Gaining Weight, Piling on Belly Fat and Losing Your Waistline?
It Could Be Your Hormones…!
You probably would agree that fat changes your shape. But did you know that weight gain isn’t always due to the foods you eat and how much you eat? It can be your hormones. And if hormones are the root cause of your weight gain, the specific glands involved in producing those hormones will distort your body in specific ways.
The four body types associated with glandular dysfunction are the Ovary Body Type, the Adrenal Body Type, the Thyroid Body Type and the Liver Body Type.
If you’re fighting a losing battle with weight gain and lamenting your accumulation of belly fat, this is important information.
When your glands aren’t working as they should, they’re likely telling you that you have an underlying health problem. All the dieting in the world won’t peel off the pounds. Neither will exercising to the point of exhaustion.
Your endocrine system and the hormones it produces can malfunction for a number of reasons. They can be assaulted by too much stress. They can be damaged by consuming too much sugar, eating a poor diet or starving yourself on low-calorie diets. They may also result from exposure to hormone-disrupting toxic chemicals, ageing, and menopause or andropause.
The only way to restore your body to its normal proportions is to restore your hormones to their proper functions.
Knowing your body type can help you understand which hormones may be involved.
The Ovary Body Type
Your two ovaries are glands on either side of your uterus that release oestrogen and progesterone. These two hormones control your sexual reproductive characteristics as well as the layer of fat you carry around your body.
For a variety of reasons, your oestrogen levels can become too high:
- Your ovaries may become dysfunctional and overproduce oestrogen.
- You’re probably exposed on a daily basis to a number of environmental chemicals called xenoestrogens ― fertilizers, plastics, food additives, household and personal care products, etc. These chemicals mimic your body’s naturally occurring oestrogen, act as endocrine disruptors and can dangerously increase your oestrogen levels.
- The correct ratio between oestrogen and progesterone can become unbalanced, with oestrogen becoming disproportionately high relative to progesterone. In fact, beginning at around age 35, progesterone declines 120 times faster than oestrogen.
Too much oestrogen and too little progesterone can result in a condition called oestrogen dominance. Oestrogen dominance increases the fat you produce and store, resulting in development of “saddlebag” hips and thighs, and a lower-abdomen pooch.
The Adrenal Body Type
Your adrenal glands sit atop your kidneys. It’s their responsibility to meet an increase in stress with a release of cortisol. This triggers your “fight-or-flight” response, which enables you to rise to the occasion and deal with danger or emergencies.
When they’re functioning well, the adrenals help keep your blood pressure and blood sugar in check, and stimulate production of needed energy. However, when stress continues unrelieved for long periods and becomes chronic, your adrenals just keep pumping out more and more cortisol.
All this excess cortisol causes progressive loss of muscle tissue and bone mass. It also causes redistribution of body fat, which builds up around your adrenal glands and vital central organs, adding inches to your mid-section (belly fat!).
It may also contribute to development of a “buffalo hump” on the upper back at the base of the neck, which adds years to your appearance.
Excessive cortisol is bad enough, but it also increases release of insulin, which is a fat-storage hormone. High insulin increases blood sugar to help you cope with stress, but when it’s too high, it increases your sugar cravings. And if you consume a diet high in sugar, flour and grains that break down into sugar, you will store even more fat.
The Thyroid Shape
The butterfly-shaped thyroid gland is located in your neck, just below your voice box. The thyroid shape in women evolves from some of the same causes as the ovary shape ― primarily, from unbalanced oestrogen that becomes dominant.
Your thyroid hormones speed up your body’s metabolism, enabling production of energy in your cells, and promoting fat burning and weight loss. However, these hormones require adequate progesterone to carry it to specific hormone receptors so it can be used.
When oestrogen is dominant, progesterone is inadequate, not only to move thyroid hormones to receptor sites and enhance thyroid function but also to convert the T4 thyroid hormone to T3, which is the active form of the hormone.
With oestrogen dominance, the liver secretes a large volume of thyroid binding globulin ―
a protein that inhibits the thyroid hormone and decreases the amount that cells can take up and use.
Instead of your thyroid revving up, it slows down, causing fatigue, water retention and weight that refuses to come off. This is called hypothyroidism, which shows itself in a number of physical symptoms, including thinning outer eyebrows, ridged nails, saggy underarm skin and hair loss.
While adrenal weight gain tends to center in the midsection, weight gain due to hypothyroidism is distributed all over. This is because the thyroid controls metabolism in all the body’s cells.
The Liver Body Type
The liver has more than 500 functions, and it’s the body’s principal organ for detoxification. It filters out all the hormones, chemicals, bacteria and viruses that make their way into your body.
Over the years, however, the liver can become damaged and may not always succeed in filtering out toxins. Consequently, these unfriendly substances can be recirculated throughout your body.
This includes synthetic oestrogens from growth-promoting hormones given to animals used for meat, birth control pills, HRT (synthetic hormone replacement therapy), medications and environmental chemicals from pesticides, DDT, plastics, and household and personal-care products. These may build up in the body, contributing to further damage.
The result of liver damage is a pot belly and typically thin legs. Although the person may appear fat, they are not. The protruding abdomen is caused not by fat but by ascites ― a plasma-like fluid that leaks into a sac located above the intestines.
Are You Fated for Weight Gain in Mid-Life?
Many things can contribute to weight gain, but take heart! The redistribution of fat and added pounds that may result from unbalanced hormones during perimenopause and menopause isn’t inevitable.
A lot of women fear that taking hormones will cause them to gain weight. However, multiple clinical studies and scientific papers attest to the fact that bioidentical hormone restorative therapy, which restores diminishing hormones and brings them back into balance, does NOT cause weight gain.
In fact, taking bioidentical hormones increases the odds that you will resist weight gain.
One of the largest studies verified that none of the participants on hormones experienced weight gain. Another study found that post-menopausal women who chose not to take bioidentical hormones had higher percentages of body fat than those who did take hormones.
It is clear that when hormones become unbalanced and certain hormones reach excessive levels, women are at high risk of gaining weight. However, all the evidence tells us that bioidentical hormones ― which match the molecular structure of hormones made by your own body ― are a safe and effective antidote to that much-dreaded middle-age spread.
SOURCES:
Hormones and Weight Gain ― The True Role of Estrogen and Progesterone in the Process. Center for Holistic Health & Hormone Therapy
Hormones Not Only Affect Your Health, They Also Determine Your Body Shape. The Alternative Daily.
Luciani, J. The Four New Body Types. Shape.
Martin. Stress Results in Dangerous Cortisol Build-Up. Life Enthusiast. Aug. 31.
Vance, Mary. How Cortisol Makes You Fat. Mary Vance N.C.
Which Hormonal Body Type Are You? eMed.com.au.
How Hormones Can Affect Your Body Shape and the Nutritional Deficiency Connection. Perfect Patients.