Have you been struggling to lose weight and wonder if there might be a
medical reason why this is? This video is for you.
Hey carb dodgers, my name is Dr. Dan Maggs. I help people who've been struggling to lose
weight, achieve their goals of long-term, sustainable weight loss. I struggled with
my weight right up until I was in my early 30s when I was officially obese. I lost it
all and I've kept it off ever since. Now I make videos to help people like you do the
same. I release new videos every day Tuesday, so be sure to hit the Like button and press
that bell to get notified whenever I release a new video.
It's not uncommon for people to think that there may be an underlying medical reason
as to why they are gaining weight or are having difficulty losing it. In this video, I'm going
to take you through some of the common and some of the not so common medical reasons
why people struggle to lose weight. Now I find it really helps to think of these
problems with some of the different hormonal systems that affect our bodies, so rather
then just listing a load of medical problems, I'm going to break this down by the different
hormonal systems and discuss some of the medical problems that fall into each.
Let's get started with one of the most common — thyroid hormone problems. The thyroid
hormones are an important regulator of our metabolism. I like to think of them as acting
like the accelerator or gas pedal in the car, controlling the speed of many of the body's
functions. If the thyroid is overactive, everything speeds up; if it's underactive, everything
slows down. Hyperthyroidism is the medical name for an
underactive thyroid and this is probably the best known medical cause of issues with weight
loss. Now approximately 5% of people have a problem with their thyroid gland and it's
estimated that 60% of those 5% go undiagnosed and untreated. Some of the symptoms of underactive
thyroid glands are slow heart rate, constipation, dry skin, low mood, hair loss, cold intolerance,
and of course, weight gain. Test for thyroid disorders are among the first tests that I
order for my patients who are struggling to lose weight or who are experiencing unexpected
weight gain. Hyperthyroidism is really common, easy to
test for, easy to treat, and frequently undiagnosed. In fact, my mum went underdiagnosed for years
and she was mistakenly diagnosed with depression, which magically got better when her underactive
thyroid gland was treated. So if you're experiencing some of the symptoms
I mentioned earlier, then it's probably worth having a chat with your doctor. It's a really
silly one to miss. The second group of hormones that I want to
talk about today are the stress hormones, in particular, cortisol. Now, cortisol is
one of the main hormones that helps our bodies respond to stressful situations. It has some
very useful, short-term effects, such as increasing our blood sugar levels, increasing our attention,
decreasing our sensitivity to pain, and increasing our blood pressure. So if you're being chased
by a lion, these are all pretty useful things to have happen to your body. But the problem
with cortisol is when these effects become prolonged such as when somebody is always
stressed out. The next main medical problem that I want
to discuss that maybe preventing weight loss, if that's what you're trying to achieve, is
chronic stress. Chronic, ongoing stress is very bad for our health. Persistently raised
cortisol causes persistently raised blood glucose levels — think diabetes — or persistently
raised blood pressure — think heart disease and strokes. It also decreases the immune
system. People who are chronically stressed frequently get more infections. It also causes
decreased levels of serotonin which is the happy chemical — think depression.
The excess glucose levels caused by constantly raised cortisol will also cause cravings for
sugary, high carb foods. In fact, there's also a disease that causes excessive cortisol
secretion, which gives us kind of an extreme version of what happens when we are chronically
stressed. Cushing's Disease is a rare tumor that causes
a significant amount of cortisol to be produced, and so people with Cushing's Disease typically
gain weight, mainly around the abdomen. They also develop fat on the upper back, they develop
red, round, puffy face, they get purple stretch marks across their abdomen, they also experience
mood issues. In other words, think that Cushing's Disease
is like an extreme version of what happens when we're chronically stressed. Other conditions
that go hand in hand with chronic stress are of course anxiety and depression and persistently
raised cortisol is something that people with anxiety and depression can also experience.
It's not hard to see why people who are suffering from those issues often also gain weight.
Of course, some of the medications we use to treat anxiety and depression can also cause
weight gain. I'm also going to talk about some of the medications that can cause weight
gain later on. The third different hormone that causes problems
with weight gain is called leptin. Now leptin is a hormone that is produced via fat cells
and high levels of it tell our brain that we don't need to eat, so it reduces our appetite.
So the more fat we have, the more leptin is produced, which should tell the brain that
we're not hungry. What causes problems with leptin? Well, sleep
problems. When you've got a medical problem that is causing issues with your sleep, which
are probably too numerous to mention here, or you're just someone who doesn't let yourself
get enough sleep ... Sleep is an important regulator of our metabolism and therefore
our weight. Sleep issues can cause problems with your weight. Very simply, when sleep
goes down, weight goes up. There was quite a famous study done a few
years ago in Finland. A group of women who had six or less hours sleep a night actually
gained five kilograms, which is about 11 pounds over a seven-year period compared to those
who slept longer. There are a couple of ways in which it goes
about doing this. Sleep deprivation leads to reduced levels of leptin, so you're simply
more hungry after about a night's sleep. To top that off, a tired brain just doesn't make
such well reasoned judgments about nutrition. In fact, you're far more likely to be impulsive
and given to the desire for junk food after a bad night's sleep.
Now I want to talk to you about something called leptin resistance. As I mentioned before,
leptin is produced by the fat cells to send a signal to your brain. So why do obese people
get hungry at all? Think about it. If you're obese, you have a lot more fat cells that
should be producing a lot more leptin that someone who's slim. This in turn should suppress
your appetite so that your weight normalizes again. But it's pretty clear that there's
something going wrong. In the same way that an alcoholic becomes
resistant to the effects of alcohol and needs more alcohol to become intoxicated, our brains
can also become resistant to the effects of leptin. This is known as leptin resistance.
Leptin resistance is one of the key hormonal problems that will prevent your progress towards
losing weight. It's probably not a condition that you will find regularly diagnosed for
example by your doctor, but it is one of the key hormonal disorders that exist in our body
that causes problems with our weight. The four hormonal system that I want to talk
about today is problems with insulin. Now I talked about how understanding the role
of insulin in the body is key to understanding weight losses in this video link up here.
Insulin has many roles in the body, but one of its key roles is the regulation of blood
glucose. If our pancreas senses that blood glucose levels are elevated, such as after
a meal that was high in carbohydrates, then it will release insulin into the bloodstream.
Now insulin allows blood glucose to be taken up by the cells, mainly fat cells and muscle
cells, but much like with leptin resistance where the brain stops listening to the signals
from the leptin, insulin resistance also occurs. In someone with insulin resistance, more insulin
is needed to shift the same amount of glucose into the same cells. The result of this is
that raised insulin levels exist long after someone has finished a meal, much longer than
they should be. If you've never heard of insulin resistance before, you've pretty much almost
certainly have known some of the conditions that insulin resistance is a key abnormality
in, such as obesity, pre-diabetes, Type II diabetes and polycystic ovary syndrome.
Remember, insulin is the hormone that tells the body to store fat. If insulin levels are
raised above where they normally should be, particularly over a sustained period of time,
then you're going to have issues with weight. It's very easy to gain weight in that situation
but it's very hard to lose weight. Finally, I just want to talk about a few other
medical things that don't neatly really fit into the different hormonal symptoms but are
important. Weight gain is the side effect of many different
types of medications, and this is often down to the actions that those medications also
have on the hormonal systems that we described earlier on. For example, insulin or any drug
that tells the pancreas to produce more insulin will cause weight gain. Steroid medications
are really well known to also cause weight gain, but what steroid medications are are
essentially synthetic versions of cortisol. We're using them because they suppress the
immune system just like I mentioned earlier, but they have all the other same side effects
of chronic stress too. Many anti-depressant tablets also cause weight
loss. Now, there's loads of different reasons why and that's probably beyond the scope of
this video, to be honest. Finally, there is one other condition that
many doctors, to be honest, haven't heard of. Lipoedema is a long-term chronic condition
where there is an abnormal build-up of fat cells in the legs, thighs, and buttocks, and
also occasionally just in the arms here. It almost exclusively affects with women, and
people with this condition really struggle to lose weight from those areas. In fact,
many lose weight off the upper body quite well. If you have a significantly abnormal
distribution of fat from upper body to lower body and you find it particularly difficult
to lose weight from those areas that I describe, then this is something you may wish to look
into further. But as I mentioned, it's not something that doctors commonly know about
so you may need to take some more information into your doctor's with you if you're going
to go in about that condition. In general, most of the conditions that cause
problems with weight loss have a hormonal basis, particularly the thyroid hormones,
problems with cortisol, problems with leptin that affects your appetite, and problems with
insulin. Now, at the beginning of this video, I mentioned
that problems with the thyroid were very, very common and you may have well have known
that thyroid issues with weight before watching this video. But I actually think that problems
with leptin resistance and insulin resistance are way under-recognized as hormonal problems
that prevent people from losing weight effectively. Many overweight or obese or pre-diabetic or
Type II diabetics are strongly insulin resistant and probably leptin resistant too. That way
outnumbers the number of people with hyperthyroidism. The problem is these conditions aren't effectively
addressed by low calorie diets, but they are addressed by low carbohydrate dieting, intermittent
fasting, and all the other lifestyle things that I talk about on this channel.
Thanks for watching, everyone. I hope that's been useful. I've you've enjoyed this video,
then please give me a like down below. Share it with your friends who might benefit from
this information. Leave me a comment. Don't forget to subscribe to the channel. I'll see
you next Tuesday.