Weight Gain? The Hormone Imbalance Connection.
Dr. Hotze explains the function of hormones in our body and how their decline and imbalance can have a direct impact on our weight and overall health. Find out how a hormonal imbalance can inhibit your body’s ability to maintain good metabolism and ideal body weight.
Podcast Highlights:
2:10: Now, we’re going to talk today about hormonal imbalance and how that adversely affects your ability to maintain good metabolism and an ideal body weight.
6:54: Now, thyroid hormones are produced by the thyroid gland in the neck. Of course, they circulate in the blood. Don’t do anything in the blood. They have to enter the cells.
7:41: When your metabolism goes down, your weight goes up.
9:59: This can all be obviated and corrected by taking natural progesterone whenever the imbalance starts and a woman has premenstrual symptoms and irregular periods or heavier periods, a little progesterone day 15 through 28, and this is natural bioidentical progesterone, can do a world of good. It can solve a multitude of problems and save you from having to go through and have a hysterectomy.
10:51: I have a doctor that told me back in training, he was an OBGYN, he says every afternoon in the office, he prospects for hysterectomies.
11:19: Listen, in our practice because we use progesterone, we have saved thousands of women from having hysterectomies.
11:41: And that imbalance in the hormones adversely affects your body’s weight because it down-regulates the thyroid. And when your thyroid down-regulates, your metabolism goes down, you’re eating unhealthy, and your weight goes up.
12:08: Testosterone enables T4 to be converted to T3 intracellularly, the active thyroid hormone.
12:18: So inevitably, men as they age, their metabolism goes down because their testosterone levels go down.
Podcast Transcription:
Stacey Bandfield: Welcome to Dr. Hotze’s Wellness Revolution. I’m Stacey Bandfield, here with Dr. Steven Hotze, founder of the Hotze Health & Wellness Center. And if you haven’t done so yet, then you can always go to HotzePodcast.com, that’s H-O-T-Z-Epodcast.com, to download our latest and greatest ways on how you can achieve optimal health through natural approaches to health. And we have had topics about how to lose weight in various ways. I know the keto lifestyle, we’ve talked about that quite a bit, however, there’s another key part of weight loss, and that has to do with hormonal balance. Isn’t that right, Dr. Hotze?
Dr. Hotze: That’s exactly right. Thank you so much, Stacey. And thank each one of you for joining us today on Dr. Hotze’s Wellness Revolution. I believe that you and everybody needs to have a physician who can coach you with his staff on a path of health and wellness naturally. They have to know what they’re doing. They have to be trained in this. They have to have the wherewithal and the commitment to help you get on a path of health and wellness naturally without pharmaceutical drugs. So as you mature, you have energy, you have vitality, and you have enthusiasm for life. Wouldn’t you like to be that way? Everybody, if you’re alive for crying out loud, you ought to feel alive. I don’t care if you’re 30 or 70 or 80.
If you’re alive, you might as well be alive. You don’t want to be dragging with the half dead, just got one foot in the grave and just waiting to go. You ought to be up and going and feeling great, and you can be at any age as long as you eat healthy, you have your hormones replenished, you get your vitamins and minerals in, so you detoxify yourself, and you’re doing some exercise. Those are the four basic points of good health. Now, we’re going to talk today about hormonal imbalance and how that adversely affects your ability to maintain good metabolism and an ideal body weight.
Now, your hormones are specific molecules made by glands called the endocrine glands in your body, and particularly the ones we think about are the thyroid hormones made by the thyroid gland in your neck, your sex hormones made by the ovaries in women, by the testicles in men, and your adrenal hormones made by the adrenal glands which sit on top of the kidney. We have other hormones like insulin, which is made by the pancreas, and this affects your metabolism. These hormones as we mature and enter puberty begin to have effects on our body.
So when you’re born either male or female, once you hit puberty, if you’re a female, you’re going to be begin to secrete from your glands, your ovaries, estrogen hormones and progesterone hormones. You’re going to enter your menstrual cycles, and you’re going to get your secondary female sex characteristics, the breasts and all that. You’re going to get the shape and start to look instead of like a little girl, you look like a young woman, and you begin to mature.
In men, their testosterone kicks in in puberty, and these little boys that have high squeaky voices and sing in the boys’ choir, all of a sudden they’re shaving, and they have muscles, and they’re strong, and they’re aggressive, and they’re crazy when the testosterone starts going. And they start identifying and saying, “I’d like to participate and meet that young lady.” All of a sudden the girls are looking pretty good, which had cooties a few years before, but now they like those girls. It produces male pattern behavior when the testosterone kicks in.
Now, as we move through our lives, our hormones begin to change. In females, if they have good hormonal production in a 28 day menstrual cycle, a woman will begin to make estrogen hormones on day one of her period. Just before the period, all the hormones have stopped. She sloughed the inner lining of the womb. Now she starts to produce estrogen hormones, which are proliferative hormones, which proliferate the inner lining of the womb.
They also cause breast swelling, and they can cause some fluid retention when your estrogen gets to a certain level. That’s why mid cycle the woman ovulates and she gives off an egg mid cycle, day 14 or 15. And in that location, the corpus luteum on the ovaries, she produces progesterone, which balances out the estrogen. And when that happens, she waits. And if she doesn’t get pregnant, well, then all the hormones stop. She sloughs the inner lining of the womb and starts over. Well, whenever a woman matures, her ovaries don’t work as well as they used to, as they did when she was in her twenties. Some women have problems right from puberty. They have irregular menstrual cycles, and they’re never balanced.
And so that can be a problem. And oftentimes they get thrown on birth control pills, which suppress the natural production of your natural hormones in the ovaries. And they’re taking these chemical counterfeit drugs, which can cause a host of health problems that lead to breast cancer over a period of years. It can cause all kinds of depression and adverse effect on the thyroid gland. So when a woman matures, as she matures and the progesterone levels fall, estrogen becomes the dominant hormone, so her periods will begin to show significant changes. First, she may have periods three to five days and light, and then they may last five to seven days heavier with some cramping.
And then as she marches through her menstrual life into her late thirties and forties, they may last seven to nine days and she has very heavy bleeding and some breakthrough bleeding. We call that menorrhagia, heavy bleeding and heavy cramping. And then they start having mood swings premenstrually and fluid retention and headaches and weight gain, all kinds of problems that are associated premenstrually because of the imbalance of the hormones progesterone and estrogen. We call this estrogen dominance, which is the other side of the column to progesterone deficiency. Now her estrogen is dominant and she has these problems that adversely affects her body’s ability to utilize thyroid hormones.
Now, thyroid hormones are produced by the thyroid gland in the neck. Of course, they circulate in the blood. Don’t do anything in the blood. They have to enter the cells. The inactive thyroid hormone T4, which is thyroid with four iodine molecules, is converted to T3, and it activates the mitochondria within the cell to produce energy. If you don’t get enough thyroid into your cells because you have estrogen dominance and now you have thyroid binding globulins produced by the liver caused by the estrogen dominance, they glom onto the thyroid hormone. You don’t get enough thyroid in your cell, and your energy production declines because the thyroid hormone catalyzes energy production within the cells.
And now all of a sudden you down-regulate those cells, you have low voltage. That means you got low energy production. You have low metabolism. When your metabolism goes down, your weight goes up. And then if you’re eating an improper unhealthy eating program with high levels of grains and potatoes and rice and corn and drinking soft drinks and having candies and all that and you’re not eating healthy, well, guess what? All of a sudden, all that gets converted to fat. It converts to sugar and sugar gets converted to fat, so you get weight gain. Now you’re carrying around this extra weight. Your energy level is low, and you’re not producing enough energy. Your body stays cold. Your body temperature is low.
You’re not thinking clearly. You can’t sleep well. You’re getting mood swings. You get joint and muscle aches and pains. You think you have fibromyalgia, your doctor says, because you have joint and muscle aches and pains. They didn’t tell you what the problem is. Something’s causing your fibromyalgia and your joint and muscle aches and pains, and likely it’s an imbalance between your, in women, estrogen and progesterone, which is leading to estrogen dominance and production of thyroid binding globulin, which bind the thyroid hormone, so the thyroid can’t get into the cell. You go to the doctor and they do blood tests on you and go, “Your blood tests are all normal.”
Well, they’re going to be normal for crying out loud in a bucket because they define normal where 95% of the people’s blood tests lie in, and 95% of the people always fall in the normal range because that’s what they define the normal range is, wherever 95% of the people fall. And by the way, the people that get their blood tested aren’t people that are feeling really good and healthy because they don’t go to the doctors – people that are feeling sick and tired. And so their thyroid levels are going to be low anyway and now they have this broad range. And the doctor is going to say, “Your blood tests are normal. Your thyroid levels are normal.” They look at the female hormones.
Well, they vary from day to day over the menstrual cycle, and they have a wide range of normal. You’re going to fall within the normal range there. And the doctor’s going to say…he’s going to tell you two things:
1) “I think you’re depressed,” and he’s going to put you on antidepressants or anti-anxiety medication and/or sleep medication.
2) And if you’re having irregular periods, ladies, guess what? He’s going to suggest you get a hysterectomy. That’ll stop the bleeding, but the bleeding wasn’t caused because you had a womb. It was caused because your hormones were imbalanced and your estrogen was dominant and stimulating too much production of the inner lining of the uterus.
This can all be obviated and corrected by taking natural progesterone whenever the imbalance starts and a woman has premenstrual symptoms and irregular periods or heavier periods, a little progesterone day 15 through 28, and this is natural bioidentical progesterone, can do a world of good. It can solve a multitude of problems and save you from having to go through and have a hysterectomy. And remember also that estrogen dominance, I should note, not only does it cause irregular bleeding, but it leads to fibroids in the uterus. So you get fibroid tumors. Now, that doctor’s going to want to do a hysterectomy on you like that. Listen, I’ll tell you how bad it is. Remember, OBGYN doctors are surgeons.
They deliver babies the first half of their career. They take out wombs and do bladder suspensions the second half of their career. I have a doctor that told me back in training, he was an OBGYN, he says every afternoon in the office, he prospects for hysterectomies. Prospects. The women in there are just like mines, and he’s prospecting, trying to find a case that it can do to make a living. Now, ma’am, you don’t want that. There are over 600,000 hysterectomies done a year that are uncalled for. Listen, in our practice because we use progesterone, we have saved thousands of women from having hysterectomies.
Hormone Imbalance Causes Weight Gain
Very few women that we see in our practice who are still menstruating, very few, I mean, it’s less than I could name all my hand, end up having a hysterectomy because we balance the hormones. And that imbalance in the hormones adversely affects your body’s weight because it down-regulates the thyroid. And when your thyroid down-regulates, your metabolism goes down, you’re eating unhealthy, and your weight goes up. Men, it’s the same thing. Testosterone stimulates the conversion of the inactive thyroid hormone T4, which is 92% of the production of your thyroid hormone, about the gland. Testosterone enables T4 to be converted to T3 intracellularly, the active thyroid hormone.
You don’t make enough testosterone. Guess what? You don’t make good conversion. So inevitably, men as they age, their metabolism goes down because their testosterone levels go down. Now, here’s one way that the doctor speeds up the hormonal imbalance. You go to a doctor and you’ve got elevated cholesterol, which used to be considered to be over 230. Then they dropped it to 220, then to 210, to 200. Now, they’re talking about dropping it to 180. Cholesterol is a very important molecule. It’s made by your body. 80% of it’s made in the liver and all your cells make cholesterol. Cholesterol forms a ring around every one of your cells. 25% of the cholesterol is in the brain. It’s important for neural transmission. It’s important for myelin sheaths.
It’s important for the production of your vitamin D. Vitamin D is made from cholesterol. When the sun hits your skin, it converts the cholesterol to vitamin D. Your testosterone, men, and your female hormones, ladies, and both in men and women, your adrenal hormones from the adrenal cortex are made with a base of cholesterol. That’s cholesterol. It’s the steroid base out of which you make your steroid pathway in your body, your natural occurring healthy steroids. Steroids made by your body are healthy, and the building block for your hormones is cholesterol. So if you go to a doctor and your cholesterol is elevated, and he is a conventional doctor, he’s going to throw you on the poison statin drugs.
And that’s going to lower your cholesterol and that’s going to cut down on your…that’s going to adversely affect your hormone production in your body, and you’re going to feel terrible. It also destroys the production of coenzyme Q-10, which is an energy molecule that the power plants need to convert nutrients into electrical energy. Particularly the heart needs high levels of coenzyme Q-10 and the statin drugs stop the production of coenzyme Q-10 and it causes a host of health problems. Matter of fact, mortality rate for those people that take statin drugs is higher than those who don’t take statin drugs. Yes, it’ll lower your cholesterol, but cholesterol is not the problem and cause of heart disease.
Inflammation is cause of heart disease, not cholesterol. And we’ll talk about that in another program. So here, the long and the short of it is if you will balance your hormones with proper levels of thyroid hormones, which are determined clinically, not based strictly on a blood test, although we look at thyroid antibodies, which most doctors don’t evaluate and that’s to see if you have autoimmune thyroid, that is antibodies to your thyroid gland, if you have that, that’s classical reason to try a dose of thyroid hormones to see if that will help stimulate your energy production. Remember, a thyroid hormones enables your cells to produce and use energy, and you need that energy. And you can tell if you have low thyroid.
Just do a body temperature. It should be 98.6 During the day. If you’re running low in 97 or 96, your body’s not producing enough energy. That’s why you’re running cold and your body doesn’t function well at lower body temperatures. It functions ideally at 98.6. So if you want to be healthy and well, you’ve got to replenish your hormones, both your thyroid hormones. And I believe anybody who has signs and symptoms of low thyroid deserves a therapeutic trial of thyroid hormone. Also, if you’re having imbalance in your female hormones, you deserve a therapeutic trial of progesterone and manage your testosterone level falls, you need to have that supplemented.
Besides that, as you age, your hormone levels inevitably fall and the building block for all the steroid hormones is pregnenolone. And that can be very helpful in rebalancing your hormones as can DHEA. These are a few tips. This is what you can do. If you want to get yourself healthy and well, get on a good healthy eating program and rebalance your hormones and replenish them. That’s very important.
Stacey Bandfield: Yes, and it’s such an important conversation to have, because as important as a healthy eating lifestyle is, and Dr. Hotze recommends the ketogenic eating program, we do get plenty of people that come to us saying, “I’m doing that, and I’m working out, and I’m still not losing weight.” They’re very frustrated and that’s because the hormone imbalance is a part of that. So if you want to find out more about how to balance your hormones, then give us a call at 281-698-8698. That’s 281-698-8698. Thank you for joining us today at Dr. Hotze’s Wellness Revolution.
