Androgenix Blog

Have you noticed that your favorite jeans are becoming slowly tighter despite washing them in cold water? Have you recently popped a button while sitting down? Are all your weight loss efforts fruitless or temporary? If so, your weight gain may be caused by a hormonal imbalance and hormone therapy at Androgenix Advanced Health and Wellness in North Palm Beach, FL may be able to help you.

Can Hormone Therapy Really Help With Weight Loss? 

Yes. If your weight gain is a symptom of a hormonal imbalance, hormone therapy can really help you with weight loss. However, it’s important to understand that hormone therapy is not a magic treatment. Losing weight still comes down to a combination of simple arithmetic and discipline. Let’s take a closer look at how bringing your hormone levels back into balance can help you lose weight for good.

How Hormone Therapy Can Help You Lose Weight

Improved Fat Metabolism

One of the countless roles played by your hormones is fat metabolism regulation. Essentially, if your hormones are balanced, your body will process the calories it needs efficiently. It will burn the carbs you eat for fuel and store the rest as glycogen rather than fat. It will also more efficiently burn stored fat for fuel once it has gone through its glycogen stores.

As you age, your hormones become progressively more imbalanced. As this occurs, maintaining your weight becomes increasingly more difficult. Unfortunately, as you gain more weight, your hormones become even more imbalanced. It is a cycle so vicious that sometimes it can only be stopped with bioidentical hormone replacement therapy. To stabilize your hormone levels, reset your appetite, and elevate your fat metabolism, ask a hormone expert if hormone therapy can help you.

Stabilized Mood

Another way weight loss is facilitated through hormone therapy is with mood stabilization. There may be people who never “eat their feelings,” but nearly everyone eats emotionally. If you’re not sure if you’re an emotional eater, keep a journal of what you eat, when, and why. You may find that the only time you reach for ice cream, candy bar, or a large plate of mac and cheese is when you are feeling sad, stressed, anxious, or overwhelmed.

By stabilizing your mood, hormone therapy mitigates the risk that you will eat and drink unhealthy foods and beverages in excess when you’ve had a bad day at work or something goes wrong in your personal life. If you’re an emotional eater, this alone will go a long way in helping you lose weight without you even trying hard to change your lifestyle.

The Effect of Stress on Weight Gain

One of the best things you can do to help yourself lose weight is to reduce stress in your life. When direct stress reduction is possible, you should learn how to manage your response to stress better. Some people find success managing stress by going for a jog, playing with a puppy, or combining a professional massage with relaxing aromatherapy. If you find that you stress-eat, take some time to find out which triggers you can avoid and how you can relax in the face of stress.

When you’re stressed, your body produces more of a hormone called cortisol, also known as the stress hormone. This hormone wreaks havoc on any fat loss attempts you may be making. This hormone simultaneously tells your body to store more fat around the organs in your midsection, increases the production of ghrelin (the hunger hormone) and decreases the production of leptin (the satiety hormone). This makes you far hungrier than you should be.

Improved Protein Metabolism

Another key role played by your hormones in weight maintenance or loss is protein metabolism. When you exercise to the point of exhaustion and muscle failure, your muscle cells break down. To grow muscles that are bigger and stronger than they were before, your body needs to strip essential amino acids from the protein that you eat and use those amino acids to rebuild the broken down muscles.

We cannot overstate how important the maintenance of muscle mass is for both fat loss and weight maintenance. Muscle is far more metabolically active than fat. Specifically, if you were fasting and at rest for 24 hours, 50 pounds of muscle would burn 250 calories, while 50 pounds of fat would burn only 100. The more muscle you put on, the more you can eat without storing excess fat. Furthermore, muscle is denser than fat, so your body will look leaner if you gain muscle and don’t lose weight.

Reduced Lethargy

Another common symptom of imbalanced hormones is lethargy. Some people who suffer from lethargy have no motivation to do anything productive, such as cook healthy meals or exercise. Other people with lethargy want to lose weight and want to put in the work necessary to lose weight but simply don’t have the energy and are too depressed to dig down deep and find it somewhere within themselves.

Hormone therapy can be used to treat both lethargy and depression. When you treat depression caused by hormonal imbalances, you will be able to find the motivation within yourself to go grocery shopping for healthier foods, park farther away from the entrance to your work and make other small, incremental changes to your lifestyle that facilitate fat loss. When you no longer suffer from lethargy, you will have the energy to act on your good intentions.

What Else You Can Do To Lose Weight

To reiterate, hormone therapy can absolutely help you lose weight if your initial weight gain was caused by imbalanced hormones. However, the only way to lose weight, regardless of the tools you lose to make it easier, you need to consume fewer calories than your body needs for fuel. In other words, the only way to lose weight is to exercise more, eat less calorie-dense foods, or combine the two techniques. Here are some actionable steps you can take.

Build Muscle Mass

Remember, muscle mass is 2.5 times more metabolically active than fat mass. Therefore, if you don’t have a lot of time to burn calories through cardio and you enjoy calorie-dense foods and beverages, we strongly recommend that you focus your limited time and energy on building muscle mass. You will lose weight faster and you will be able to maintain your ideal weight far easier while still enjoying reasonable portions of the foods and drinks you love.

To ensure you are getting enough amino acids to build muscle, eat a gram of protein per pound of body weight. Once you’ve achieved your ideal body composition, you should only need to eat around 0.7 grams of protein per pound of body weight per day. Also, remember to rest the muscles you worked to failure for at least 72 hours to give them plenty of time to recover. At the beginning of your journey, you may need to rest muscle groups for up to five days.  

Row

Another great tool to help you lose weight as your hormones are being brought back into balance is rowing. If you don’t have the money to invest in joining a crew team or buying your own scull, you can join a gym with an ergometer (indoor rowing machine) or buy one to use at home. The Olympians train on the Concept2 Model E, but the Sunny Health & Fitness SF-RW5515 provides a great workout with customizable resistance for an incredible price.

Rowing is such a great weight management tool to add to your arsenal because it is so efficient. The first time you row, you’ll notice that it provides an excellent cardio workout and burns calories more efficiently than running or biking. However, it is also one of the best exercises for building muscle mass. Just be very careful about your form and remember that you don’t have to set the damper to 10. Somewhere between 0 and 4 is more than adequate.

Join a Local Sports Club

One of the biggest challenges in weight maintenance or loss is a lack of accountability. You’ve lost weight successfully in the past, only to regain it. You hit a plateau that you couldn’t overcome quickly, so you gave up. You eventually stopped telling your friends and family that you were on a journey to lose weight. Joining a triathlon club, running club, crew team or soccer club is a great way to help you lose weight.

Your team needs you to show up for practice. You can’t let them down, so you show up to every session and give each session your all. Whether you tell your fellow club members that you’re trying to lose weight, as long as you can keep your eating in check, you will notice that you are shedding weight in no time. You’ll also feel stronger, healthier, and happier which will help you when you struggle on your journey.

Drink More Water

Although exercise is a very important part of losing and maintaining weight, it’s meaningless if you don’t get your diet under control. Unfortunately, in North Palm Beach, there are days where it can feel impossible to walk outside without sweating. Living in the climate we do, hydration is absolutely crucial. Among the symptoms of dehydration are lethargy, sodium cravings, and intense “hunger” pangs.

To ensure that you’re eating because you feel hungry and not because your body is trying to tell you it needs hydration, start carrying a water bottle to work. Drink eight ounces of water every hour so you get a minimum of half a gallon of water daily. On top of this, particularly if you’re exercising, you’ll need to drink more before or after work. Since feeling thirsty is a lag indicator of hydration, check the color of your urine. You’re not adequately hydrated until it’s pale yellow.

Eat More Vegetables

If you’re focusing on muscle gains for the first time in your life, you may feel insatiably hungry. To combat this, and help you get enough water in your diet, eat more vegetables. Every meal, including breakfast, should include at least one vegetable, and you may benefit from focusing on high-protein vegetables in the meal after your daily workout.  

Discover if Hormone Therapy Is Right for You Today

If you’re sick and tired of squeezing into clothes that don’t fit or buying bigger clothes, start to change your life today. When weight gain occurs due to imbalanced hormone levels, hormone therapy can help with weight loss and any other symptoms of hormonal imbalance that you are experiencing.

To determine if hormone therapy can help you lose weight, contact our compassionate hormone experts at Androgenix Health and Wellness in North Palm Beach, FL today to schedule an initial consultation. We will test your serum hormone levels to determine which, if any, of your hormones are imbalanced and discuss the most appropriate hormone delivery methods for your lifestyle.