If you’re overweight, everything is harder. It’s harder to stay active. It’s harder to find clothes that fit. It’s harder to eat a healthy diet. It’s harder to lose weight. Also on the list, it’s harder to stay disease free, especially as you age.
Why so many difficulties? One reason is that those extra pounds throw your hormones out of balance. And your hormones control just about everything, including how often you feel hungry, as well as your risk for certain types of cancers.
Kimberly Bolling, MD, has seen for herself how her patients transform almost every aspect of their lives through healthy weight loss and weight loss management. Here she details how weight loss helps to restore your hormones.
When you look at a roll of fat on your abdomen or elsewhere on your body, you probably don’t think of it as actually doing anything. But fat — also known as adipose tissue — produces estrogen, just like women’s ovaries do.
High levels of estrogen circulating in your bloodstream are associated with a number of health issues, including an increased risk for breast cancer and liver cancer. Even though estrogen is commonly considered a “female” hormone, men produce estrogen too.
In fact, many of the symptoms associated with aging in men, such as erectile dysfunction, are due to low testosterone and excess estrogen. Just a few symptoms of higher-than-normal estrogen in both sexes include:
High estrogen in men can also lead to infertility and gynecomastia (commonly known as “man boobs”).
If you’re overweight, you may have been told over and over that you eat too much. That’s not necessarily true. You might, instead, be eating “foods” that aren’t really nutritious and that throw the hormones that control hunger out of balance.
Two of the main hormones involved in hunger are ghrelin, which signals your body that it’s time to eat, and leptin, which signals your body when you’ve eaten enough. The wrong foods, and even excess adipose tissue itself, can interfere with how ghrelin and leptin work.
You may release too much ghrelin, making you feel constantly hungry. You might not have enough leptin, so you never feel completely satisfied after you eat.
Through Dr. Bolling’s weight loss management program, you learn which foods nourish your cells and keep your hunger hormones in balance.
Healthy foods also help to regulate insulin, the hormone that helps convert dietary sugar into cellular energy. When you don’t produce enough insulin, or your body becomes resistant to it, you develop diabetes and other metabolic disorders.
After you lose weight, your sensitivity to insulin improves too. You can more easily move glucose out of your blood and into your cells. Greater insulin sensitivity and less circulating blood glucose lowers your risk for Type 2 diabetes, and can even reverse the disease.
Find out how to improve multiple aspects of your health by losing weight and balancing your hormones. Call our Bowie, Maryland, office today at 301-352-0090 or request an appointment online. You can also send a message to Dr. Bolling and the team here on our website.
