Weight gain is often due to hormonal influences that predispose you to becoming less lean. Leanness is controlled by many factors, but the hormone balance in your body is a big driving force that can make your other efforts more or less successful. We want to encourage our clients to come in for testing even if you just want to document what your baseline levels are. Then we can see if we need to adjust them.
Women need a healthy level of testosterone, the primary male hormone in the category of hormones known as androgens. This hormone will enhance your ability to develop muscle and burn fat.
If you do not naturally have enough you can be supplemented by medical prescription through personal supervision.
To understand how interrelated hormones are you need to know that to make estrogen, a woman must first make Testosterone. To have proper hormone balance we need to have sufficient levels of the various important hormones.
To be healthy we need to keep the secretion and intake of hormones (even those we encounter via foods, plastic bottles and pesticides) in check by being able to properly metabolize and excrete the byproducts of hormone metabolism. It’s a complicated female paradox that we are just beginning to be able to adequately monitor and modify for our patients.
We get imbalances in testosterone in the same way we get other hormonal imbalances, and they are detectable by blood testing.
The adrenal gland makes male hormones too. As part of weight management this hormone can be tracked as well.
Common reasons for changing male hormone levels have to do with age, contraception, illness, fructose consumption, exercise, insulin resistance, steroid use, excessive body fat, and stress.
By age 35 your testosterone levels decrease, in the female body peak between 18 and 24 and by age 35 the levels begin to drop in fairly quickly, years before natural menopause
All androgens can have similar effects in the body and should be balanced. We have just begun to realize that some compounds, once thought of as lesser androgens, like androstendione actually can bind to the same places in a cell as testosterone with equal potency. DHEA, (Dihydroepiandosterone) an androgen from the adrenal gland is one of these potent androgens we need for sustaining health, muscle mass, and sexual function.
Too much binding protein will lower needed testosterone. We know that the levels of androgens that are circulating in the blood stream are affected by the binding proteins that make the hormone inactive when bound to these proteins.Lower levels of androgens, accompanied by lower levels of the binding protein can have an effective androgen level that is actually fairly stable.
