The SURPRISING REASON You Can't Lose Weight! (Not What You Think) | Dr. Mark Hyman

there are many obstacles that have nothing to do with what you eat or how much you exercise things like imbalances in your nutritional status chronic inflammation from infections even viruses a metabolic problems toxins and in your environment leaky gut your microbiome huge impact on your metabolism even your genes so I cover all those things in the past what I want to talk about today is one

specific category of resistance to weight loss which is hormonal imbalances now it's no contest when it comes to hormones what the worst thing is for weight it causes inflammation it causes weight gain it's the main driver of chronic disease aging pretty much everything that goes wrong as we get older and it's too much insulin insulin resistance insulin is basically the fat storage hormone in my book

effect get thin in the 10-day detox diet I talk about how we can regulate insulin so you can shift your body from storing fat to burning fat so if you want to get more detail check those out but today we're going to talk about things Beyond insulin how other hormones affect your weight and your health your thyroid hormones your stress hormones and your sex hormones so

let's get right into it today we're talking about these three big disruptors um I talked about them in my book blood sugar solution but let's talk about each of them today because they are often the cause of weight loss resistance now thyroid is really common we are inundated with a thyroid problem because our thyroid is like the canary in the coal mine it's super sensitive to

all sorts of environmental toxins to stresses in our diet to gluten and low thyroid function affects one in five women and one in ten men that's a lot and half of those cases uh they're not diagnosed and even if they are diagnosed and treated with conventional therapy which is usually Synthroid or T4 it's not adequately controlled or treated so what causes low thyroid function or thyroid

imbalances well there are a lot of things that cause what are the symptoms let's just go over those first you may not really identify this as a third problem but you might have a little of this and a little that little depression a little dry skin a little hair falling out a little constipation low sex drive maybe your cholesterol is a little high maybe your nails

are cracked maybe your your hair is thinning maybe you're having eyebrow loss and a lot of your eyebrows maybe you have muscle cramps maybe you have trouble sleeping maybe you feel a little fluid retention and tired all the time you have trouble getting up in the morning these are all clues that your thyroid might not be working right and and often you just go to the

doctor and you get the regular test which we'll talk about and it may not actually indicate what's really wrong so one of the main things that causes dysfunction of thyroid in Hashimoto's which is an autoimmune thyroid condition the most common one is gluten gluten is often Associated probably about 30 percent of cases with Hashimoto's uh and the other big one is environmental toxins heavy metals Mercury

lead also nutritional deficiencies affect your thyroid function things like low selenium low zinc low iodine low omega-3 fats low vitamin D all Impact thyroid function and most doctors don't even properly test for it they don't know how to diagnose it and they don't treat it effectively because they just give you the precursor of your thyroid uh active thyroid hormone which is T4 and they don't know

how to optimize your health otherwise with diet supplements or the right right thyroid replacement so it's really important to get this right because if you don't you're going to struggle with weight gain you're going to struggle with all these symptoms and often low thyroid function is a big player if you're struggling with weight loss and you can't figure out why so what are the strategies for

optimizing your thyroid function and for getting your weight in check first get the right test now the right tests include TSH or thyroid stimulating hormone which is the pretty much the only test that most conventional doctors do you also have to ask for free T3 and free T4 and not only that you have to ask for thyroid antibody tests something called thyroid proxidase and anti-thyroid antibodies

these are looking for low level antibodies or even high level antibodies and you can have perfectly normal thyroid tests but have high antibodies and you still need to be treated or you can have a normal TSH for the low T3 or a low T4 and you can still need thyroid replacement so you've got to kind of figure out what's really going on here we'll also look

at reverse T3 which is the break that stops your thyroid from working so sometimes toxins inflammatory factors can actually increase reverse T3 which is like the break on your thyroid so even if your regular tests look normal and you have high reverse T3 you might not have good thyroid function at the cellular level eat right for your thyroid is really important if you don't eat right

you're not going to be on the right track because your diet influences your thyroid function you need all the raw materials for thyroid function but you also have to make sure you don't include things that are hurting your thyroid one of them is is raw cruciferous vegetables broccoli collars kale brussels sprouts now people are often having kale juice a lot and you know that can interrupt

the hard function and usually not eaten in in cooked forms not eaten in the normal amounts we eat them which is even a couple of cups a day but they can interfere with iron function I had I had uh um a woman who was in New England Journal study I saw saw the eating you know bok choy which is one of these cruciferous vegetables was good

and she ate I think uh two pounds a day of raw bok choy and she ended up in a hypothyroid coma so it sounds crazy but I would encourage you not to be juicing kale also make sure you add foods that are including the nutrients you need to actually activate your thyroid function which include for example iodine which is in fish you can get seaweed also

so you want to make sure having low mercury fish um often people are eating iodine free salt because they don't want to eat iodine and they're salty there's more iodine deficiency out there than we might realize it has to do with where it is in the soil and we don't often eat foods with high levels also making sure you don't uh you have fluoride in your

in your water or chlorine which are common these are thyroid blockers so you can filter your water at home I think that's important also you want to add extra nutrients that contain the other additional things like zinc for example as in pumpkin seeds Brazil nuts have selenium you know as I mentioned seaweed has iodine vitamin D you can get as a supplement but also through fatty

fish and even mushrooms although porcini mushrooms are highest they're hard to find and they're hard to grow now also you need to write supplements so in order to activate the thyroid function for example the converter from T3 to T4 you need selenium in order to make it bind to the to make thyroid itself you need iodine to make it bind to the receptor of your nucleus

to do all its thyroid functions it has to have vitamin D and so forth so you need basically A multifacial and vitamin D as a foundation you may need iodine supplements but I would be very cautious about those you can really overdose and interfere with your thyroid function also when you're taking thyroid you want to take the right stuff often doctors recommend Synthroid or Levoxyl which

is the inactive form some people do well with that if you add a little T3 but I prefer people stay on a comprehensive bioidentical hormone and the one I recommend is Armor Thyroid or naturethroid or westroid these are a combination of T3 and four but their whole glandular thyroids now it sounds kind of weird but these came from a pig very very identical to our body's

own thyroid hormone and we've been using these glandulars in medicine for you know decades and decades over 70 years for cortisol for thyroid for many things we use them for and so I think that that's important to to understand how to properly adjust this now if you get on a bioidentical thought your TSH is going to drop and your doctor will go oh you're over treated

but you can't just look at the TSH you need to look at the T3 T3 and free T4 and those have to be in a good range and and I have all that in my book and there's a great Guide online called how to work with your doctor to get what you need I wrote a whole guide called the ultra thyroid solution you can look that

up online little PDF handbook all right let's talk about the next hormone cortisol cortisol is a big one now cortisol makes you gain weight now it's a stress hormone most of us are overactive in our stress response and don't reset our nervous systems when you have high levels of cortisol it causes you to gain belly fat it causes your muscles to break down and makes you

more resistant erases your blood pressure it shrinks your memory cell in your brain and and what happens is stress also affects your fat cells literally your nervous system your autonomic nervous system your sympathetic nervous system your fight or flight nervous system has like neuronal connections to your fat cells so literally when you're stressed your fat cells are listening and when it tell and when your body

is actually in a state of stress it's not designed to actually lose weight initially because you want to be flooding your body with sugar and fatty acids and so you basically inhibiting the process of of metabolism and you're increasing your fat storage and you're doing all these things that are really bad and they're good if you're running from a tiger for you know two minutes but

not if you're doing this every day so stress um often isn't just a real event in the world it can be a tiger chasing you but can also be an imaginary event in your mind like you could think oh your spouse is cheating on you because they came home a half an hour late or something and it could be a total fabrication that gets stuck in

traffic and so the same event can cause stress depending on how you interpret that event so stress is really and interpretation of an event even you know even a gun for example to your head would be highly a different experience for James Bond or Woody Allen so you know same trigger but different different response so among most um these uh short-lived traumas we can learn how

to mitigate but it's the sort of long-term trauma we often have to deal with and that may be PTSD and there's a lot of emerging therapies around that that help reset the nervous system whether it's still a ganglion block whether it's MDMA assisted Psychotherapy which is being researched now in phase three clinical trials that should be approved by 2024 so there's a lot of things out

there but basically if you're chronically stressed you can just gain weight I had a patient um who was struggling to lose weight or daughter lived in Israel it was time of Palestinian uprisings a lot of bombings and she was really constantly freaked out about her daughter getting killed and as soon as your daughter moved back to the stage she lost 40 pounds so it's it's a

real thing um now you want to learn how to reset your nervous system we can't get away with being in a stress-free life but we can learn how to reset our nervous systems whether it's breathing exercises or breath work meditation yoga massage guided imagery you know binaural beads I mean the list goes on there's all sorts of apps and programs for this and you can really

reset your nervous system this Apollo Sensei things that help to reset your parasympathetic nervous system to kind of a more calm state so you have to practice that regularly and I encourage people to do that every day so what should you do well first of all our thoughts are the biggest driver of our stress response so make sure you're interpreting reality in a way that actually

isn't constantly seen as a threat and that may take some work and therapy but uh may take from coaching or you know different kind of examinations of your thinking but it's really important to do also practice active relaxation like I said you know you can't just do nothing and expect to relax like watch TV you have to do something when it can be something more acted

like a breath work or meditation or yoga or can be something like a sauna or steam bath or ice plunge a cold plunge these reset your nervous system in a powerful way and change your physiological State you can also try meditation I love Ziva meditation I use regularly it's basically a mantra based Vedic meditation it's very simple 20 minutes once a day twice a day really

easy and also sort of our social connections are huge mitigator of stress whether it's cuddling with a friend even cuddling with a pet makes a big difference so make sure you have time to be a human being not a human doing and uh just friends and family connections uh super important so make sure you take the time to do that all right so we've covered thyroid

we covered cortisol let's cover the last hormone that can go hormones that can go off uh that affect your weight which are sex hormones so there's main ones are estrogen and testosterone we talked about also progesterone plays a role a lot of women took Provera which is a synthetic progesterone and that makes women gain weight makes women depressed so it's not great now estrogen is often

a problem we live in an estrogenic Society we actually do all the things that make our estrogen levels as men and women go up so men have estrogen too and when estrogen goes up you know men get you know big fat belly they lose the hair on their legs and their chest uh and it's essentially they become an estrogen producing Factory because fat cells produce estrogen

they'll convert testosterone to estrogen so really really important to make sure that you're not doing things that are leading you to that body state which is all the sugar and starch so basically our carbohydrate-rich starchy sugary diet is driving high estrogen levels also environmental toxins do that alcohol is a big one you know the beer belly thing that really is something we need to pay attention

to because estrogen will basically make you gain weight when you look at how they fatten up steer for for uh Slaughter they basically put an estrogen pellet in their ear and they the body absorbs all this estrogen they get all this marbled fat and it you know sells for more money but essentially because they're giving male steers estrogen to make them fat so a lot of

things also affect your hormones your gut Flora play a big role lack of fiber too many antibiotics you know as you mentioned pesticides all sorts of things can interfere with estrogen so when women get too much estrogen what are the symptoms the men we talked about but you get breast tenderness fluid retention PMS fibroids heavy menstrual bleeding um in and also in men what happens is

you get low testosterone so I not only your estrogen go up but it's converted to testosterone to estrogen and your testosterone drops when your testosterone drops that's a big one because then you lose muscle you actually end up poor with a poor metabolism and a lot of things cause low testosterone but lack of exercise too much drinking too much stress environmental toxins pre-diabetes diabetes even pituitary

problems can lower testosterone so you want to check that and if metabolic testosterone they tend to lose motivation they lose muscle they lose sexual desire or they lose sexual function they might have fatigue mental fogginess they have bone loss they can cause osteoporosis and obviously muscle loss so you really when you lose muscle you you your metabolism slows down you gain more weight and it just

creates a vicious cycle and you need you know for example to take to make testosterone you need cholesterol uh and eating a low-fat diet and statin drugs can often interfere with male testosterone so how do you balance your diet and lifestyle to correct sex hormone imbalances pretty easy you just following and saying forever which is the approach that's in eat fat get thin or in my

10 Day Detox Diet or or My Pika diet is pretty much similar principles about how to eat a diet which is low in starch and sugar high in good fats high in fiber has adequate protein lots of phytochemicals and it can actually balance your gut Flora so my testosterone went up about 300 points when I changed my diet to eat more fat and less Sergeant sugar

also fiber is really important flax seeds are great because they help regulate hormonal balance in men and women you can add two tablespoons today with shake or Salad lots of fiber rich veg vegetables and fruit make sure you're having daily bowel movements if you're constipated you can help cause reabsorption of estrogen which is really bad so you want to make sure you're going every day take

magnesium citrate vitamin C probiotics flax seeds all that helps you go alcohol again not great for all your sex hormones increased risk of all sex hormone cancers breast uterine ovarian even prostate cancer so I'm not not a good thing to do on a daily basis it also affects your detoxification of hormones and your estrogen levels go up also get moving you know exercise is a huge

regulator of hormones so make sure you're exercising regularly you'll balance your hormones you'll increase testosterone your lower estrogen you'll build muscle lose fat all in a positive virtuous cycle so if you really are struggling dealing with I resistance to weight loss you know checked out all the other things we talked about make sure you check your hormones thyroid cortisol stress hormones and and your sex hormones

and you'll usually find a way to heal a lot of it and overcome that resistance if you loved that last video you're going to love the next one check it out here I really learned firsthand the dangers of sleep deprivation on my health and my mood my energy it may seem like not such a necessary thing like why sleep but it is really critical to Health

and Longevity and the whole idea that I'll sleep when I'm dead will actually lead you to have an early death