Ep.77 These 5 things are causing You to Gain Weight
Mar 14, 2024Season 2Episode 77
Andrew Costa
Ep.77 of The Hormone Helper Podcast: These 5 things are causing You to Gain Weight Summary
In this episode, Andrew Costa discusses the various causes of weight gain. He explains the link between weight and metabolism, emphasizing the importance of building a strong foundation. He shares the story of weight gain and highlights the common factors that contribute to it. The main causes of weight gain discussed include overeating, under eating, digestive issues, chronic stress, and an increase in estrogen.
Takeaways
Weight gain is often linked to the functioning of metabolism and hormones.
Overeating, under eating, digestive issues, chronic stress, and an increase in estrogen can all contribute to weight gain.
Building a strong foundation and addressing these causes can help individuals achieve sustainable weight loss.
Resources mentioned in this Episode:
The 16-week gut health program offered by Andrew Costa provides support and guidance in addressing these causes. go to www.fit4allfitness.com/guthealth for more information
Ep.77 of The Hormone Helper Podcast: These 5 things are causing You to Gain Weight Summary
In this episode, Andrew Costa discusses the various causes of weight gain. He explains the link between weight and metabolism, emphasizing the importance of building a strong foundation. He shares the story of weight gain and highlights the common factors that contribute to it. The main causes of weight gain discussed include overeating, under eating, digestive issues, chronic stress, and an increase in estrogen.
Takeaways
Weight gain is often linked to the functioning of metabolism and hormones.
Overeating, under eating, digestive issues, chronic stress, and an increase in estrogen can all contribute to weight gain.
Building a strong foundation and addressing these causes can help individuals achieve sustainable weight loss.
Resources mentioned in this Episode:
The 16-week gut health program offered by Andrew Costa provides support and guidance in addressing these causes. go to www.fit4allfitness.com/guthealth for more information
Hello everyone, we are back with another episode and in this episode I want to share with you all of the things that can cause people to gain weight. I have to say hands down that year over year the number one challenge that I keep coming across as a coach with our clients is weight gain. So while it is normal for your weight to go up a little bit over the span of your life, there comes to a certain point in... Normally that points around 10 pounds in which anything after that becomes not normal for your body to hold on to. So your weight, how much muscle you have, how much body fat you hold on to, as well as how much water you retain is a direct link to how well your metabolism and your hormones are operating day to day. I like to tell all of my clients that you tend to run at the speed of the weakest. part in your life that also stands true with the physical body as well. So any time the body starts having a hard time keeping or maintaining weight, it is going to do things to make sure that the metabolism slows down just enough for you to be able to recover prior to of course, speeding you back up again. So for example, things like your workouts, anytime we start to get to a point where we are no longer repairing the damage from our training, the body is actually going to start to slow down the metabolism. It's gonna break down existing muscle tissue to repair the damage until all of the muscles are recovered. You will then experience what most people call kind of like a plateau where it's like, oh, I've plateaued in the training where no matter how much cardio you do or how many times you try to hit the gym, you're not gonna see. any more progress. And that lack of progress isn't because the body doesn't want to grow, but it's actually a defense mechanism for making sure that the new muscle can be built on a metabolism that can actually hold on and keep it for later. So this principle that the body uses can really be said in another way. And the way is this, we can only build this high as we build their foundation deep. So meaning if we want to build 40 pounds of muscle, but we don't have a bone in metabolism structure at a safe point to which we can keep that muscle, then we might end up injuring or damaging ourselves to the point where new muscle is not going to make a difference anyways. So this principle is the exact same when it comes to weight gain. So most people that I start to work with, they share a similar story around weight gain. I want to share this with you before we go into kind of what causes weight gain. So the story looks like this. of having kids, maybe having a high-stress job, maybe it's eating a little differently, as well as sleeping on a different schedule, they start to find that the weight is now creeping up. And we're not talking about kind of 5 to 10 pounds of aging. This is typically 10 pounds year over year until they hit what I call the 40 moment. And that moment is being roughly 40 years old. being the heaviest weight that they've ever seen on the scale, and at that moment they all ask themselves the same question, what the heck caused my weight gain? So while weight gain has a lot of moving pieces, it really comes down to the changing of your metabolism's foundation, to the point where your body feels like it needs to store that fat, either in the event of an emergency or to use it to help you deal with something for later. So in understanding that, What I've done is I've condensed the most frequent issues for weight gain. And in sharing these, my hope is that you recognize some potential causes for you so you can start getting a clearer picture and taking a clear level of action towards stabilizing your weight or potentially losing weight and keeping it off long term. Now that being said, once you have an idea of what could be causing your weight gain, it doesn't mean... that this becomes the excuse as to why the weight won't come off. Because as I can tell you as a coach, every single one of these weight issues can be completely treated and changed in order for somebody to lose weight. Now I know this because many of our clients go through these challenges daily and we work with them on it so that way they can lose weight safely and do so through a Vantage program. So let's get started on kind of the first thing that can cause weight gain. So the first thing that can cause weight gain is overeating. And sure, it seems like a super simple explanation for somebody to gain weight, but most of the time, overeating actually doesn't come in the form of just plain healthy food. So when I have our clients go and write down a week's worth of what they eat, what almost every single person fails to write down is liquid calories and quote unquote fillers that go alongside each and every meal. So for weight gain to occur naturally without a hormonal condition, it means that a person is eating at least 500 calories over their above maintenance or that they're consuming about 3 ,500 calories per day. So you're probably asking yourself, well, like, how the heck can somebody eat that much? Like, Andrew, there's no way I eat that much in terms of calories. Well, here's how. You got one Starbucks cafe latte or whatever, okay, with two calories. of vanilla and cream in a muffin, and that's 800 calories right there on average. And then you've got a snack between breakfast and lunch, usually a bagel, three to 400 calories, lunch itself being about five to 600, another snack like a granola bar in between, tack 200 calories onto that. And then finally dinner, which tends to be the biggest meal for people, the meat, potatoes and starches, that's roughly 800 calories. and finally a snack before bed like a bowl of yogurt and berries at 300. So that's already 3 ,100 calories, not including the liquid stuff, the wine with dinner, the sugar and coffee, the liquid sauces on the side, which can add upwards of hundreds to thousands of calories into someone's day -to -day diet. So most people who don't track are aware with what they eat and they eat way more than they think they do. And it's important to remember that every free 3 ,500 calories consumed is going to equal one pound of fat that the body puts on. This is why it's important to eat for your BMR, which is basically how many calories you naturally burn for your body type in your activity level. This is going to ensure that overeating doesn't become the issue where the waking is going to start to slowly creep up. That being said, with overeating, you're going to notice over time as like, The weight usually fluctuates around large times of eating. So like Christmas dinners, vacations, holiday outings. So really once you start to track and you make the changes and you start eating smaller portions, as well as making an effort to exercise more, you're gonna see the return of the weight back down to a normal number that you're used to seeing. And this is where most of the... are going to start to see results first with their weight loss is really doing the calorie counting and watching the amount of food that's going in. So if you haven't tried removing the liquid stuff, the liquid sugars, the liquid calories, the alcohol, along with tracking with what you eat each day, then this should be the first place that you start to prevent weight gain from continuously happening. Now outside the normal way to gain weight, which is overeating, we also have the polar opposite. which is under eating or creating a really big calorie deficit. So calorie deficits were made popular a long time ago by bodybuilders who convinced people that by eating under the amount of calories that they had to eat in a single day, that the body would prioritize saving muscle and then start to break down the fat storages that they have saved within the body. This initially actually works for weight loss and being in a slight deficit, like 200 calories a day, is something that the body can handle and it actually will focus on breaking down the fat first. The problem with under eating lies in the size of the deficit that someone creates as well as how long that they're in the deficit for. I'll say, and I've experienced this with our clients, you should never be in a deficit longer than 12 weeks. And at some point, at some point during dieting, you're gonna have to bring the calories back in to normalize your metabolism. This is where I tend to see most of the struggles when it comes to a client that I've tried different diets. They start to see the first two to three pounds down with the small deficit. So they begin to start cutting out full meals. They think that by not eating breakfast or that by only having one meal a day, that the body is going to break down the fat even faster, allowing them to lose 10 or more pounds per week. This really extreme deficit. actually causes the opposite effect. Where after the first one to two weeks of having such low calories, your body is actually gonna start to tell your stomach that it's gonna need to break down food at a slower pace, as well as instruct the body to start to forcibly save some of the food eaten to be stored as fuel for later. And guess what? This is actually forced fat storage. and we don't even recognize it, in which your hormones are telling your body that you're eating so little, you have to store some fat to function for later. So my experience, anything outside of a 200 calorie deficit is dangerous for weight loss and will cause weight gain because not only will it cause a weight bounce back, it'll also cause the person to turn on a form of ongoing fat storage, which means that after every single meal eaten, the person's gonna keep storing more fat. Now for under eating to be a thing that makes you gain weight, it usually means that you've been on a diet or a strict food regimen of calories for longer than three months. And the body at this point has been forced to slow down because the metabolism doesn't have the calories needed to keep you at your current weight. Normally, alongside under eating, this is actually followed by a lack of hunger, or a feeling of chronic fatigue that doesn't go away with sleep or rest. These indicators, they're actually there to show you that the body is running on emergency fuel. And for some clients, I've even had to put them on like a refeed where we increase the calories above their minimum so their body and their metabolism can start to heal again. Now, unlike eating too much or having too little, the next causes of weight gain aren't so obvious. The first one being digestive issues. It can be easy to look at your gut and your digestion and say, well, what the heck does this have to do with my weight? But the way that you pull nutrients from food can completely affect how much body fat you store, as well as how much energy you have available to burn for your metabolism to stay at a certain level every single day. So when we eat food, we actually only get and digest about 70 % of the nutrients that are there. And that is due to acid breakdown, stomach bacteria, as well as fiber, which holds onto a little bit of nutrients to create stool. So if a person has digestive issues, say things like chronic bloating, IBS, maybe the inability to absorb nutrients, like being gluten or dairy sensitive, when they experience those things, it means that they may not be getting the same amount of nutrients from food compared to other people. So what does this mean? This means that we can eat super healthy food, we can have the right amount of portions that is still needed for our body, but actually still not receive the nutrients from the food that we eat. So in order to keep your weight the same and to keep your metabolism running stable, we need to make sure that we're using the nutrients to fuel your thyroid, as well as the nutrients to repair your muscles and then provide raw energy for you to move day to day. So if a person is always struggling to digest food, then one of the ways that the body can compensate to kind of help you is to actually slow down the metabolism, which will then slow down a person's digestive system. While this allows people to get more nutrients from the food, because the body's now taking more time to digest, it actually affects weight gain for two reasons. The first is by slowing down the metabolism, we limit the amount of calories we burn. So the weight starts to build up. And the second is we get less energy over a longer period of time from the amount of the digestive speed that we currently have. So this will make us actually store more fat naturally to use for energy if we can't get the energy fast enough from eating our food. The thing with poor digestion is that many people think that there are certain parts of it that is okay. So for example, going to the bathroom only once per day. That's not okay. It actually means that your metabolism is slow and that you're having a hard time eating gluten and dairy. Or, you know, anything with fiber or anything like gluten and dairy that's very struggled for you to eat, okay? That's not normal because that means that you aren't getting nutrients from it, that you're not absorbing those foods. Or even something as simple as being bloated. People accept being bloated, daily after eating a large meal, but that's also not good because it means that every time you eat, your body's actually not processing a certain amount of food. And after that certain point, everything is being attacked and it's fermenting in your gut. So the digestive is a big indicator as to whether or not someone can of course lose weight and whether their way to go up. Now, the best part about digestion though, is that if it isn't working right, you're always going to get a signal to show you, that it needs work. So for your digestion to not be the cause of weight over time, this involves healing the bacteria inside your gut with pre and probiotics so that way your stomach can tolerate more food, as well as it involves helping the stomach digest food at faster intervals. Now for the next thing that causes weight, and I want to put this on the list, it's got nothing to do with food, it's chronic stress. There are many things in our life, which can generate stress. And while having stress as a part of our day -to -day routine is common, it becomes a problem when we start to have stress that lasts longer than a month or so. So you see, stress comes in the form of cortisol, and cortisol is a hormone that provides energy in the moment and is really responsible for helping us deal with inflammation over time. So this hormone is designed to increase temporarily so we can start to fight whatever the stress is in the moment. So if it's physical workouts, then we have the energy to push a little farther than we regularly can. If it's something like mental stress, you might find a surge in energy or temporary boost in productivity. Or if it's something maybe even emotional, you might find that it might clear your mood up or create a feeling of drive for you to appear. So while having this hormone is a completely natural part of having stress, The problem lies in having cortisol increase past what you can tolerate. So you see your stress hormone cortisol, it's all about energy usage in the moment. So it's natural that it talks to other hormones in order to then find that temporary energy, because you don't pull it from nowhere. So this one hormone in particular for this conversation of energy is estrogen. Estrogen is your energy storage hormone and it stores energy in the form of fat. So this means if we have a really high or prolonged level of stress, that the body's cortisol will start to talk with your fat storing hormone to tell you to start storing energy for later. And that means you're naturally gonna start to store more fat. So when a person experiences this issue, at least the way that I've seen it in past clients, it's a person's going to go from not having any weight gain to over the span of a small two or three month period, they gained 20 pounds super quick. And that's because the higher that the cortisol level exists, the higher the level of estrogen will be required to store more fat. So when a person is in this state of weight gain, it sucks because literally everything that they worry over is going to make them gain. more weight. This is not going to change regardless of what they eat or how much they exercise. As a matter of fact, exercise is probably going to bring their weight up too because it's also a physical stressor that they're not managing properly at the moment. So for clients like this, when I'm working with them, it's really important for us to help them focus on stress relief, rest, and the recovery of their hormones with food. This often involves me telling them, to stop working out or doing less activity and having them spend more time in meditation or in breathing exercises. So the goal with this is about lowering cortisol to a level that is actually manageable in their lives. Now I'm not gonna say that they become stress -free because I don't think that's possible these days, but what I am saying is that you have to have a reasonable level of stress management put into place so you don't tip the scales literally with your weight. Now the final area, in this area for the weight cause I've left last on purpose, is an increase in estrogen that's not natural to the body. So as I mentioned earlier, that estrogen is the fat storage and the fat usage hormone, your body's estrogen doesn't always change from a natural perspective. Sure, there's a lot of natural ways estrogen change. Pre -menopause, post -menopause, prenatal, post -natal, high levels of stress, all of those are natural changes to estrogen and can be corrected. But most of the time when people show me their blood work or they tell me what they're taking and eating, there are a lot of other things present in which a person's hormones for estrogen can be made high. So most of the time, high estrogen can come from external sources. So things like medication, for example, like people on thyroid medication, or take ADHD medication, they don't realize that a lot of the basis for those medications have to be estrogen so your body can actually absorb them easier. So what this means is by taking certain medications, you're actually gonna start to see a change in someone's hormone panel to the point in which they might start to experience the side effects of weight gain as a result of an increase in estrogen. So it's unfortunate because many people I come across, they're either not told what the potential side effects could be for taking a medication or maybe the side effects weigh heavily against what they actually need it for. So they're like, okay, I'm gonna do it temporarily. Either way, people are surprised when a medication can change the way that their metabolism runs, but I see it all the time. Like I have a client who was on birth control, for example, and she had gained, I think it was close to 40 pounds, but it was over the span of six years. And as we started working together, I was like, hey, what do you think changed in that initial spark? Because your metabolism was really solid. And then we tracked it down to like, holy cow, it was the birth control, which is a big thing. So we had her change up her food. I educated her that the medication might be the issue. So she made the choice to chat with her doctor and to make that decision with them to stop using it. So the combination of both the food and the medication change, had her drop the 40 pounds in three months. Just from something very simple like that. Because it's amazing the amount of estrogen that can be held by taking a medication. Now another cause for external estrogen change can be supplements and certain food items. So just like medications, supplements are designed to be the most absorbable. And that means that they could have a chemical estrogen created to help them absorb into your body. Now, that's not with all supplements, but most people don't recognize it is with some of them. And this estrogen is designed to be absorbed by the gut to then absorb the rest of whatever that vitamin or that supplement is. So what happens is if you start taking that supplement for a long time, it starts to change the amount of fat that you store. And so your weight might go up and even certain foods like soy, certain lentils, cabbage, and even some fruits. they carry a very weak estrogen called a phytoestrogen. Phytoestrogens help the body naturally create more estrogen if a person's level might be low. While this might be good for people who have low estrogen, like maybe someone post menopause, it's not good for people who already have a high level of estrogen and who are struggling with their weight already. A few clients I've seen with estrogen issues normally have estrogen coming from all these forms. It's from stress, it's from medication, it's from stuff in their diet. So cleaning up their diet is the start of one, but then also working with their doctors to look at what they're taking and maybe swapping some medications if need be is definitely a second part of the process. Now the good thing about this last one, about the external, is when you start to correct the estrogen high, the weight literally starts to fall off somebody's body. where a person could experience anywhere from a two to three pound per week drop. And it becomes an absolute normalized part of this process. So with all these causes, I hope you can see the connection in which the body stores weight really to protect you from damage, but also to provide emergency energy because it's thinking that you don't have enough. And it's interesting to me because as with our clients, like people usually experience at least two of these things. which forced them to cause weight at the same time. And this is where then we have to break down what's going on, but then also teach them why the weight is happening in the first place. So this buildup doesn't happen again. Now the program that I've developed does this beautifully where we work together for 16 weeks. We teach you how to eat right for your body type. And then we show you how you can use the food to balance out your hormones naturally. Once the hormones are stable, we work towards improving digestion so we can start to turn up that dial on how fast the metabolism can be. So at that point, things like weight loss, it happens very easily. Digestive issues, they start to disappear. And seeing that two to three pounds per week, where you get that steady and sustainable weight loss, it actually becomes effortless. And you know, one thing that's so special for me is watching our amazing FIFRL crew celebrate and get excited together is more and more people lose weight each week. Like it's really awesome. And all of this is done in a super realistic way. That's easy for you to prep, shop and cook for. Now, if you're at a place now where you recognize why the weight is still going up and you want that support to change your food, to turn your health around, then there is an amazing opportunity that we've got going on right now. It's our gut health program. If you go to www .fitforallfitness .com slash gut health, and the number four is basically the actual number four, not the spelling of four. If you go www .fitforallfitness .com slash gut health, this is where you can learn about that 16 week program. And then afterwards it gives you the opportunity to book a call with me so we can really break down what's going on and see if you're a good fit to get started. So that is all for now with this episode. Love you lots. Thanks for listening. Hope to catch you on the next one and chat soon. Bye.
