Dr. Karen Sun: Weight Loss Support
There are 3 root reasons people gain weight, and in order to achieve percent weight loss, we need to work on addressing the following 3 root causes listed below:
Lifestyle: Eating too much of the wrong food or living a sedentary life
2. Hormonal Imbalance
3. Toxin Accumulation
Lifestyle Recommendations:
Change your lifestyle! Exercise at least 3-5 times a week, 30 minutes to one hour each. Aerobic exercise burns calories, weight lifting builds muscle, and relaxation exercise reduces stress hormones. Reduce your total calorie intake. Reduce your carbohydrate intake. All carbohydrates turn into sugar and our body uses sugar as our energy source. As long as we are feeding our body with sugar, we are not going to burn the stored fat. Drink lots of filtered water to help your body detox. Eat organic fruits, vegetables, grass fed beef, and free range chicken/eggs to get enough nutrition to reduce your toxin exposure and help your body detox. Avoid eating big meals, especially at night, because most of the calories not used will be stored as fat. Planning for meals ahead of time. Don’t eat out too often as restaurant foods are usually not organic. Don’t buy processed foods as they are usually high in sugar, carbs and gluten. Make sleep a priority, as sleep deprivation triggers the stress hormone cortisol.
Hormonal Imbalance
Hormones can help us to lose weight: Testosterone helps to build muscle; Progesterone to help us utilize fat for energy, and Thyroid hormones are important for energy production. That’s why a lot of women start to gain weight after menopause due to hormonal decline, even if they have good eating habits and exercise regularly. This is why bio-identical hormone replacement therapy can help people lose weight.
The hormones that make us gain weight: Insulin and Cortisol
Insulin:
Insulin acts like a key to open the cell membrane to let sugar go into the cell. If the sugar is not used, it becomes stored fat. We’ve all heard about insulin resistance, metabolic syndrome, and diabetes. These health issues and disease all start when we eat too many carbohydrates. Once the cell has stored too much fat, the cell membrane will no longer respond to insulin to allow the sugar to get into the cell. If we continue eating a lot of sugar and carbohydrates, our body produces more insulin to push the sugar into the cell. Insulin generates fat, and also triggers inflammation. This is called metabolic syndrome, which means our blood sugar is still normal but the fasting insulin level is elevated. Eventually even with elevated insulin, the body cannot handle the sugar load, and the blood sugar level will begin to rise. We call this, type II diabetes.
The good news is that metabolic syndrome and type II diabetes can be reversed. How do we achieve that? By changing our lifestyle and losing weight. Supplements that help improve insulin sensitivity are listed below:
A. Alpha Lipoic Acid
B. Berberine
C. Chromium
D. Cinnamon
E. Omega 3 Fish Oil
GlucoSupport has chromium, alpha lipoic acid, cinnamon. Metabolic Boost has berberine, alpha lipoic acid and fish oil.
Cortisol:
When our ancestors saw a tiger, they needed to generate energy to run for their life. So cortisol, the stress hormone, much like insulin, also pushes sugar into the cell to generate immediate energy. In addition, it breaks down muscle to turn it into sugar, that’s why we call it a catabolic hormone. Plus, when we are stressed, we tend to crave and eat foods high in carbohydrates, which makes things worse. This is why stress can often lead to weight gain.
To reduce stress, we need to work on our sleep quality, reduce our body’s stress response, by taking supplements such as AdrenCalm+T, which has DHEA to help balance cortisol. It also contains chelated magnesium to calm our body and help with sleep.
Detoxification for Toxin Accumulation
Losing weight only without getting rid of the toxins in our body only pushes the toxins into our internal organs and does not reduce inflammation. That is why detox is such and important component in the weight loss program. Dr. Sun uses InflamDetox Powder to make delicious smoothies that can be used as a meal replacement. Use InflamDetoxMulti, if you don’t like smoothies. Please check out the Detox Program article for more information.