of hunger. When we delved into it, what we identified is that most of them had hormonal imbalances, with resistance in insulin, leptin and grelin. And it was this imbalance that was making weight loss so difficult. In our Lose the Last 10kg for Good weight loss program, I delve into these hormones in detail and one of the first steps we do, is identify if you have an imbalance and if you do, then we first work together to rebalance them, so we get your body working as it was design to.
But for today, to be able to lose weight we need rebalance your hormones, reduce your bodies resistance, so that you reduce those urgent feelings of hunger, caused by an imbalance and that make weight loss do difficult.
When we are constantly responding to our hunger signals which are caused by hormonal imbalances, our bodies become trained not to go into our fat stores for energy, rather it will just send you a message to eat more, which will result in more unused energy being stored as fat for later.
To have our bodies working efficiently (and as they are design to), we need to retrain our body to utilise our fat stores for energy. Train them to become what we call fat adapted. That way when our body needs energy, rather than sending you a signal to eat, it will instead go into your fat stores and use that for energy. I like to call this eating in and it is the way our bodies are supposed to work. However in a world where there is so much concentrated foods, our bodies have often become imbalanced, making weight loss feel impossible.
To identify if you possibly have a hormonal imbalance, a few questions you can ask yourself are:
When you are hungry do you find yourself craving things like sugar, pasta, bread?
Does your hunger feel urgent, like something you need to solve for quickly?
Do you still feel hungry after a good size meal?
Do you notice that you are tired throughout the day, despite eating good size meals?
Do you look to food to get more energy?
If you answered yes to any of the above, then it is highly likely you have an imbalance.
The great news about hormonal imbalances is that by make a few changes, we can get your body back in balance within about 14 days, and once your hormones are in balance, you can start trusting the wisdom of your bodies hunger cues and those urgent feelings of hunger will subside.
As insulin is the main driver of the imbalance, a couple of things you could try and help get them back into balance are:
Increasing the gaps between meals so that your body has a chance to not have insulin in your blood stream, so it can start to access your fat stores. Remembering that when there is insulin in your blood you cannot burn fat. There was a study done on mice and it looked at both obese and lean mice and the impact on their weight loss and gain if you gave them food throughout the day, vs only during certain times. Consistently what it showed was that while eating the same amount of food, the mice who were given food only during certain hours did not put on weight, vs the mice who were able to eat that food throughout the day. This research really shows the importance of creating gaps between eating so that your body has a chance to no have insulin in the blood so that it can start to tap into your fat stores for energy.
The second thing you can do is reduce processed sugars and flours from your diet for a 2 week period, to enable your hormones to start to rebalance, so that you can start feeling the difference between a craving (urge) vs a true hunger signal. I know for me, I didn’t know the difference in feeling and once I learnt this, it made such a difference for me, as helped me know when I needed to respond vs not.
There is so much research on insulin and hormones if you want to find out more, otherwise feel free to sign up to my free course, which talks about hormonal imbalances and the second driver of why we are often overweight.
