By: Dr. Michelle Irwin

How many of you have experienced a plateau with your weight loss?

You have done all the right things; exercise, eating the right things, and getting adjusted but you just can’t make the scale budge.

This could be your hormones holding on to those calories and fat. Hormonal imbalances can happen to anyone at any age. We all start to have changes in our body chemistry at certain times in our lives whether we are male or female; most commonly we start to notice skin changes.

Remember puberty?

But that may not be all. Life changes are hard enough, but when we start to notice the effects of hormones differently, it can be frustrating.

It is not always clear what is causing the changes in our body, but hormone imbalances can cause anything from mood swings to weight loss resistance.

Research into the why behind weight loss resistance has revealed hormones from your thyroid, cortisol, or insulin can be the culprit.

When working on weight loss try to reduce stress, and therefore cortisol, in your life by adding in mediation exercises for your mind as well as the physical exercise that will release endorphins and help your mental attitude.

Don’t let a plateau in the journey stress you out, you are on the right path, and this can be a time to reassess and make changes to habits where needed.

A habit that can be changed is how we think about eating.

Eating causes us to release insulin to store sugar for energy use later. With the world of abundance we live with today, that is not as necessary as it was when we were foraging for our food and didn’t know when our next meal was going to be.

The problem is we still have those ancient mechanisms in our bodies, so while our body is doing what it was designed to do, we are actually creating an overload of fuel.

Food is fuel and when we have enough fuel, we need to use it before putting more in, just like a car. Your tank is only so large, and you may not need to fill it as often.

Whether you are a grazer or a faster, you need to give your body the right amount of nutrition with little refined sugar so your body can use some of that energy to break down your food.

Drink water, not caffeinated fluids, to lose the bloat but also because when you are needing water your body makes you feel the same sensation as hunger, so you may not be hungry but just need to hydrate.

When you decrease the amount of sugar you take in and hydrate better you also find that you are less inflamed.

High amounts of sugar intake and dehydration will cause our body to become inflamed, and we can feel stiff, aching, and sore which will cause us to not move as well or avoid certain activities which are beneficial to overall weight loss.

Hydrating will help to flush the toxins produced by prolonged inflammation out of your body and you are able to move better and make better decisions for your journey.

I know how hard it is to keep going when you are doing everything right and not seeing the scale move. What I try to do is focus more on how my energy is and how my clothes are fitting during these plateaus.

When we are building muscle, the scale is not going to accurately show how our hard work is paying off since muscle weighs more than fat. Hang in there, keep working on building better habits and the rest will follow.

Let’s get healthier together!