How To Balance My Hormones To Lose Weight

Dieting? Exercising? Still not losing weight? Whether you have tried it all or are just embarking on your weight loss journey, finding out what caused your weight gain in the first place is key. You see, weight gain isn’t the problem. Weight gain is the symptom of an unbalanced body/unbalanced hormones.

Permanent weight loss can only occur with balanced hormones. It might surprise you, but understanding your hormones is absolutely essential for long-term weight loss. There are several hormones that can literally make or break your ability to gain or lose weight. If you struggle to get and stay lean, despite all the dieting and exercises you’ve tried, I promise hormones are to blame.

Some of the cues that hormones have begun to turn against you are hunger, cravings, low energy levels, moodiness, and lack of sleep. If only one hormone is off balance, it will inevitably affect the other.

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In this article, I focus on 17 weight controlling hormones. I share what they are, how they affect weight, and what exactly you can do to bring them back into balance and lose the weight you want.

Insulin is a hormone released by the pancreas. Its main job is to maintain safe and stable glucose levels after a meal. When you eat food, it’s broken down into basic nutrients (glucose, amino acids, and fatty acids). Insulin helps  control blood glucose levels by instructing the liver, muscle, and fat cells to take in the glucose and use it for energy. If there’s more glucose in the blood than the liver or muscle cells can use, insulin signals to the fat cells to take up all the remaining glucose and store it as fat. That’s why insulin has been dubbed as the “fat-storing hormone”.

In addition to instructing fat cells to store glucose as fat, insulin also inhibits the breakdown of fat. Fat cells contain an enzyme called hormone-sensitive lipase (HSL), which helps break down body fat. Insulin suppresses the activity of HSL.

How To Balance Your Hormones To Lose Weight

However, there’s another side of insulin – its potential to build muscle. While insulin doesn’t directly build muscle, it decreases the rate at which muscle proteins break down.

Glucagon is a hormone released by the pancreas. It’s released when the concentration of glucose in the blood becomes too low. Insulin and glucagon are like yin and yang of blood glucose maintenance: insulin lowers the concentration of glucose in the blood; glucagon raises the concentration of glucose in the blood. Glucagon also signals to the body to release stored fat and use it as fuel. Essentially, insulin promotes storing energy (glucose and fat) while glucagon promotes the release of stored energy (glucose and fat).

To stimulate glucagon release and burn fat, you need to keep your blood sugar and insulin levels low. Your body prefers burning sugar over burning fat so as long as your body has access to glucose, it won’t start burning fat. Glucose levels are generally the lowest between meals and when exercising.

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Leptin is an appetite-regulating hormone that’s produced by fat cells. It acts on the hypothalamus, the brain’s hunger center, to turn off the hunger switch. Leptin is also very effective at monitoring fat storage. The more fat your fat cells contain, the more leptin they produce and the more your appetite shrinks.

When you lose weight, leptin levels decrease. That’s one of the reasons it’s so hard to maintain weight loss. The brain thinks you are starving and pushes you to eat more.

Now, you might be thinking that overweight people shouldn’t have any problems with overeating since they typically carry around more fat and therefore more leptin. However, many overweight people are leptin resistant (5). In other words, the message to stop eating doesn’t get through to the brain. The brain erroneously interprets leptin resistance as starvation and activates multiple mechanisms to increase fat stores, rather than burn excess fat.

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Leptin resistance is most often caused by habitual eating patterns. If you constantly overeat, you can damage the receptor signal. According to Dr. Kent Holtorf, “leptin resistance also stimulates the formation of reverse T3, which blocks the effects of thyroid hormone on metabolism.” (6) What results is slow metabolism.

Ghrelin is a hormone released primarily by the stomach. Its main function is to increase appetite and store fat by acting on the brain’s pleasure centers and encouraging the production of NPY. In addition to being an appetite-stimulating hormone, ghrelin also affects food intake, chewing time, and taste preferences. Have you ever had to finish the whole tub of ice cream or empty the entire bag of chips just because you remembered how good it tasted? Well, blame ghrelin!

If you want to optimize ghrelin for weight loss, dieting is not the way to go. If you under-eat or go on a diet, your ghrelin levels increase, making it hard to lose weight and keep it off. Also, the longer you diet, the higher ghrelin levels rise. According to one study, ghrelin levels of bodybuilders who went on a 6-month low-calorie diet increased by 40%. Surprisingly, overweight people have actually lower ghrelin levels than lean people; they are just more sensitive to ghrelin’s effects.

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Thyroid hormones are produced by the thyroid gland in the base of your neck. The thyroid gland releases two hormones: thyroxine (T4) and triiodothyronine (T3). These hormones control the rate at which your body burns calories. According to Dr. Keoni Teta, the thyroid hormones are highly sensitive to “sleep (how long and how deep), nutrition (types and amounts of food), stress (acute or chronic), and exercise (longer moderate intensity or shorter high intensity), etc. It influences every system in your body by sensing your internal and external environment”. (11)

What negatively affects thyroid hormones is dieting. The production of reverse T3 seems to be the primary method by which the body tries to regain any weight lost as a result of dieting. As soon as you restrict calories, your body thinks “starvation” and increases levels of reverse T3 while decreasing levels of T3. That’s why it’s so difficult to prevent regaining any lost weight achieved by dieting.

Cortisol is a hormone produced by the adrenal glands located above the kidneys. Its main role is to prime your body to “fight or flight” from danger (stress). This mechanism used to be crucial in the earlier days of dinosaurs and cavemen, when running away from predators and seeking protection for survival was common. The extra surge of cortisol (together with adrenalin) provided extra physical energy from stored carbohydrates and fats.

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While nowadays lifestyles are extremely stressful, they aren’t nearly as physically demanding as those of our ancestors. Whether you are running for life or stuck in a traffic jam, your body doesn’t react any differently. It can’t distinguish between physical and psychological stress. And because you’re not burning this energy by running for your life, this additional energy is stored as fat.

Cortisol is both a fat-storing hormone (due to its activation of a fat-storing enzyme lipoprotein lipase) and a fat-releasing hormone (due to its activation of a fat-releasing enzyme hormone sensitive lipase). Cortisol’s fat burning potential is activated during exercise when other fat burning hormones – adrenalin and human growth hormone – are released into the system as well. Cortisol’s fat-storing potential is activated in a fed state, especially after a carbohydrate-rich meal, when fat-storing hormone insulin is released into the system.

Therefore, cortisol itself is not the problem. It’s the combination of cortisol and lack of exercise that causes weight gain. What’s interesting is that abdominal fat cells have special receptors for cortisol, which is why high stress levels have been linked to abdominal obesity. Also, women seem to react to stress with a greater increase in cortisol than men.

Balancing Your Hormones For Weight Loss

Adrenaline is a hormone released by the adrenal glands. It has many different roles, but its main function is to prepare the body for the “fight or flight” response in reaction to stress. Adrenaline causes an increase in strength and energy, as well as heightened senses and better focus.

When it comes to weight loss, adrenaline is responsible for the release of glucose into the blood,  which a fight-or-flight response would use. It also initiates breaking down of fat to access another source of energy. Essentially, adrenaline frees up energy for muscle and brain use in response to a perceived stressor.

This is extremely beneficial during exercise. When your body is under physical stress – from lifting weights or doing cardio – it responds by producing more adrenaline, which in turn helps to increase the amount of energy available to use. A chain reaction then stimulates the release of other hormones, such as cortisol, testosterone, and HGH, which send your body into a fat-burning mode.

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While acute (short-term) stress can be quite beneficial, chronic (long-term) stress is a different story. When your nervous system increases adrenaline levels, it also decreases leptin levels. This can easily lead to overeating, sometimes called “stress eating”. When you are under constant stress, not only do your leptin levels stay low, but your adrenaline levels stay chronically high, which can desensitize your cells and cause adrenaline resistance. Once the resistance sets in,  you become poor at releasing stored fat into the blood stream, but you are still overeating.

Human Growth Hormone (HGH) is a