Dr. Bailey's Metabolic Makeover: How Hormones Help You Lose Weight

The Macro-Nutrients: Sources of Energy
Your body uses proteins, fats, and carbohydrates as fuel to keep you alive and kicking. Since fat has twice the energy content of carbs or proteins, fat is the main energy storage nutrient.

Hormones
Your body uses signaling compounds, called hormones, to control your hunger, appetite, and sense of fullness after meals. These hormones control the amount of energy (food) you take in. Other hormones control how rapidly you burn fat. Your body's storage of fats is a balance of fuel intake, energy demand for body functions, and hormone balance.

There are many complex interwoven pathways, feedback loops, and alternate pathways controlling the energy balance in the body. When these pathways are working properly, fat burning is easy and simple: just eat less and exercise more.

For most people, it is just not that easy or simple.

Energy Balance: A Tale of Three Hormones

Cortisol
Your adrenal glands make cortisol. Cortisol helps control the breakdown of proteins and fats for energy. It also helps normalize immune responses and control inflammation.

If your level of cortisol is too high or too low, you will have trouble burning fat and losing weight.

Insulin
Insulin is a major hormone involved in fat metabolism. Insulin controls the intake, storage, and use of glucose in cells. If you cells become less sensitive to insulin or if you have excess insulin, your cells will increase fat storage and prevent weight loss.

What you eat, how often you eat, and how much you exercise are big factors in regulating your
insulin.

Thyroid
Your thyroid controls growth, repair, hormone production, and metabolic rate. Low thyroid hormone levels cause low fat burning metabolism, as well as fatigue, dry skin, and other health problems.

These three hormones control fat burning metabolism by interconnected complex pathways. If one system has a problem, they all will eventually.

Helping Your Hormones:
To work together properly, these hormones require sufficient levels of enzymes, vitamins, minerals, and micro-nutrients. What you eat affects your hormones and their ability to help
you lose fat.

Here are a few key steps.
1. Stop, or reduce as much as possible, caffeine, alcohol, sugar, sodas of any type, and processed foods. These drain nutrition away from your body, and starve your fat burning system.

2. Eat many raw, organic highly colored vegetables. These contain high concentrations of the very vitamins, minerals, and enzymes needed for improving fat metabolism.

3. Take a high quality fish oil supplement. Omega 3 fatty acids reduce inflammation, a major factor in promoting obesity.

4. Increase your physical activity. The right kind of exercise, tailored to your hormone profile, can help burn fat efficiently.

5. Reduce stress, or learn to help drain its effects away. Stress can kill the brain cells responsible for hormone regulation, among other negative influences on your health.

When To Ask For Help
If these things don't help by trying all this on your own, you may need professional guidance. A key hint is that if you have tried several times to lose weight and keep it off, only to work hard without success, you may need help.

Get an individual metabolic, nutrition and hormone profile that can find the barriers to restoring your fat burning metabolism.

It may not be easy, but long term success depends of finding a proper hormone balance.