Sexy Forever: How to Fight Fat After Forty (12 page)

So for women, by allowing your estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone levels to decline, you set yourself up for weight gain from high insulin and cortisol. In addition, you no longer have the fat-burning benefits of a properly working thyroid. And your adrenals are high (cortisol again), so now you can’t sleep, and are putting yourself at risk for a heart attack. This entire cascade is due to declining estrogen, progesterone, and DHEA (which declines in both sexes starting at age thirty to thirty-five, allowing cortisol to start a slow upward creep well before menopause). So you can see that all the hormones are affected when one is off. When your doctor says you have high insulin levels, take the information seriously. (You may need to check with a doctor who knows how to do proper insulin resistance testing with a sugar challenge to get this information, though.)

Cortisol
. High cortisol levels make sleep impossible. On the other hand, if your cortisol is low, weight is lost in excess (but this is unhealthy weight loss). If cortisol is overactive (high), either systemically or intra-cellularly (in fat cells), it promotes weight gain.

When estrogen drops, cortisol rises, because the inhibiting effect estrogen had on the enzyme that transforms cortisone into active cortisol is now mostly gone.

High cortisol can be rectified by estrogen, DHEA, and testosterone
supplementation in a bioidentical form. Because high cortisol promotes the formation of new fat cells from connective tissue cells, you want to get that down, and can do so by replacing the hormones that have declined with age.

Thyroid
. Thyroid is the fat-burning hormone. If thyroid levels are low, thyroid supplementation can promote weight loss. Blood tests frequently miss weak thyroid function, and doctors often don’t even check rT3 (reverse T3) levels, so it is important that you find a doctor who does not rely solely on lab results and will conduct a thorough clinical evaluation. And you need a doctor who understands how to read the overly broad ranges of normal, an example being the “shrinking TSH range.” If you’re scratching your head, let me explain.

Kathy Simpson wrote in her book
The Woman’s Guide to Thyroid Health:
“With hypothyroidism [low thyroid], we don’t metabolize food effectively and the calories we consume turn into fat instead of energy. This weight gain is insidious, and neither diet nor exercise resolves it. When weight gain is caused strictly by low thyroid function and not other endocrine deficiencies as well, fat tends to be symmetrically distributed on the body.… When low pituitary function is at the root of low thyroid function, weight gain is generally confined to the area from your abdomen to just above your knees. The skin of a person with hypothyroidism also takes on a flabby look, as overall musculature is affected, too.”

Symptoms of an underactive thyroid can include yellow palms, yellow bottoms of feet, missing the outer third of the eyebrows, constipation, slow pulse, cold hands, frequent infections, sensitivity to heat and cold, reduced sweating, dry skin, tongue swelling, and others. You don’t need to have all of these symptoms for thyroid to be a factor. Any one of these can be an indicator of low thyroid.

Constipation is extremely common with low thyroid. Both digestion of food and excretion of wastes are slowed along with everything else in the body. The specific cause is deficient muscular action of the abdominal walls and intestines. Bowel movements should occur every twelve to twenty-four hours, but if your thyroid is low they may occur much less
frequently, in some cases just once a week. This results in painful hemorrhoids and painful bowel movements, and causes a buildup of toxins because waste products are not excreted as they should be. The fermentation of wastes caused by the extended time it takes for food to move through your digestive tract often results in a lot of gas, which further distends your abdomen.

Many environmental chemicals have structures very similar to certain hormones and are toxic to the thyroid. These chemicals can fit into the cellular receptors for these thyroid hormones, with serious consequences. Many of these chemicals mimic estrogen, but some also interfere with the usage and metabolism of thyroid, testosterone, and other hormones. When thyroid function is affected by these chemicals, it can’t do its job of destroying poisonous substances and infectious agents. Dr. Davis Lamson, a colleague of mine at Tahoma Clinic, has shown that toxic metals such as lead, mercury, cadmium, and many others can cause elevations of the “blocking” thyroid hormone, reverse T3 or rT3. A chelation test will measure metal toxicity to determine if this is your issue.

Fluoride, heavy metals, chemicals like perchlorates (found in drinking water), and X-rays all can negatively affect the thyroid. Also, certain medications damage or suppress thyroid function, including lithium (at prescription doses), birth control pills, beta-blockers, phenytoin, theophylline, antacids that contain aluminum, sulfa drugs, antihistamines, and chemotherapy drugs. Imbalances of estrogen and progesterone can suppress the thyroid, too.

For more information on BHRT, see the brief guide at the back of the book, as well as a list of doctors at
SuzanneSomers.com
.

If you’ve had a hysterectomy, you must find a doctor who understands the importance of replacing progesterone along with estrogen. Taking estrogen without natural progesterone creates imbalances in the body that can lead to cancer and unwanted weight gain. Estrogen and progesterone should be replaced in a cyclical manner, mimicking nature. The prevailing thought of most doctors is that after a hysterectomy women no longer need progesterone because they do not have a uterus. But this ignores the biological reality that whenever we have estrogen in our bodies we must have progesterone taken cyclically to balance it or our entire endocrine system can be thrown off. Balancing your hormones correctly, even if you have had a hysterectomy, will return your metabolism to normal, and (provided you detoxify and eat properly) you can regain your perfect weight.

When your thyroid is working as it should, you’re more able to withstand massive assaults from our environment. And it will assist in ridding your body of its toxic burden, and in turn will have a positive impact on your ability to lose weight.

The incredible impact of replacing declining hormones is that you get to feel like you did when you were young, when weight wasn’t difficult to take off. Why was being thin so easy when you were young? You had
balanced hormones
! The difference between then and now is the imbalance.

To rectify the matter, you need to go to a qualified doctor who specializes in bioidentical hormone replacement.

Before you go, it makes sense to have your blood tested for essential hormones ahead of time, so the doctor can accurately and immediately
prescribe bioidentical hormone replacement that’s right for you. To conveniently have your blood tested, log on to
SuzanneSomers.com
and click on Life Extension. They have a nationwide network that enables people to have their blood conveniently drawn without the need for an appointment. Life Extension’s prices are far more reasonable than what commercial laboratories charge. And if you’d like to dig further into this topic, please grab a copy of
Breakthrough
or
Ageless
, as in those books I delve into the entire subject.

I take great pains (and I have had the patience) to find and keep hormonal balance. If I can do it, so can you. The effect of balance on my life is fantastic. Every day is a good one and as a result of my choices I am healthy, I’m thin, I have energy, and I feel involved and vital. Plus as an added bonus I have the benefits of youthful hormonal protection against cancer—a win-win.

You have a choice: you can continue to deteriorate, continue to eat an unhealthy diet, continue to surround yourself with chemicals, continue to eat chemicals, continue to take unneeded over-the-counter or prescription drugs, or you can choose health and
change your life
!

Now that you understand how important a role hormones play in the body, you can see that as we age, having a doctor who can help us keep an eye on these systems is very important. If you don’t take hormones seriously, what do you expect will happen? Hormonal imbalance leads to weight gain and poor health. Fat is a language. Fat is your body talking, screaming, to be heard. Tell yourself the truth. Stand naked in front of the mirror. Do you like what you see? Do you want to lose weight? Do you want optimal health? Balancing your hormones is a big part of the answer to health and to the weight that just doesn’t seem to want to come off. Once your hormones are balanced, the battle will become easier. Without balanced hormones you are fighting a losing battle.

Again, it’s a choice: deterioration or restoration!

Choose health and balance, and weight loss will follow!

It’s a new concept to go to the doctor when you are well, but as a result of my doing this, I am never sick. I don’t remember my last cold or flu, or ache or pain. Not since breast cancer ten years ago, when I changed my whole approach to my health, have I been sick. (There was one exception: during a poisoning that put me in the hospital, as I explained in my last book,
Knockout.
) I have made a commitment to wellness and optimal health and I have never looked back.

As mentioned, to further understand the hormonal system and hormone replacement, I urge you to read my books
Ageless
and
Breakthrough
. If you want a little refresher, see “A Brief Guide to Bioidentical Hormone Replacement” (
this page
).

Every time I give a lecture, the first thing I do is ask for a show of hands, “How many in this room sleep five hours or less?” Inevitably nearly every hand in the room is raised. It seems like no one is sleeping these days, and the big winners are the pharmaceutical companies who continue to come up with sleeping pills that appear to take care of this problem. Unfortunately sleep induced by sleeping pills is not real sleep. It is a suspended state and none of the natural healing work nature has meant to take place during sleep can happen. Sleep is essential for health and sleep controls appetite.

You ask, What does sleep have to do with losing weight? If you don’t sleep, losing weight becomes a losing battle and it all has to do with your hormones, especially the very important hormone cortisol. When you reach midlife, as we’ve discussed, your hormones estrogen and progesterone begin to plummet. As these hormones fall, your cortisol rises. You cannot sleep when your cortisol is high. When cortisol is high, insulin rises, and high insulin leads to weight gain because insulin is the fat-storing hormone.

Sleep has been provided by nature to do the body’s healing work. It takes seven to eight hours for this process to happen. The first three and a
half hours are when melatonin is secreted. Then prolactin, which is a pituitary hormone, is released. The National Institutes of Health concludes that six hours of prolactin production in the dark is the minimum necessary to maintain immune function. When prolactin is released, other hormonal functions happen: cortisol goes down, insulin goes down, your thyroid gets a rest as do your adrenals. But if you are imbalanced because your estrogen and progesterone are low or missing due to aging or stress, much less of this healing process can happen.

This is the teeter-totter again: estrogen and progesterone dip, so insulin, cortisol, thyroid, and adrenals rise. One goes down, the others go up.

As a result, insulin stays high, so you gain weight, which can lead to obesity and diabetes—even if you are eating correctly. That is why dieting alone is no longer working for people forty and older. The hormones are no longer in balance and, coupled with your toxic burden, the result is inability to lose weight.

Inability to sleep makes your cortisol rise, making you anxious, and your heart becomes stressed. If your cortisol is high, you can’t sleep well. Cortisol is your stress hormone, which is meant to be high only in times of prolonged stress, and even though high cortisol is natural with high stress, it slowly wears away body tissues and good health. High cortisol gives you a “steroid high”; your brain is overactive and you feel pumped up all over. (It’s actually adrenaline itself—an entirely separate adrenal hormone from cortisol—that makes the heart pound, not cortisol. And of course adrenaline provides the adrenaline rush. One way to keep these two categorized is to think of adrenaline as the “sprinter’s hormone”—rapid onset, only lasts a little while—and of cortisol as the “long distance runner’s hormone”—takes longer to get started but can be sustained against stress for much longer before becoming exhausted.) Inability to sleep also diminishes your thyroid, so now you have also diminished fat-burning hormone. Plus the thyroid is responsible for dissolving cholesterol and low thyroid can contribute to autoimmune diseases such as MS and lupus. This cascade, this hormonal crash, throws off your entire system, causing your adrenals to stay revved up and making your heart race, and now sleep becomes impossible.