Posted on 10 Apr 2023
FitFarms Menopause Workshops On Camps
How your hormones change weight loss results
Hormones have a significant effect on weight loss and weight gain that most people are not aware of when starting their health journey.
These hormones include leptin and insulin, sex hormones and growth hormones. These heavily influence our appetite, metabolism and body fat distribution. Promoting your hormonal balance is important if you want to maintain a healthy weight there are several areas we need to address Including focusing on your quality of diet, maintaining eating patterns, up keeping a healthy amount of exercise in your routine, managing your stress and having a healthy sleep pattern.
What is Insulin?
Insulin is a hormone produced by your pancreas which helps your body use sugar for energy.
When your blood sugar levels rise, as they do after each meal, insulin is released. If your pancreas doesn’t work as it should, it may not produce or release the insulin you need to control your blood sugar levels.
This can often cause diabetes and other health issues. Diabetes then impairs your body’s metabolism, which effects how it processes and stores energy, affecting your ability to lose and gain weight.
To improve your insulin there’s several things you can do. These include gaining more sleep, exercising more, reducing stress, weight loss, improved diet and decreasing your intake of added sugars.
By improving your insulin you’ll reduce your risk of diabetes and other health conditions as it’s a essential hormone that controls your blood sugars.
Enhancing your insulin is a healthy decision, despite whether your already dealing with diabetes or dangerous insulin levels. Changing your lifestyle habits is the best way to maintain this. We will be adding a section to the FitFarms Information page on our menopause workshops so be sure to check back for more information.
Many people struggling with their weight also struggle with their sleep habits. Studies show a lower quality of sleep or a non-consistent sleeping pattern can upset your hormone balance. Therefore when changing around your eating habits and exercise habits to obtain weight loss it’s important to make sure you also maintain a good quality of sleep.
Further research shows losing sleep while trying to lose weight can reduce your weight loss and encourage overeating. A lack of sleep decreases levels of leptin, leading to increase in hunger and appetite. Making your weight loss journey harder and non-enjoyable, which it doesn’t have to be.
There’s recent research linking oestrogen levels to obesity, especially in menopausal women. It shows that menopausal women are three times more likely to develop obesity than a average person.
There are ways to prevent this weight gain though, as already mentioned, moving more, eating less and maintaining a good sleeping pattern is the most effective way in avoiding weight gain during menopause.
Keeping a eye on your weight is important and cutting down on things like alcohol and added sugar intake will be effective in avoiding this.
At FitFarms we target a lot of our workshops and give advice on dealing with menopause and weight gain, as it’s something a lot of our customers come to us dealing with. It isn’t an unusual thing to struggle with and there’s lots of support we can give you to deal with this change.
If you would like to read more information on menopause please click here