Men, Balance Your Hormones To Lose Fat (Keep Your Muscle)

Men, Balance your hormones to lose weight (and keep your muscle)

As we age, we start to gain weight, slowly storing more and more body fat.

When this happens, our hormones begin to work against us, making it difficult, and sometimes it feels near impossible to lose the weight we’ve gained.

Today we’re going to look at four different hormones that can cause us to store body fat and what we can do to bring them back into balance.

Insulin is an important hormone. That helps our body break down food into energy. This comes primarily from carbohydrates. Some of this energy is used right away, and the rest is stored in our liver, muscles and fat tissue.

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It not only provides our muscles with the energy we need to train, improving performance, but it protects them from breakdown and staves off Sarcopenia.

The problem with insulin starts with overeating and especially when we consume a lot of junk food and refined sugars, causing us to become insulin resistant. This can lead to obesity and metabolic syndrome.

The first thing we need to do is stop eating the wrong types of foods, making the switch from processed to whole food eating, with a better balance of nutrition, reducing carbs and increasing protein and healthy fats.

Protein foods can raise our insulin level short term, but they did a 5-year study looking at over 20,000 men between the ages of 50 and 64 and found those with the highest protein diets had a lower BMI and smaller waist size than those who consumed low protein meals.

Don't take this to the extreme and go on an all-meat diet as that will create other problems. Instead, have protein at every meal, reduce the number of carbs and add in a whole food protein.

Leptins job is to let the brain know you have enough body fat stored and are full, reducing your appetite.

Leptin is made in the fat cells. So you would think the more body fat you have, the more Leptin you will have screaming at the brain, “enough eating already we’re full”, but unfortunately, just like with insulin, you can get leptin resistance, and the brain is no longer listening.

Two things cause leptin resistance, that’s inflammation of the hypothalamus and chronically elevated insulin. Quality of food matters eliminating as many processed foods out of your diet as possible.

Omega-3 fats like what is found in fatty fish and nuts reduces fasting insulin levels and inflammation.

On the other end of the scale, we have the hunger hormone Ghrelin. This one becomes a non-impacted player in obese people. Typically when your stomach is empty, Ghrelin levels increase, telling your body it is time to eat. Once fed, these levels drop, signalling that you’ve had enough.

In overweight people, Ghrelin levels start out lower than normal and barely change after a meal providing the body with no real signal.

This is another hormone that is impaired by products containing added sugars and responses well to high protein meals. The studies I looked at had protein at 30% of your calories and fats at either 30 or 40%, with carbs making up the remainder of the calories consumed.

Estrogen is another hormone that starts to be overproduced as we gain weight, especially if this weight gain is around our midsection. Visceral belly fat contains an enzyme called aromatase that converts testosterone into estrogen.

Having enough fibre keeps estrogen levels in check, cruciferous vegetables contain phytochemicals that block estrogen production.

Polyphenols can bind to estrogen and inhibit its actions. These are found in whole grains like oats, corn and rice.

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