Hormonal Imbalance - How It Leads To Weight Gain?

Being overweight sometimes has nothing to do with calories in your diet or exercise. For a number of us, mostly women of 35 and above the problem is due to out-of-whack hormones. It’s true that a few hormones in our body enable weight gain as they encourage the storage of fat, like insulin, the body’s sugar metabolizing hormone. There are also weight affecting hormone disorders like thyroid and insulin imbalances, both of which affect your shape, often drastically.

Here are a few other lesser known hormones that can play havoc with your physiology and weight:

1. Leptin: Leptin is a hormone that signals fullness. It travels from your fat cells to your brain, telling it that you’re full. But this hormone starts swelling your appetite instead due to the consumption of a type of sugar called fructose, found in fruit and processed foods alike. Anything above eating five servings of fruit daily and your liver can’t handle all the excess fructose which is then converted into fats and released as triglycerides into your blood stream. This fat gets accumulated as belly fat mostly and it also increases levels of leptin, your body’s satiety hormone. This means you are unable to feel full and you keep eating and getting fat.
2. Cortisol: This stress hormone makes you put on some extra pounds too. When its levels rise, blood sugar is converted into fats for long-term storage in your body. Stress triggers cortisol and so does coffee.
3. Estrogen: Estrogen is a blessing and a bane for women. It makes women feminine and it also makes them fat. Normal estrogen levels actually maintain an ideal body weight as this hormone reduces the production of insulin, a fat storing hormone. Out-of-sync estrogen levels can cause exponential weight gain by directing a bulk of the glucose to be stored as fat, instead of sending it to the liver and muscles to be converted into energy. Your fat tissue can thus expand by as much as four times to accommodate this storage of glucose due to high estrogen levels.
4. Testosterone: Toxins are entering your body even as you read this article from the air, the food you may be eating, your face cream, drugs, etc. These chemicals mimic natural hormones like estrogen. Higher levels of these ‘xeno’ estrogens can overwhelm the body’s testosterone causing an estrogen overload. Testosterone is an anabolic hormone, it contributes to muscle growth, which in turn supports metabolism, whereas estrogen overload increases insulin insensitivity. This imbalance, thus, adds on the pounds.

So, every time there is a drastic change in your frame size, understand that it could be a sign of an underlying hormonal imbalance, so do something to balance your hormones rather than change your diet once again to cut down even more calories. In case you have a concern or query you can always consult an expert & get answers to your questions!