Can’t lose weight? This is why

This is not for the people that are eating fast food and sitting on the couch.  This is for the people moving, shaking, eating well and still not getting results.

I can’t count the number of people (primarily women) that have employed every method they can imagine to lose weight, but their bodies just won’t let go of the fat.

Understandably, this causes an immense amount of frustration, confusion, and exhaustion.  If these people make their way to my office, they are at their wit’s end and just inches from throwing in the towel.

After hundreds of interactions with people desperate for the answer to their weight-loss dilemma, I’ve found a trend and it is one that we rarely talk about.  Now, stick with me because this may seem a little broad, but this is the trend with literally every person that does not respond to increased exercise, decreased caloric intake or similarly obvious approaches to weight loss…

their bodies don’t feel safe…

Let me explain.

Your danger response

For millennia, humans have evolved to survive.  We have many adaptations that help us survive threats, whether that threat is a predator, famine, or an infection.  One of the adaptations to stress is a that our nervous system can redirect resources (i.e. oxygen, glucose, nutrients) away from “rest, digest, and reproduce” functions and towards “fight or flight” functions like the heart, muscles, immediate immune response, brain, and vision.  By fueling the “fight or flight” response, we have a better chance of survival.

However, the ability of our body to move from parasympathetic nervous system mode (relaxation) to sympathetic (revved up) take a large shift in circulating hormones and these vary based on the threat.

A famine will threaten your survival, so hormones will trigger reduced metabolism which is most beneficial for sparing your energy resources.  This means you will store fat and burn fewer calories. This will allow you to live longer with little food.

However, what if you get a serious infection?  This will cause hormonal cascades that stimulate your immune system to respond by increasing swelling, pain, redness, and heat (typically burning more calories), while pumping out a bunch of inflammatory molecules that with safeguard you in the short-term.

Stress and fat storage

Now, consider how these functions may manifest if your body senses a threat on a more chronic basis such as work stress, relationship stress, overwhelm, trauma, chronic infections, poor diet, yo-yo-dieting, etc. While we don’t identify our demanding boss in the same, we would imagine a response if a tiger was chasing us, our nervous system recognizes a threat as a threat.

When I work with clients that can’t lose weight, my job is to help their bodies experience less stress so, in essence, helping the body feels safer.

These 5 factors are the most common nutrition-related answers for shifting the body away from the threat and towards safety.

1. Balancing blood sugar

2. Removing foods that cause an immune response

3. Eliminating inflammatory processed foods and replacing with anti-inflammatory foods

4. Compensating for micronutrient deficiencies with food and supplementation

5. Addressing gut infection or overgrowth

It’s true, meditation, certain forms of exercise, sleep, community, emotional support, and other tools can also help move the nervous system towards rest and digest, but my scope of work is all about food. The goal is to remove the things that cause harm and provide the things that heal.  When we figure out what that means to the individual’s unique body, the sense of safety that follows allows the body to release stored fat. It learns that it no longer has to protect itself!