How Functional Medicine Helps You Lose Weight
How Functional Medicine Helps You Lose Weight Beyond Eating Your Vegetables
Have you ever looked down and been shocked by the number on the scale? Especially when you work hard at eating a clean diet, including lots of vegetables. You even exercise on a regular basis.
You’ve noticed your clothes fitting tighter. It just doesn’t reflect your activity level and dietary choices.
There’s no other way around it. You need to lose weight. But something has changed, and you don’t know what. You need to find out what’s getting in the way of losing those unwanted pounds because diet and exercise just aren’t enough.
I’m Dr. Martina Sturm, and I’m here to tell you there are many reasons you could be seeing a different number on the scale. Together, we’ll use a functional medicine approach to help you lose weight. And trust me, it’s more than eating a healthy diet exercise.
We’ll uncover the root cause of your weight gain.
The Root of Your Weight Gain
Weight gain and obesity are often caused by deep imbalances inside your body. These imbalances affect your body’s ability to convert what you eat and drink into energy. This process is your metabolism.(1) If there are problems with your metabolism, there are problems with losing weight.
Learning what’s getting in the way of your body’s ability to make energy and burn calories and fat is crucial to helping you lose weight.
Poor Gut Health
The bacteria inside your gut regulate many bodily functions and can affect your ability to lose weight. Your gut bacteria are responsible for things like:
Digesting food
Your appetite
Converting food into energy
Your immune system
Producing bile acid
Preventing disease
Hormone regulation
…and more.(2)(3)
When your gut microbiota is balanced, your metabolism burns up those extra calories a bit easier. But if there’s an imbalance of your gut bacteria (called dysbiosis), you can experience a variety of health problems, including autoimmunity, allergies, inflammatory bowel disease, and (you guessed it!) weight gain.(2)
Outside factors that influence your gut microbiome and lead to weight gain include:
Consuming artificial sweeteners
Hidden seed oil consumption
High sugar/refined carb intake
Poor sleep
Long-term use of antibiotics
Glyphosate (Round-up)
Chronic stress
Hormonal birth control
NSAIDs
Various other medications
Genetics (2)
When you understand why there’s an imbalance, you can make dietary, lifestyle, and other changes to help restore balance in your gut and help you lose weight.
This is also important because dysbiosis can lead to poor hormone regulation and vice versa.
Hormone Imbalance
The gut is the largest endocrine organ in your body and plays a crucial role in helping to regulate your food intake and how you burn energy.
The gut uses chemical messengers (hormones) to communicate to the brain.
It uses the hormone ghrelin to stimulate your appetite.
Leptin, secreted primarily by your fat cells and other glands help:
You feel full (satiety)
Body composition
Control your appetite
Boost your energy
And cholecystokinin (CCK) increases satiety in response to fatty acids entering the duodenum.
These are just a few of the messages your brain receives from the gut. And the type of food you eat impacts the type of messages communicated to your brain. An imbalance in these hormones can lead to overeating and weight gain.(4)
Other hormones like estrogen, insulin, and cortisol also play a role in helping you to manage your weight.
Estrogen is not only important in regulating your reproductive cycle. But it helps to manage other systems in your body that support your metabolism, appetite, body fat distribution, and inflammation.
Insulin is a hormone produced by the pancreas. It helps your cells especially the liver, and muscle cells uptake sugar from your bloodstream and turn it into energy.
Any excess sugar that isn’t needed is stored as fat, initially around organs (visceral fat) and peripherally.
There is an unparalleled connection between obesity and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD).
Ultimately, when cells are constantly overloaded with sugar they start to become less responsive to insulin. Blood sugar remains high despite insulin levels being high.
If you become insulin-resistant, your body cannot regulate the sugar in your blood. The result – Metabolic Syndrome
Cortisol, your stress hormone, helps support your blood sugar, sleep, metabolism, and inflammation.
When cortisol levels are high, your body is stuck in a “fight or flight” state. Chronic stress experienced from a hectic job or a medical condition tells your brain it's under attack. Your brain then signals the systems in the body to prepare itself by:
Increasing your appetite, which can result in binge eating
Making you crave sugar and carbohydrates for quick energy (5)
Increasing blood sugar levels
Stress alone can lead to metabolic syndrome and weight gain. This causes low-grade inflammation and difficulty with losing weight.
Inflammation’s Role in Weight Gain
Inflammation is the body’s response to something harmful. It can be caused by:
Food choices, especially pro-inflammatory seed oils
The air we breathe
Chronic stress (6)
Inflammation is the cause of many chronic diseases and can lead to carrying extra fat.(7)
Additionally, processed oils change the gut microbiome and can cause low-grade inflammation throughout the body. Diets high in pro-inflammatory seed oils can:
Reduce healthy gut bacteria
Leaky Gut Syndrome
Release toxins into the blood
Create changes in the endocannabinoid system
Among other things, this affects energy balance and appetite stimulation, potentially contributing to weight gain.(8)(9)
Food Sensitivities
Food sensitivities happen when your gut becomes leaky and your immune system starts to create antibodies against various foods or chemicals you eat.
This can cause you to experience certain symptoms beyond gas, bloating, abdominal pain, and diarrhea.(10) Things like joint pain, migraines, allergies, or asthma can be present without any digestion-related symptoms.
Common food sensitivities include:
Gluten
Dairy
Caffeine
Salicylates
Histamines
FODMAPs
Sulfites
Fructose
Other common food sensitivities are:
Artificial sweeteners
Eggs
Monosodium Glutamate (MSG)
Yeast
Sugar alcohols (11)
These contribute to dysbiosis and leaky gut which leads to an inflammatory response. Repeatedly eating these foods overwhelms your immune system and creates an environment of low-grade inflammation.
This chronic inflammation can cloud your gut hormones, including leptin, which tells the brain you’re full and suppresses your appetite. (12)(13). This condition is called leptin resistance and often accompanies insulin resistance.
Without appetite suppression, you’re likely to take in more calories than you can burn, making it difficult to lose weight.
Sleep’s Impact on Your Weight Loss
Poor sleep is strongly linked to weight gain. When your sleep is interrupted, your body requires more energy. This affects your appetite-suppressing other gut hormones and increases cortisol..
When you don’t get enough sleep, your body will stimulate your appetite, so you eat more food to combat your fatigue and stress from the lack of sleep. This often comes in the form of excessive snacking and sugar and carbohydrate cravings.
Better sleep and correction of sleep disorders help your body communicate better with your brain and lead to better hormone balance. This also helps regulate your insulin and cortisol levels, which is important in helping you lose weight.(14)
Chronic Stress
The link between chronic stress and weight gain is undeniable. And over the long haul, chronic stress boosts your hunger hormone and causes you to overeat.
It also spikes your insulin levels, initially lowering your blood sugar, and makes you crave sugary and greasy foods like cookies and mac and cheese. It's easy to see how this pattern can be devastating to your waistline. (15)
I hope you can now see why the key to losing weight is understanding why you gained weight in the first place. And that the answer is not as simple as eating more vegetables (an overrated and misleading strategy (that I will discuss in a future blog).
Over-exercising
The common misconception of exercising more and with more intensity has backfired for many women. High intensity exercise is a stressor. Stress releases stress hormones.
Because women's bodies are very different from men’s; Men operate on a 24-hour clock and women on a monthly cycle. Throughout this cycle your hormones change and your body’s needs are completely different. There are times in your cycle when the female body can thrive under stress and times that stress is highly counterproductive. Working with your hormones and not against them, can make all the difference in your weight loss journey. Read more about the hormone hierarchy and cycle syncing here.
Working Together to Help You Achieve Sustainable Weight Loss
It’s time to take control of your health.
Our first step together is to dig deep into your health history and lifestyle. We need to find out what things could be influencing your weight gain. This is backed up by functional lab testing. From here, we can use this information to get at the root cause of your weight gain.
Poor gut health, hormone imbalances, and difficulty sleeping all play a role.
This isn’t a one-size-fits-all plan. Once we uncover why you can’t lose weight, we can start working on a holistic and personalized plan to address your needs.
We’ll discuss how making small shifts in your diet and lifestyle can greatly impact your weight loss journey.
I will explain and work with supplements, nutraceuticals, and herbal medicine that can help improve your gut health and balance your hormones.
I incorporate acupuncture, when appropriate, to help you:
Eliminate toxins
Reduce inflammation
Balance your hormones
Regulate your blood sugar
Reduce various food cravings
Improve your digestion
Improve sleep
Reduce stress
I also use weight loss injections (not the dangerous semaglutide) to support your body’s ability to burn fat more effectively..
Together, we’ll find your recipe for success. Book a FREE 15-minute consultation to learn how using a functional medicine approach can help you lose weight, restore energy, and improve your health.
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