Nowadays, the market for selling varied diets and fast weight loss exercises is booming. If you are one of the many people who have tried thousands of diet plans for losing fat but have failed, this article is for you.
According to the Journal Of The American Medical Association (April 2007), The proper function of hormones has a close relationship with success in weight loss. It means that different diet plans success also depends on one's hormone functionality.
How hormones prevent fat burning
Sometimes you can't blame theamount of food you consume in a day, but to solve the obesity problem you have to find the root cause for your obesity.
Poor eating habit is a huge mistake which can endanger your health. Having too many exercises without healthy diet plans can worsen hormones imbalance. This issue can prevent fat burning even with strict diet plans and hard exercises.
Why are most of the diet plans doomed to fail?
Hormones have the duty of burning fats or saving them. When they don't work properly they affect each other and can make it troublesome for you to lose weight or gain it.
Symptoms of unbalanced hormones
Although the best way to realize if you have imbalanced hormones is taking a blood test, yet you can identify it from the signs in your body and mood. These signs are described below.
Take care of your hormones even after the treatment to keep them balanced.
The symptoms are:
- Accumulation of fat around the hip, Love handles or fat gain around the abdomen.
- PMS
- Muscle cramp
- Loss of bone density or osteoporosis
- Obesity
- Frequent gas and bloating
- Hair fall
- Abnormal growth on face or chin in women
- Oval cysts
- day fatigue
- Restless leg syndrome
- Parkinson's disease
- Loss of libido
- Cravings for sweets, carbohydrates
- Lack of sweating
- Heart palpitations
- Erectile dysfunction
- Fibrocystic breast disease
- Heavy menstrual bleeding
- Mood swings
- Anxiety and depression
- Fat gain at hips in women
- Prostate enlargement
- Breast Growth on men
- Thinning skin, thinning hair in the middle of the scalp
- Hot flashes
- Poor memory or concentration
- Difficulty falling asleep
- Irritability mood, having a bad mood(impatience, moodiness, become frustrated or upset easily)
- Frequent colds and flues
- Difficulty building muscles
- Cellulite
- Shrinking or sagging breasts
- Water retention
- Acne
- Difficulty losing weight
- Painful sex
- Acanthosis nigricans (women)
- Constant hunger or increased appetite (women)
- Fatty liver
- Dry skin or hair
- Long menstrual cycle more than 30 days, or irregular periods
- Feeling cold, or cold hands and feet
- Iron deficiency anemia
- Poor memory
- Heart disease
- Constipation
- Night eating syndrome
- Migraines
- Bronchitis
Nowadays, with the constant exposure to many chemical pollutions of the air and consuming estrogen-like compounds in our foods (pesticides and plastic dishes, herbicides and growth hormones) and poor eating habits, all of us have experienced at least some of the symptoms at least a few times in our life.
If you have a lot of the symptoms mentioned above, you probably have hormones imbalance and should be treated quickly, otherwise, it will get worse and may even lead to having other illnesses.
If you don't have any of the symptoms you can still benefit from the hormonal diet plan to increase your body fat burning speed.
In the following, hormones imbalance treatment will be discussed.
What are hormones?
Assuming your body is a song, then your hormones would be the instruments that are played in the song. When your hormones are not balanced the music would be terrible. They need to be tuned and harmonized together to make a piece of beautiful music. Only one untuned instrument would be bad enough to ruin the entire song even if the rest work flawlessly.
The first step to balance your hormones is to know how they work. Look after their voice to become aware as soon as they get untuned. So you can increase each one which is too low, and decrease in case some of them are too high with the help of a special diet.
Can hormones make me fat? Can hormones cause fatigue?
The answer is Yes. As I said before hormones are interconnected. For example, if one stop telling the other "hey take this fat and burn it for the muscles cells", or the other constantly ignore this message and save the fat instead, soon you will have many accumulated fat in your body while you have felt exhausted because of low energy.
The hormone imbalances that prevent fat loss
1.Insulin resistance
Chronic high level of insulin makes the cells in your muscles get blunted to the insulin signal (which says grab the glucose and use it in the muscles). Insulin resistance develops in muscle cells but it can also happen in the liver and other tissues. When your cells become resistant to insulin, losing fat gets so harder.
The best way to find out if you are insulin resistant or insulin sensitive is by taking a blood test. But you can also figure this out by looking carefully at the areas on your waist and love handles.
If you have fat in these areas you may have insulin resistance, otherwise, you are in a good state of insulin sensitivity.
2.Excess Cortisol-Chronic stress
Like what is said about insulin before, you can identify the sign of bad cortisol functionality from the appearance of your body. When cortisol in your body is high for a long time, It increases the amount of fat saved in your belly. Belly fat is accumulated as the consequence of an excessive amount of cortisol.
Excess cortisol causes an excessive appetite for carbohydrates and sugary foods. Many side effects of stress can make you fat.
We all have experienced stress in our lives, and the body needs cortisol to adapt to a stressful situation. Under situations of chronic stress, the body cannot fully achieve a calm state, in consequence, this imbalance causes permanent physiological change.
In the bellow, you can find how excess cortisol disturb the hormonal balance.
- Cortisol by interfering thyroid hormones gets your metabolism down.
- Cortisol makes you depressed
- Excessive cortisol also disrupts your sleep cycle.
- Cortisol cause aging by interfering in growth hormone which has the job to build metabolically active tissues.
- Cortisol blunts serotonin (happy hormones) and make you depressed and craved to sugary foods and carbohydrates.
- Cortisol decreases insulin resistance and causes the accumulation of abdominal fat.
- Cortisol destroys the metabolically active muscle cells and slows down your cells' repairing speed, causes Irritability, fatigue, and headaches between meals.
- Hypoglycemia and symptoms of shakiness are results of imbalance blood sugar caused by excessive cortisol.
3.Excess estrogen-Estrogen dominance
Estrogen is the dominant hormone for two weeks after menstruation in women but it is also essential for men.
Although estrogen is a female hormone, but both men and women have this hormone. As Men grow old they will experience a drop in testosterone production and growth in estrogen levels. Whereas womenlose estrogen as time passes and experience a rise in testosterone levels.
The hormones that play the main role in fat burning
Thyroid (Hypothyroidism or low thyroid):
Symptoms for under-active thyroid:
- Hair loss
- Irregular or heavy menstrual bleeding
- Depression
- Low libido
- Weight gain
- Iron deficiency, anemia and/or high cholesterol
- Constipation
- Dry skin
- Brittle hair, and splitting nails
The hormones which control your appetite are:
- Serotonin
- Melatonin
- Gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA)
- Leptin
- Dopamine
- Acetylcholine
The hormones which simulate the growth of muscles are
- DHEA
- Testosterone
- Growth hormone
boost your fat-burning hormone in your diet plan for quick weight loss
Glucagon: Carb to energy
Glucagon acts the opposite to insulin when your blood sugar drops glucagon directs the liver to synthesize glucose from amino acids released by your muscle to raise the blood sugar.
When you exercise or stop eating for a while, the level of sugar in your blood drops. Here glucagon comes to help with burning the stored fat to provide energy. Since protein consumption stimulates glucagon release, eating substantial amounts of protein from sources like meat and fish can help you lose weight.
The key to keeping insulin secretion low while retaining a stable blood sugar level is a diet which has a substantial amount of protein, low-glycemic carbohydrates, and cereals. Such a diet will promote glucagon release and prevents muscles from getting burned as the fuel while helping the body burn fat.
Bottom line
Hormones are the actual commanders of our body that specify where to store fat or how to lose it. When some of the hormones are not secreted enough, fat accumulation in some areas would be unordinary.
To lose weight and feel healthier you should change not only what you eat but also your lifestyle. Look after your hormones occasionally to decide which diet suits you best.
Suggested reading: The Mediterranean Diet Plan: Lose Weight, Live Healthy
