When they’re trying to lose weight, many people will see gaining weight as an inconvenience at most, rather than a potential symptom to a larger problem. In truth, many people, especially women over forty-five, should be focusing on their hormonal imbalances. Imbalanced hormones cause problems with weight, mood, reproduction, and much more.
Treating the symptoms instead of the problem can actually exacerbate the hormone imbalance.
Treating Weight Gain Due to Hormone Imbalance
It’s entirely understandable to want to lose the weight you have gained due to hormone imbalance. But to do so, you need to focus more on healing and less on losing weight. It’s essential to treat the cause instead of the symptom.
If you try to treat the symptoms of weight gain incorrectly with diet and exercise, you will actually make the root cause worse.
Generally, hormone imbalance slows down your metabolism and raises your cortisol and inflammation. It throws your blood sugar out of balance and depletes your nutrients while causing internal toxic stress.
To start seeing changes, you must address these imbalances by eating whole, natural foods that will replenish your cells instead of damaging them.
Vegetables are naturally anti-inflammatory and your body needs the nutrients from fruits and proteins to run properly. Eating these foods regularly and avoiding damaging ingredients will help heal and rebalance your hormones.
Signs of Hormone Imbalance
Hormones are basically tiny messengers that carry information through the body, play a huge role in your overall health. They tell your tissues and organs what to do and when to do it. They affect your whole body, so when they are out of balance, your whole body is affected. Because of that, weight gain is only one of the signs of hormone imbalance. It just tends to be the most notable because most people are sensitive to their weight.
Symptoms will vary depending on what hormones are working improperly. Common symptoms include:
- Weight gain
- Unexplained weight loss
- Fatigue
- Hump of fat between shoulders
- Muscle weakness, aches, tenderness, or stiffness
- Pain or swelling in joints
- Changed heart rate
- Sweating
- Sensitivity to Temperature
- Change in bowel movements and urination
- Increased hunger or thirst
- Decreased sex drive
- Change in mood, depression, and anxiety
- Thinning or brittle hair
- Dry skin
- Puffy face
- Rounded face
- Pink or purple stretch marks
- infertility
Having just one or two of these doesn’t necessarily indicate a problem. But choosing to eat whole, natural foods will help many of these issues even if they aren’t caused by imbalance.
Some of these symptoms can indicate other chronic conditions. If you are dealing with major or sudden changes in your body, please be sure to speak to your doctor.
What Causes Hormonal Imbalances?
Other than natural causes for hormone change like puberty, pregnancy, and menopause, hormone imbalance is mainly caused by stress. Stress triggers inflammation in the body and raises your cortisol levels.
Cortisol is a stress hormone from your adrenal glands. While it does have an important function in your body, too much cortisol is a problem. Long periods of heightened cortisol levels cause weight gain and put extra stress on the body. Extra stress throws other hormones out of balance and increases inflammation.
While there are other causes for imbalance like tumors, damage to the endocrine system, and autoimmune diseases, for most people it’s stress.
It is recommended to work with a professional to treat your hormone imbalance. They will help you monitor whether or not the tailored change in lifestyle is helping and recommend seeing a doctor if necessary.
Treat Your Hormone Imbalance with Metabolism Reboot
If you have tried diet after diet and still feel like you aren’t making progress, contact us today to learn how Metabolism Reboot can help you make a real change.
Learn about sustainable weight loss without extreme dieting or exercise with Metabolism Reboot. We teach you how to reboot your metabolism to promote permanent weight loss. Schedule a call to learn how to rebalance your hormones and reduce inflammation.