Sexy Forever: How to Fight Fat After Forty (13 page)

You can’t sleep because you are in hormonal decline.

The only way to know for sure if your hormones are below optimal levels is to have a blood test or a twenty-four-hour urine test. I have provided numerous resources for doctors on my website, but I have also asked Bill Faloon and his scientific advisory board at
Life Extension
magazine to supply you with an easy and inexpensive way to test your hormone levels. Bill has also given me his thoughts on the connection between balanced hormones and weight loss.

BF:
It is true that eating less and avoiding toxic foods addresses many of the underlying causes of weight gain and the accumulation of surplus fat pounds, but it is also partially attributable to the severe alterations that occur in our hormone levels as we age. For instance, a substantial percentage of aging women (and many aging men) have less-than-optimal thyroid levels that predispose them to weight gain. Youthful thyroid hormone levels are needed to maintain healthy metabolic rates, so your body is able to remove fat stores. Those who suffer from a deficiency should be prescribed thyroid hormone replacement. Medications to consider are Armour natural thyroid complex (containing both T4 and T3) or Cytomel (containing T3).

Trying to lose weight in the face of a thyroid deficit can be particularly challenging. However, taking excess amounts of thyroid hormone will not burn away body fat. The objective of testing your blood is to make sure that free T3 levels are in the upper one-third range of normal and that your other thyroid hormone markers are in optimal ranges.

SS:
So what should men and women do for optimal balance … and weight loss?

BF:
A large percentage of men today suffer from abdominal (visceral) obesity, the most dangerous kind of body fat. It is often difficult, if not impossible, for aging men to lose inches off their waistlines if they are deficient in free testosterone, especially in the presence of excess estrogen. Low levels of dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA) can also contribute to undesirable fat accumulation in men and women.

A comprehensive blood test panel can reveal free testosterone and estrogen levels, and a physician can prescribe a topical testosterone cream and an aromatase inhibitor (to suppress estrogen if necessary) to restore a man’s sex hormone profile to a youthful range. The same blood test panel can also detect DHEA blood levels to enable a man to take the proper dose of this over-the-counter dietary supplement.

The benefits of restoring testosterone to youthful ranges extend far beyond losing belly fat. Published scientific studies document a reduction in heart attack risk, alleviation of depression, enhanced sex drive, and a lot more.

A blood test panel for men should also measure prostate-specific antigen (PSA) to help screen for hidden prostate cancer. Those with prostate cancer usually cannot restore their sex hormones until the PSA numbers are lowered.

Some men are able to reduce excess estrogen and simultaneously boost free testosterone by taking nutrient formulas that contain plant extracts to help inhibit the aromatase enzyme (which converts testosterone into estrogen) and decrease levels of sex hormone-binding globulin (which binds free testosterone).

SS:
What about women?

BF:
A common problem women experience during menopause is an increase in belly fat mass. Estrogen levels plummet during menopause, and some studies correlate this estrogen deficiency with greater abdominal adiposity in women.

While treatment with high dosages of horse-urine-derived estrogens and progestin drugs (Premarin and Provera) may contribute to weight gain, evidence suggests that individually dosed natural (bioidentical) estrogen replacement facilitates a reduction in abdominal fat in women who are estrogen deficient.

Excess levels of testosterone in women can be particularly troublesome, as it can cause abdominal weight gain, which is the opposite of how testosterone works in men. If a woman’s blood tests reveal excess levels of free testosterone, there are safe medications that can rapidly bring this hormone into normal ranges.

Restoring hormone balance in aging females requires the intervention of a health care practitioner with specialized expertise in prescribing bioidentical hormone replacement therapy. Men are more fortunate in that most doctors can prescribe the proper dose of testosterone (and aromatase inhibitors if needed).

SS:
Anything else you can share?

BF:
There is a massive body of scientific data supporting the role that hormones play in regulating body fat storage. To put it simply,
hormones tell our cells what to do. In the presence of too much or too little of each of these hormones, aging individuals risk accumulating fat pounds that are difficult to shed.

Fortunately, folks don’t have to guess what your hormone status is. You can obtain a male or female hormone blood test panel by going to
SuzanneSomers.com
and clicking on Life Extension. These tests are offered by Life Extension to Suzanne’s readers at a reasonable price. Plus the experts will provide information about the results, and even get you started on a natural hormone balancing program that’s right for you.

I admire Brenda Watson—she is a one-woman crusade for gut health. She is also the author of many books, including some of my favorites:
The H.O.P.E. Formula, The Detox Strategy
, and
The Fiber 35 Diet
. She is one of the foremost authorities in the country on internal cleansing and detoxification. Because of her expertise in digestive health, people flock to her lectures all over the world. Understanding how the gut works is essential to health—and to losing weight—and I asked her to explain the reason why.

SS:
So what happens to the gut when a person’s diet is genetically modified, full of chemicals, stripped of nutrients, and unvaried? What toll does it take and what can a person expect?

BW:
Toxins create gut imbalance, degrade the gut lining, and then enter the circulation, affecting the health of the entire body. Toxins
can also enter the body through the lungs and the skin. When the liver can’t detoxify them properly, they hide out in unlikely places like the bones, muscles, fat cells, brain tissue, and the liver itself (where they can do serious damage, both in the short term and in the long term). Because many fat-soluble toxins park themselves in fat cells they can mess with signals from these cells that affect our hormones, and that in turn changes our metabolism and how we store (or burn) fat.

SS:
It’s the point of this book: toxins make you fat. Including the artificial sweeteners in diet sodas that people believe will help them lose weight.

BW:
You got that right. What a crock!

SS:
It’s difficult to make people truly understand that we are facing a chemical and environmental catastrophe regarding our health.

BW:
Yes, and more than 60 percent of Americans are also deficient in one or more essential nutrients. The average diet further adds to our toxic load through refined sugars, additives, preservatives, and exposure to pesticides. So eating closer to nature—choosing organically grown foods, high-quality sources of protein, and other nutrients—will offset and support our bodies’ natural detoxification system. And weight loss will follow.

SS:
That makes sense to me. Let’s talk more about gluten intolerance. It is quite the epidemic, and it looks like it is here to stay.

BW:
That’s for sure. I do want to clarify one thing. Gluten intolerance, or sensitivity, is like a spectrum. Some people are somewhat intolerant and can even eat gluten on a rare occasion. At the other end of the spectrum are people with celiac disease, which is the most severe form. These people must strictly avoid gluten for the rest of their lives
or they risk irreversibly damaging their intestinal lining. Celiac disease can be detected by blood tests and intestinal biopsy, while gluten intolerance may be more difficult to pin down.

SS:
I understand people of northern European descent are more affected by gluten intolerance. Is that correct?

BW:
It used to be that northern Europeans were most affected by gluten, and people of Irish descent were especially affected, but of course now we are seeing gluten intolerance all over the board. And these foods are producing little tiny inflammations that we don’t really immediately feel in our gut. It might make its first big appearance with say, chronic fatigue, because this person’s gut is now out of balance. But 43 percent of people today are gluten intolerant!

SS:
Forty-three percent? That’s huge! Is this a result of a lifetime of refined and processed foods, and at a certain point the gut just says, “I give up”?

BW:
That and some hereditary markers. Children of alcoholics are at a higher risk. Recently a woman wrote to me and said that she had been on my detox program for a solid year and had some major successes with her lupus, weight gain, migraine headaches, and on and on. She had done the cleansing and the digestive care, but she said something was still missing. She said her face would swell and bloat and she couldn’t figure out why. Then she took the test for gluten intolerance and there it was. The puffy face is the giveaway.

It constantly amazes me how many people don’t recognize that they are out of balance. Anyone who is overweight is out of balance. And they definitely have a digestion problem, whether they feel it or not.

SS:
Do you believe most of this fat is coming from toxins?

BW:
Yes, and also a high intake of simple carbohydrates in their diets. You know: cakes, pies, cookies, bread, et cetera.

SS:
If I just told people to stop eating cakes, pies, and cookies, it would certainly help, but they still wouldn’t get thin because of the toxins in their systems. Will gluten intolerance lead to obesity?

BW:
It certainly can. Obesity, simply put, involves being overweight due to excess body fat. About 100 million Americans are overweight. That’s one-third of the population. And one-quarter of our children are overweight. It has doubled since the 1980s. Many different proteins and molecules are secreted by fat, so fat now becomes its own organ. The fat tissue is in communication with the rest of your body, especially the endocrine (hormonal) system and the central nervous system. That is why the brain, gut, thyroid, and hormonal connections are vitally important, because you now have a fat organ that is affecting all of these systems.

People who build up fat in their abdominal regions, versus storing it on the hips, are set up to have much greater health consequences. Abdominal fat is connected to the heart, cardiovascular system, liver, and pancreas, which is why we have an epidemic of diabetes. Abdominal fat leads to a condition known as nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), which is associated with metabolic syndrome and can lead to diabetes and heart disease. NAFLD is also associated with gut imbalance. Candida overgrowth increases the production of ethanol (alcohol) in the gut. I can remember years ago I was at a trade show and I talked with Dr. Robert Atkins and he said to me, “The only people I cannot get to lose weight are the people with candida. I have to get rid of that first.” Bacterial toxins are also found in the bloodstream of NAFLD patients. All this points to gut imbalance as a contributor to this condition—with the many health implications we’ve discussed. It’s a web of illness, all leading back to the gut.