Nutrient dense foods infographic written on a spiral notebook with an orange-colored marker with explanatory text.

How to Reset Weight Loss Hormones And Lower Your Setpoint Weight

by Dr. Matt Olesiak, M.D.

Resetting your weight loss hormones is a critical step for weight management, yet supposed "experts” have largely ignored it.

Instead, they recommend eating less and exercising more to create a calorie deficit. In other words, we should starve ourselves to shed pounds because our bodies are too stupid to regulate our weight.

There's only one problem: they are wrong.

Scientific research studies show beyond doubt that hormones and the brain control weight gain or loss.

Together, they decide your setpoint weight, that number on the scale that your body always seems to return to after every calorie-restrictive diet.

An image of female bare feet on a weight scale in the bathroom.

What is Setpoint Weight?

Setpoint theory is the belief that the body maintains weight (body fat) within a specific range. It does this by regulating your appetite and metabolism through your hormones, genes, and brain.

As a result, it always works to keep you within range of your setpoint weight, no matter how many calories you consume or burn off with exercise.

And setpoint weight is more than just a theory -- numerous research studies support it. (1)

Setpoint explains the frustrating dieting patterns many people have experienced so many times. Namely, you go on a calorie-restrictive diet and quickly lose ten or fifteen pounds.

But you're hungry and cranky and miserable. Nevertheless, you continue dieting because you still need to lose more weight.

Suddenly, the weight loss slows down to almost nothing. You slash more calories and exercise longer and harder, and the numbers on the scale still don't budge much.

An image of a female executive meditating in a stressful office.

What happened?

Starvation dieting with rapid weight loss threatened your setpoint weight, and your body responded by adjusting its hormone levels. These hormones increased hunger and fat storage and decreased your metabolic rate.

To make matters worse, after you end your weight loss diet and begin eating normally again, you'll probably regain the weight plus an additional few pounds.

Why?

After the fat metabolism system is starved, its number one priority is restoring all the body fat it lost and then protecting you from starvation in the future.

It does that by increasing hunger, slowing fat-burning metabolism, and storing additional body fat. (2)

In short, abnormal hormone levels make your body think that abnormal body fat levels are normal. Therefore, the only way to lose weight sustainably is to lower your setpoint weight by resetting your hormones.

Which Hormones Help You Lose Weight?

Here are seven main hormones that play a role in weight regulation.

Leptin: The Satiety Hormone

Leptin, produced by the fat cells, is an appetite suppressant hormone. It signals the hypothalamus in your brain when you're full so that you stop eating.

This hormone should be a fail-safe measure to prevent you from overeating. However, those who are obese often have significant amounts of leptin constantly circulating in the bloodstream., leading to leptin resistance.

This means that the brain doesn't receive its message, which can cause chronic overeating.

An image of the words ghrelin and leptin spelled out on small wooden tiles on a dinner plate.

Ghrelin: The Hunger Hormone

The hunger hormone ghrelin is released into the bloodstream when it senses the stomach is empty. Research shows that ghrelin levels usually increase in a low-calorie state before meals and return to normal after food consumption. (3) Its main job is to increase appetite and make you consume more food. It also promotes fat storage.

In this way, ghrelin helps regulate weight. But its hunger signals interfere with the success of any long-term calorie-restrictive diet, as it can cause constant hunger. It can also destroy your efforts at maintaining that weight loss. How? Several studies suggest that ghrelin levels remain elevated months after weight loss occurs, making it challenging to keep those pounds off. (4)

Insulin: The Fat-Storage Hormone

Insulin is a hormone produced in the pancreas. Its main job is to shuttle excess glucose from the bloodstream to the body's cells to be used for energy. The doors of the cells, aka insulin receptors, will not open without insulin.

Your pancreas secretes insulin in response to glucose levels. When you consume sugars and starches, your body breaks them down into glucose. As a result, insulin automatically spikes to take care of the excess glucose.

If you routinely eat sugars, starchy carbs, and heavily processed foods, the pancreas releases more insulin more often. Consequently, insulin levels are constantly elevated, and because the insulin receptors on the cells get so used to it, they no longer open up to accept the glucose. This condition is called insulin resistance.

An image of a notebook with the word 'insulin resistance' written in the middle. There are arrows around this word that lead to explanations of the things that cause insulin resistance. Explanatory text is below.

Explanatory Text of Factors Involved in Insulin Resistance

Eat food, make insulin, cells resist insulin, sugar stores as fat, feel tired and hungry, eat food, and the cycle continues.

End Explanatory Text of Factors Involved in Insulin Resistance

Insulin resistance combined with a poor-quality diet causes blood sugar levels to rise. However, insulin must still remove excess glucose from your bloodstream, so if the cells won't open to accept it, insulin has no choice but to take it to your fat cells.

Please note: if insulin continues taking excess glucose to your fat cells, all the nonfat cells in your body will signal to the brain that they're starving. And you'll start craving glucose because your nonfat cells aren't getting any, which leads to you eating starchy carbs and sugars. And you will also be hungry all the time regardless of how often or how much you eat.

In response, your body increases your setpoint weight.

Testosterone: The Metabolic Hormone

Testosterone is the primary sex hormone for men, but men and women both need adequate levels to keep setpoint low. This is because it plays a crucial role in carbohydrate, fat, and protein metabolism.

There are a couple of reasons why balancing testosterone levels is essential. The first is that testosterone inhibits body fat accumulation, but if levels are too low, it can trigger fat storage and inflammation.

The second is that high testosterone levels in women are associated with increased belly fat, especially around menopause.

Eating significant amounts of refined carbs and soy foods lower testosterone levels in men and women, raising setpoint weight.

But eating SANE foods, which we'll discuss in the next section, regulates testosterone levels and lowers setpoint weight.

Estrogen: The Fat Metabolism Hormone

Considered the "female hormone," estrogen is present in both sexes, though higher in women. Estrogen has a significant effect on fat storage.

Estrogen has a significant effect on fat storage. Studies show that as a woman's estrogen levels begin to fall during perimenopause, her body starts holding on to fat. Even worse, this hormone seems to redistribute her weight into the tummy, which is the most dangerous place to carry fat.

Estrogen can be balanced with a SANE diet and other lifestyle factors like testosterone.

Nutrient dense foods infographic written on a spiral notebook with an orange-colored marker with explanatory text. The explanatory text is described below.

Infographic Text

Nutrient dense foods is written in the center with a circle around it. Lines extend from it to factor in nutrient dense foods. These factors include organic, local, pasture raised, properly stored and prepared, heirloom, whole, gently cook, raw, wild, seasonal, and fresh.

End Infographic Text

Cortisol: The Stress Hormone

Cortisol is a stress hormone that has a significant effect on your setpoint weight.

Stress is a healthy response to a life-or-death threat. When faced with a hungry tiger, we need energy fast to fight or flee the predator.

Our adrenal glands release insulin to get glucose into our cells for energy without even thinking about it. After we've escaped danger, the relaxation response sets in, and our bodily systems gradually return to normal.

This biological response is supposed to be a short-term response to a life-or-death stressor. But unfortunately, the problem today is that many people react to every situation like a life-or-death matter with the same biological changes.

Chronic stress triggers a constant release of cortisol and insulin, and you've already how elevated insulin levels can lead to sugar and starch cravings, increased body fat, and a high setpoint weight.

Thyroid: The Metabolism Hormones

Numerous research studies show that significantly restricting calorie intake slows thyroid function and metabolism, resulting in an elevated setpoint weight. This is especially true with hypothyroidism or underactive thyroid.

One of the main symptoms of hypothyroidism is weight gain, though it can also cause insulin resistance, depression, memory problems, and other issues.

Fortunately, eating SANE foods can help regulate your thyroid levels and lower your setpoint weight.

4 Ways to Rest Your Hormones and Lower Setpoint Weight

Here are four ways to heal your hormones for sustainable weight loss.

Eat SANE Foods

Eating SANEly means enjoying a high-quality diet of whole foods. Research shows that the quality of the foods we eat is much more important than calorie content when it comes to weight loss.

High-quality foods heal your hormones. They fill you up fast and keep you full for a long time and provide plenty of nutrition for your body. So you can eat as much as you want of SANE foods because they nourish your body. Incredibly, though, you’ll probably eat fewer calories with SANE than you did eating all those refined carbs and sugars.

How does this affect setpoint weight? Because your body is satisfied and energized by the foods you eat and not hungry, it doesn't think you are starving. So, it feels safe releasing fat and lowering setpoint weight.

What Are SANE Foods?

SANE foods are minimally or unprocessed foods created in nature. So how can you tell if a food is SANE? It will either have no ingredient label -- like fresh vegetables and fruit -- or it will have no more than three ingredients that you recognize. Let’s suppose you can't pronounce some of the ingredients.

In that case, it is a "food-like" product created in a lab and filled with artificial flavorings, chemicals, sugars, trans fats, and other unhealthy setpoint elevating ingredients.

To reset your hormones and lower your setpoint weight, you must reduce refined carbs, processed foods, and sugars and replace them with nutritious and filling SANE ones.

Here are the SANE food categories that you need to emphasize for lowering setpoint weight.

Nonstarchy vegetables

These foods contain plenty of fiber to fill you up, and because they are digested slowly, they help regulate your blood sugar levels. They are also loaded with nutrients that help regulate your hormones.

For best setpoint-lowering results, try to eat at least 11 servings a day.

(To avoid digestive upset, you must gradually increase your fiber intake if you're not used to eating this type of food.) Examples of nonstarch veggies include broccoli, spinach, kale, cauliflower, green beans, artichoke, and asparagus.

Nutrient-Dense Protein

These foods are crucial for sustainable weight loss. Why? It takes more calories to digest protein than any other macronutrient. In addition, protein is the most satiating macronutrient, triggering your short- and long-term satiety hormones. So try to eat 3-5 servings of nutrient-dense protein per day.

Nutrient-dense proteins include salmon, grass-fed beef, plain nonfat Greek yogurt, humanely raised chicken, beef liver, and ham.

Whole-Food Fats

Contrary to popular belief and questionable scientific studies, eating fat does not make you fat, just the opposite.

Dietary fat is highly satiating and can prevent overeating. It's not a coincidence that the rates of obesity significantly increased during the low-fat, no-fat movement of the 1980s and 1990s when manufacturers replaced fat with sugar.

The refined carbs triggered food cravings and hunger due to the absence of dietary fat.

In addition, when you replace refined carbs with whole-food fats, your body will start burning fat for fuel. So, once it burns the fat you've eaten that day, it will dip into your fat stores.

Eating whole-food fats is essential because they have the fiber and other nutrients your body needs to lower your setpoint weight. Conversely, oils are heavily processed, containing few of these nutrients.

Try to eat 3-6 servings of whole-food fats per day. Examples include olives, dark chocolate, avocado, coconut, salmon, nuts, and seeds.

Low-Sugar Fruits

You can even eat fruit occasionally but remember -- fruit still contains inflammation-promoting, setpoint elevating sugar. Its fiber content does slow glucose absorption into the bloodstream, but you're still ingesting sugar.

So, if you want to enjoy fruit, try to limit it to low-sugar varieties and no more than three servings per day. Examples include goji berries, blueberries, strawberries, oranges, peaches, and grapefruit.

Now that we've discussed SANE foods, let's discuss the following method of resetting your weight loss hormones and lowering setpoint weight -- reducing stress.

Manage Your Stress Levels

As you saw earlier in this article, chronic stress harms your health and setpoint weight.

You cannot eliminate all stress from your life, and actually, stress is beneficial in some circumstances. It's what gives you the drive to finish that project at work or to give a phenomenal speech.

But as we discussed earlier, chronic stress is terrible for body weight. It can indeed keep you from achieving or maintaining a healthy weight.

The solution? Find ways to de-stress daily. Here are a few ways to reduce stress and relax your nervous system and body, thus lowering your setpoint weight.

Practice yoga
Go for regular leisurely walks
Meditate
Practice deep breathing exercises
Play with your dog or cat
Go out to dinner or a movie with friends
Binge-watch comedies on Netflix
Do aerobic exercises
Take up a hobby
Help someone out. (Studies show that helping others lowers our stress levels.)

Get More Quality Sleep

Numerous research studies suggest that lack of sleep can lead to excess body fat, insulin resistance, higher cortisol levels, and weight gain. It also promotes belly fat, increasing your risk for heart disease, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, abnormal cholesterol levels, and more.

Here are a few tips for getting more quality sleep.

Go to bed at the same time each night, and arise at the same time each more. A sleep schedule trains your body to get tired close to your bedtime.
Avoid drinking liquids a few hours before bedtime. Waking up for bathroom runs several times a night is no way to get quality sleep.
Relax with meditation or deep breathing exercises an hour before going to bed.
Put away your devices. The light from your computer, smartphone, tablet, and other devices disrupts your brain's production of the sleep hormone melatonin.
Try not to eat a large meal close to bedtime. The digestive process may disrupt sleep.
Keep your bedroom dark and cool. Any light can negatively affect melatonin production, so if street lights are shining through your window at night, you may need to block it with black drapes or wear a sleep mask.
Avoid caffeine four hours before bedtime. This stimulating compound can keep you from getting a night of restful sleep.

Take Your Daily SANE Aamia Supplement

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