The Role of Hormones in Female Weight Gain

This post is part two of a series of articles about why women gain weight as they age.

Part One: Top Causes of Female Weight Gain

Part Two: The Role of Hormones

Cortisol is a hormone that increases with stress. Cortisol is also a fat storing hormone, so it is no wonder that too much stress/ cortisol can make you fat.

Leptin is a hormone that tells the brain you’ve had enough to eat and also knocks out food cravings. Most women who are overweight are Leptin Resistant. In fact, childhood obesity has been linked to Leptin Resistance. Again, exercise, diet and supplements that contain Irvingia help to reverse Leptin resistance.

Hormones are a very complex issue and I consider myself an expert on this topic since I was hormonally imbalanced for 15 years and was forced to find the answers myself when I could not get help from conventional medicine. At the age of 35, after my fourth child, I weighed 103 pounds. My OB/GYN convinced me to have a bilateral tubal ligation. I literally gained 30 pounds within 3 months and 60 pounds within 6 months. I was aging prematurely, I looked like I was 60 years old, had aches and pains, was depressed cause I was gaining all of this weight, couldn’t sleep at night, had no sex drive, developed hypothryoidism which can also be caused from a hormone imbalance.

I went back to my physician begging for a hormone check and to 4 or 5 other physicians, but was told there was no good way to check hormones and there was no correlation to the tubal ligation. I was getting older and just needed to eat less and exercise more. I was an RN at the time and had not changed my eating or exercise habits but was literally blowing up like a “spaded dog”.

If you will google “Tubal Ligation Syndrome” you will now find that in a high percentage of women, their ovaries fail which leads to estrogen dominance which leads to weight gain, fibrocystic breast, ovarian cyst, fibroids, etc. which ultimately leads to a hysterectomy. In fact, by the age of 49, I had all of these things which required a complete hysterectomy. I was then handed a box of Premarin which I did not take but knew I had to get some answers to this hormone traversty. After taking some courses with “Pharmacy Compounding Centers of America”, I was led to and completed a Fellowship with the American Academy of Anti-Aging & Regenerative Medicine. This Fellowship literally saved my life. I actually look younger at the age of 55 then I did at 35 and have lost all the weight that I had gained back then.

Hormones have gotten a bad rap by the media since the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) was completed in 2002. The WHI was done on synthetic hormones Premarin (horse urine) and Prempro (horse urine and progestin-synthetic progesterone) Many physicians in America still think that these chemicals are hormones. They are not!

In actuality, it is hormones that keep women young. Just look at the commercials on TV right now regarding low testosterone levels in men. When hormones are perfectly balanced, it is much easier to lose weight and keep the cells young and healthy. So the men are going to be on the “anti-aging train” while the women are aging prematurely. How fair is that??