Which hormones affect your weight loss the most?
Hi Dr Hamilton here, founder of Neuroswitch weight loss and in this blog I want to talk about three female hormones that will affect your weight loss.
So let’s talk about hormones. Hormones support many vital functions in the body including our ability to maintain muscle mass, especially in females to lose fat loss, not just weight but specifically, we want to lose the fat and it also helps to regulate how we experience stress and hunger.
The three female hormones that I see that typically affect female weight loss is going to be obviously our estrogen and progesterone. I’m combining those because many are aware of those as female hormones. The other two are cortisol and thyroid.
First, let’s discuss progesterone and estrogen. Many see them as playing a role in our sexual health but they also play a role in our eating behaviors. How, well the obvious role is that they can affect our mood and sleep which affects our eating behaviors but they also help regulate our muscle mass which we want to hold onto and so we need to make sure those are in balance. The higher our muscle mass is the better our metabolism is.
Next, cortisol as we all know probably by now is our stress hormone. Cortisol is released by adrenals and it essentially can trigger responses that we do not want to happen. It increases at times of stress which can be due to anything for us females, kids, family, job or even daily chores. We really need to be able to pay attention to how we’re managing stress because any increase in cortisol can trigger hunger.
It can trigger unwanted cravings in us that can throw off our healthy eating habits that we want to maintain unexpectedly. Cortisol also affects our metabolism when we’re in stress mode, slowing it down, and it’ll also makes us crave processed foods in order to help release dopamine to “make us feel better”. Your cortisol level can increase due to lack of sleep and which also increases in times of stress.
Lastly, the thyroid. Most people get their thyroid checked by their primary care doctors, but they don’t check for thyroid antibodies. It is essential that we also check for thyroid antibodies because that is what truly can affect our ability to be able to lose weight.
Be sure your primary is checking the full panel of thyroid because even though your TSH which is often checked may come up normal, you can actually have other abnormalities in the thyroid that can help contribute to your weight gain and that could be due to a decrease in metabolism and other vital functions that the thyroid contributes to. The thyroid is a major supporter of weight loss when it is functioning properly, but if it has antibodies to it or does not function at its peak level, it will cause weight gain.
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