The Role of Hormones in Weight Loss
If you look around the web for advice on how to lose weight, you’ll find that people fall into two broad camps. There are those that believe weight loss is entirely dictated by that caloric deficit we just discussed and there are others that feel there are other, more important factors at play.
Let’s take a look at some criticisms of the ‘calorie deficit’ approach to dieting.
Problems With the Deficit
It is certainly true that your body needs to burn fat for energy once it has run out of other sources. It is certainly true that if you have no other means of getting that energy, you will lose fat stores and eventually you lose weight. This really is simple math – cause and effect.
But the problem comes with calculating that magic ‘AMR’ – active metabolic rate. These calculations are rough guesses at best and they are based on nothing more than your physical features. The best calculations take into account your muscle mass (which is metabolically active) but even these don’t take into account underlying issues such as the balance of your hormones.
Simply put, some hormones help you to burn fat faster and some help you to burn fat faster. These are directly responsible for how many of those processes that require energy are going on in your body at any given time and how capable your body is of utilizing the various stores of energy available to it.
Just a few of these hormones include:
- Cortisol
- Insulin
- Thyroid hormones (T3 and T4)
- Adrenaline
- Serotonin
- Leptin
- Ghrelin
- Testosterone
- Estrogen
- Progesterone
- IGF1
- Human growth hormone
- And many more
The problem is that we all have different balances of these hormones. These hormones are in constant flux and are affected by everything from what we are eating at the time and how stressed we are, to how much sleep we’ve had and how sunny it is. Some people have imbalances in these hormones that are permanent, while others will use medications that can alter them. Those fitness ‘gurus’ that ignore the role of hormones in weight loss can’t explain why hypothyroidism or polycystic ovaries leads to weight gain. They also can’t explain why using steroids builds muscle and burns fat.
You may not have a condition like hypothyroidism but the point to recognize is that these conditions are not really binary. You do not have to ‘have’ or ‘not have’ a condition – but rather you can view everyone as existing somewhere along the spectrum. You might have a slightly lower production of thyroid hormones than someone else, or you might be higher in testosterone.
This is why some people lose fat very easily and it is why some people struggle to lose it. It’s also why things tend to get harder for us as we get older and it’s why things get harder for us as we become more stressed and more tired. All of this upsets our hormone balance and puts our bodies into ‘fat storage’ modes.
The issue is not with the calorie deficit but rather our ability to accurately calculate our own AMR. Not only that, but these hormones also play a very big role in why we struggle to lose weight (they make us hungry, low in energy and depressed) and they contribute directly to fat storage around the midriff.
This is before we take into account the fact that it is essentially impossible to calculate the precise number of calories burned (heart rate alone is not a perfect correlate for calories burned) or the number of calories in any given item of food.
You really think that every single apple has the precise same number of calories in it? Are you sure you are really adding precisely the same amount of sauce to your meals?
Then there’s another fallacy of the calories in/out diet, which is the notion that our calories somehow magically reset at the end of the day: that we can make sure we’re in a calorie deficit on Monday and then start again on Tuesday. In reality, the build up of calories is cumulative and can be ‘carried over’.
And then there is the way that eating in itself can affect your hormonal balance and process the foods that are coming in.
