Functional Medicine vs. Traditional Medicine

Did you know that estrogen is an appetite suppressant and it promotes energy expenditure? That’s part of the reason why women gain weight after menopause.

 

Estrogen replacement can reverse the effect. There is a type of estrogen, 17β-estradiol, that protects tattered brain cells. So it makes sense that estradiol may prevent the brain from making you eat more and burn fewer calories.

 

The decision to do hormone therapy varies person to person and must be individualized.

Enzyme aromatase increases

production in fatty tissue and leads to increased estrogen. Excess estrogen increases your risk for breast cancer in postmenopausal women. There has to be a fine balance. Not too much so it promotes breast cancer, and not too little so it promotes appetite and slows metabolism.

Thyroid is a hormone of metabolism. It affects almost every cell in your body by telling it to turn up or down metabolic rate.

 

When thyroid function is low, you feel fatigued, depressed, may retain fluid and also gain weight.

 

Although the thyroid gland is in the neck, the hypothalamus in the brain controls it. The hypothalamus needs to provide adequate levels of both the storage thyroid hormone (T4) and the active thyroid hormone (T3) in order to feel your best and have a healthy  body weight set point. Labs may be within normal limits but you may not be doing a good job of converting T4 to T3 in the brain, possibly because of a genetic or inflammatory issue.  This then resets the brain and it gets confused and slows down metabolism, even though your thyroid labs are normal.

 

Leaky gut may also be contributing to the issue. Sealing a leaky gut will also help reduce an autoimmune attack of the thyroid, which is the cause, in most cases, of low thyroid function.

Stress is one of the key components between the brain and the body that is most overlooked when it comes to weight gain and weight loss. Cortisol motivates the sympathetic nervous system so that you can be ready to fight or run. In certain circumstances this is beneficial, but often times cortisol levels are much higher than the human body can properly handle. Consistently elevated cortisol levels cause fat storage in the abdominal area.

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This becomes a vicious cycle. The more abdominal fat you have the more cortisol you produce in response to this stress! What happens... we produce more abdominal fat.

 

Stress becomes embedded psychologically and biologically.
 

It can affect your HPA axis function, your cortisol levels, and all aspects of food behavior: how you eat, the food you crave, and how much you eat. Women experiencing high levels of stress have a higher BMI, more emotional eating and cravings, and more visceral fat.

 

"High cortisol can break down your muscle for energy, which is bad for weight loss because it lowers metabolism further," (Sara Gottfried, MD).