Traditional weight loss plans and weight loss clinics are often a tempting first stop for people who want to get serious about losing weight.
A typical weight loss plan may entail:
- Cutting calories
- Omitting or restricting certain foods
- Increasing exercise
- Prescribing appetite-reducing medications
This certainly sounds fine on the surface, but neither of these options for weight loss solves the underlying problem.
A Pill Is Not the Answer
For example, a pill may help suppress your appetite while you’re in dieting mode, but what happens after you’ve reached your goal weight, and you become hungry again?
You can’t take appetite suppressants indefinitely, and a pill or short-term diet alone doesn’t resolve the root issues that lead to obesity, to begin with.
Yo-Yo Dieting Is Bad for Your Health
This, in turn, creates a vicious cycle of yo-yo dieting, which is detrimental to your health. Recent research has found approximately 90% of people who lose weight eventually gain it all back. And often, they gain back more; it gets harder to lose weight every time.
Short-term dieting and weight regain leads to a loss of muscle mass and a higher percentage of body fat, an increased risk of diabetes, heart disease, and high blood pressure, and an increased appetite.
Simply put, you might see immediate results with medications and short-term diet plans, but you’re putting your health at risk in more ways than one.
So What’s the Cure?
To go well beyond the surface-level diet plans, and to find a deeper solution to weight loss. Keep in mind there are a number of contributors to being overweight, which include:
- Diet and lifestyle
- Stress
- Sleep
- Toxic load
- Genetics
- Hormones
Hormones and physiological factors should NEVER be overlooked because although they are working behind the scenes, they play a key part in your natural tendency to lose or gain weight.
Here are some of the biggest hormonal indicators that identify a person’s ability to lose and maintain a healthy weight:
- Thyroid: The master hormone that regulates metabolism
- Insulin: a fat-storage promoting hormone
- Leptin: A hormone that signals to the brain when we’ve eaten enough, and we’re full
- Somatropin: the ‘aging’ hormone that affects energy, metabolism, muscle…
If any of these hormones are not balanced or functioning practically, then your ability to lose weight is already compromised, even before you start your diet plan.
Let’s Talk Metabolic Issues
In addition, many of these metabolic problems co-exist and could be working together to compromise your weight loss efforts.
The triple combination of undiagnosed thyroid dysfunction, insulin, and leptin resistance makes it very easy to gain weight, and much harder to lose weight.
In addition, these issues are a key player in cravings and overeating. When you add in predictable declines in receptor sensitivity for somatropin, it becomes clear why it’s harder to lose fat and gain muscle as we get older.
Being overweight isn’t just a cosmetic issue, either. The medical community links obesity to a higher risk of a myriad of health issues, which include:
- Diabetes
- Cancer
- Psychological diseases including and especially depression
It’s also directly connected to a heightened risk of heart disease, which is the leading cause of death in the United States.
Growing Issue
It’s also an issue that is literary growing. According to data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), 2013–20142,3,4,5
- More than:
- 1 in 3 adults were considered to be overweight.
- 2 in 3 adults were considered to be overweight or have obesity.
- 1 in 3 adults were considered to have obesity.
- About 1 in 13 adults were considered to have extreme obesity.
- About 1 in 6 children and adolescents ages 2 to 19 were considered to have obesity.
So finding a long-term solution isn’t just imperative for your immediate weight loss goals – it will save your life down the road.
But considering that 90% of diets eventually fail, and the result is more body fat and less muscle mass as your weight slowly ticks back up, it’s understandable why so many people get stuck in a years-long cycle of dieting.
Breaking the Cycle
So what can you do? Break the cycle and start looking at weight loss from a new perspective.
Just as you may take a pain reliever for a broken arm, a diet pill only resolves the symptoms of the overlying problem. You have to go further and identify any hormonal or underlying health issues that are undermining your weight loss efforts before you begin.
This is why you need a complete and comprehensive weight loss center that has the tools available to uncover these underlying issues.
These tools and resources would include screening:
- Hormones
- Thyroid function
- Leptin and insulin resistance
- Blood-sugar control
- Stress
- Diet
- Sleep
You also need to understand your ratio of body fat and muscle mass, and where extra pockets of fat may be stored.
DEXA Body Scan
A DEXA Body Scan is an excellent resource for this information, as it goes miles beyond the standard BMI calculator, and intricately determines how much of your excess weight is muscle or fat.
The medical community considers the DEXA Scan to be the gold standard for determining a jumping-off point for weight loss.
We Have the Tools to Help You
At the Lamkin Clinic, we have all of these tools readily available and more.
We understand the importance of identifying these underlying problems that are derailing your weight loss goals.
Many folks often get frustrated and blame themselves when their diet slips, or that extra weight returns, but you don’t have to beat yourself up – you need better information and a better strategy.
Medical weight-loss should never rely on a medication-only approach. An optimal healthcare team for real, long-term results should include a:
- Certified weight-loss counselor
- Dietitian
- Health coach
- Physiologist with exercise specialty
- Physician familiar with the fundamental causes of weight-loss resistance
So reach out to the Lamkin Clinic today for a medical weight loss plan that truly works. With our expertise and advanced diagnostic services and tools, we have the resources on hand to break the cycle for good.
Resources
- Image attribution.
- pritikin.com
- mwlc.com
- obesityaction.org
- niddk.nih.gov
- centerformedicalweightloss.com