Hormones & Weight Loss
Diet and exercise are a foundation of any weight loss strategy, but what do you do when diet and exercise don’t work? One of the first places I look is hormones. The hormone system is especially important to weight management and body composition. When we are younger our hormones and the hormone receptors are working optimally, and this allows us to eat a less than perfect diet and still maintain a healthy weight.
These hormones are constantly talking to each other and they can cause you to lose weight or gain weight depending on the conversation.
So as you can see there are not good and bad hormones. The important thing to remember is that it is how those hormones are talking to each other that really matters.
In functional medicine we look at how do we restore the hormone production and sometimes more importantly how do we improve the hormone communication. A comprehensive approach to weight loss has to take hormones into consideration. The amazing thing about functional medicine is that in order to get you to lose weight we have to get you healthy and that includes optimizing hormone function. And once your hormone function is restored many other things will also improve. Things like sleep, energy, muscle tone, sex drive, and appetite just to name a few.