Most overweight people, when seeing all the ?easy ways to lose weight fast ? watch the fat just melt off and stay fit forever! feel like their failures in dieting are due to a bum thyroid gland. Well, sort of.
The thyroid gland is the primary conductor of the metabolic rate.? The metabolic rate is best described as being the amount of calories your body uses for basic function. The bulk of the calories that you have available are used to fuel the organs and muscles. They are active tissues that do work and require energy to do their jobs.
So you’re hypothyroid. You have a slow metabolism. Shouldn’t you just be eating a low-calorie hypothyroid diet of lettuce leaves and alfalfa sprouts? I don’t think so.
If you eat 3,000 calories per day, the thyroid gland will do its best to adjust the metabolism to 3,000 calories. If that’s not quite enough, you will either get tired, get cold, get hungry, or experience all three to bring calories consumed and calories burned into perfect equilibrium. If 3,000 is too much, the opposite will happen. The thyroid increases the metabolic rate as best as it can, your body dissipates extra heat, your energy levels increase to burn off the excess, and your hunger goes down to keep you from eating too much.
What happens if you are overweight and you cut calories and increase exercise to lose weight? Die you know that this behavior can be actually be one of the causes of hypothyroidism?
Well, whaddya think?? The thyroid works hard with it’s fellow glands to stop your intense exercise any way it can and increase your hunger so you will eat more food. That’s always the result of your body using more calories than it has available to burn for energy. In other words, hypothyroidism treatment strategy is hopeless. Creating a calorie deficit makes your body work hard to counterbalance that imbalance. Plain and simple. Trying to starve yourself is futile. The body won’t let you get away with it. Anyone who has ever tried to simply eat less and exercise more to battle a weight problem, especially a severe one, has at some point run into this brick wall.
All this dieting, all this ?eat less, exercise more? nonsense helps to create a state where the thyroid pumps out less juice. When the thyroid is pumping out less than normal amounts, it causes hypothyroidism. Sometimes there really is something wrong with the gland itself, but more common is the form of hypothyroidism that is induced by not getting enough calories to the muscles and organs that need them.
A symptom of not getting enough energy to those active tissues, and thus lowering your thyroid hormone levels, is hunger. Don’t forget that, because hunger is a dieter’s worst enemy and one of the causes of hypothyroidism. Even if you are gaining fat, if you are chronically hungry it’s a safe bet your hunger is caused by a lack of calories to the active tissues. Eat less, and the problem gets worse, the thyroid slows down even more, and a sluggish thyroid in hibernation mode is the worst possible thing that could happen to a person trying to lose body fat. So what’s an effective hypothyroidism treatment?
Legendary thyroid specialist Broda Barnes, M.D., estimated that nearly half of the U.S. population at the time he practiced (a few decades ago) had mild hypothyroidism, something he noted was associated with many degenerative diseases, particularly heart disease and of course weight problems.
Now the causes of hypothyroidism are better understood (although not well-known). Hypothyroidism is caused by the over-activation of adrenal hormones such as cortisol, induced by stress ? either mental, emotional, the result of an infection, or allergies, or nutrient deficiencies, you name it ? is frequently seen paired with hyperinsulinemia (too much insulin) in those that are overweight. It forms a nice happy triangle of imbalances that makes you look like a triangle with arms and legs when you look into the mirror.
The complexities of hormones and their interrelationships, and of course their significance to your waistline are explored in understandable and even entertaining terms at www.180degreehealth.com. More importantly, many secrets of overcoming these imbalances, which are without the question the underlying causes of packing on too much fat in the first place, are revealed right here. Odds are, if you have a sluggish thyroid gland, the easiest and most harmless and natural solutions will work like charms. And we got ?em in my downloadable ebook, 180 Degree Metabolism; The Smart Strategy for Fat Loss.