What causes weight gain? And how do we lose it?
This is not a cookie cutter answer and you might not like this post. Or maybe you will like this post when you hear that starving yourself and killing yourself with exercise is not the answer to losing weight.
Seriously, every single person’s reason for weight gain is totally different. I will reiterate here that weight is a symptom, just like an ailment is. It’s an indicator that something is not working in the body. So you could change the word weight with any symptom you have as it’s all an inflammatory response really.
So here are some reasons for weight gain:
1. Hormones
I’m not referring to the standard estrogen/progesterone or testosterone you have bloods for, where you usually get told your hormones are “fine”.
Actually, it’s the 2 overriding and dominant hormones that DON’T get tested. They are priority for the body to function and OVERRIDE all other hormones.
They are:
Insulin
Insulin is required to take energy (carbohydrates/sugars) into your cells.
Your body pumps out insulin in response to how many carbs/sugars are in your blood. So a high carb/sugar diet = more insulin. Insulin is required as it’s the means to get energy into the cells.
Insulin is used/burnt in that cellular process and anything extra goes into fat cells.
When there’s too much glucose and insulin, the cell recognises this and prevents anymore coming in (insulin resistance which leads to Diabetes). Insulin resistance blocks the next part of cellular function which is the hormone receptors Leptin and Grehlin. Too much Insulin affects the presence and effectiveness of these two.
Grehlin lets us know we are hungry.
Leptin lets you know when you’re full and time to move.
So if you have too much glucose and insulin, you lose the signals of eating when you’re hungry and stopping when you’re full and you are not going to lose fat or use fat as fuel. The more processed the food and your environment is, the more raised Insulin will be.
Your goal is to keep insulin low.
Insulin is raised by:
-preservatives/chemicals/fillers/refined carbs and sugars that you find in all artificial food and drink, creams, sprays, plastics, medicines.
-basically any artificial item that goes in and on to your body - ITS NOT JUST FOOD!! You also become insulin resistance if you have high cortisol.
Cortisol
Cortisol is your stress hormone - your survival hormone. Your get up and go. (Please remember your body’s number one function is to keep you alive). As with the insulin hormone, if cortisol is required it will OVERRIDE all other hormone production. If you are constantly in survival mode, your body will consistently produce cortisol at the expense of all other body functions.
It’s important again to redefine stress - stress is not just busy and anxious - it’s any workload or job the body has to perform whether digestion, thinking, doing - it’s just basically meeting the demand and the ability to perform it.
Stress weight can come from all of the below:
1. Culture
It’s become perfectly normal to overeat. The go large or go home mentality overrides your natural signalling to stop when satisfied. Which leads to the next cultural affect. No one is satisfied. Overindulging is seen as prosperity, success and fun. Most compare, most run themselves and each other down. Most aspire to a fake or unrealistic idea of what health looks like. Most have bought into the media and retail packaging of buying your way to health. Or, they have believed the diet crazes, the “science” that changes all the time. In that drive for an Insta butt and lifestyle, the body is forced into processes and actions (aka stress) that will never be sustainable and that load eventually causes weight gain.
2. Emotional/psychological
Pleasure seeking, avoiding pain and reducing effort is now sold as the acceptable way to manage emotional and mental struggle. Taking responsibility, making effort to change, picking yourself up if you slip is not!
We’ve normalised buffers to dealing with pain - overeating being one of many, and then formulated and packaged excuses.
Yes there are environmental factors - like social media - driving emotional and mental issues, that might not be our fault or cause or doing. Even though it’s not our fault, it is our problem and we have to accept that and not get stuck in blame.
3. Performance
There are two sides to performance. One is trying to do everything, be everything, push everything to the limits. Extreme sports, extreme party hard kind of thing. Then there’s also the performance as in PRETENDING. Pretending to be something you’re not, trying to fit in and follow the crowd kind of thing. The root of pretending and performance is actually insecurity and pride - trying to prove something. All of it though goes against your body and therefore is a stress, a workload that therefore causes a physical load aka weight, holding onto weight, inflammation then disease.
4. Neurobiological
Our brain is wired to be rewarded for life preserving activities. Food provides that reward - serotonin, dopamine etc. So that is normal but the issue is, with pleasure culture and chemically loaded foods - we’ve created a pathway that is so solidified to constantly be pleasure seeking. Eating again and again and again, sugar cravings, obsessions etc are all a brain wired with no switching off.
The more you do do something, the stronger that pathway develops. You aren’t born with desire, you grow it. (Ok yes I hear some of you saying genetics, which is definitely a factor but even more so a reason to change).
5. Environmental
That is anything in your environment from what you breathe in, put in and on your body, where you work and the foods and drink you take in. It’s anything from the outside in, in its simplest definition.
6. Spiritual
Just like a fish is made of it’s kind, and it can’t survive outside it’s environment of water, so are we a spirit made in the image of God, and our environment is eternal. Society as a whole have become God-less and that goes against our design. We are created for fellowship with Him and when we resist that, we automatically put a stress/workload on our physical being. It’s easy to acknowledge body and mind but the spirit is a fight because it’s a truth we don’t acknowledge.
Summary
Your body is only moved by what’s moving your nervous system. So that’s what you believe, how you think and what is in your environment. This is HUGELY encouraging and empowering because it gives you the foundation of where YOU can look, where YOU can start and where YOU need to take control. You are spirit, soul and then body…not the other way round.
I say it again, weight is a symptom of something not working in the body. The body works in systems that we can’t buck, and it has metabolisms and processes that require a whole lot of hormones, chemicals etc. Unless we give the body the ingredients, remove the things interrupting the process, we will not reach whatever the goal - call it weight loss, cellulite reduction, skin disorders, diabetes, autoimmune or whatever you’re struggling with.
Weight is therefore literally how much stress/workload the body is facing. Don’t put yourself under more stress by chasing means to ends that your body doesn’t know to do.
The body doesn’t know to count calories, or get to a certain number on the scale to call itself healthy. (Throw the scale away!) You aren’t going to be on your deathbed saying “yay I’m thin”. The body measures health by the ability to respond, by the types of food and ingredients you eat and then the measure of joy, peace and relationship you have with yourself, others and God.