Your Partner in Optimum Health!
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Your Partner in Optimum Health!
January 06, 2020
Have you ever sat in a doctor’s office and felt frustrated as a medical professional lectured you about losing weight, again, and gave you simplistic advice about doing so? Have you ever wanted to ask them why, if it’s so easy, it’s such a widespread problem? The traditional view of weight loss sees it in simple, black-and-white terms: it’s all about self-control or can be solved with a pill or a simple ratio of calories in, calories out. At Medical Transformation Center in Louisville, KY, we take a different approach to healthy weight management.
We know that keeping to a healthy weight isn’t a simple matter of eating a bit less or exercising a bit more. Crash diets may take off the pounds, but they’re not healthy or sustainable, and the results rarely last. Exercise, while vitally important for a variety of reasons, actually makes you hungry out of proportion to the number of calories you burn, meaning you’re liable to eat more than you burned off in the following 24 hours.
Healthy weight management means knowing yourself, your metabolism, and the many physiological, emotional, dietary, and societal factors that go into the way we eat. None of these factors alone account for everything, and only when all are balanced together can we achieve a healthy weight for life.
Healthy weight management considers all the factors that go into your weight and health. It considers you as an individual, not just a set of numbers on a scale. It’s a part of functional medicine, which doesn’t look at health concerns one by one but as parts of a larger whole.
To achieve a healthy weight, functional medicine like that practiced at the Medical Transformation Center considers your physiology, personal emotional needs, and the outside factors that affect you every day.
A healthy weight isn’t just a “thin” weight. It’s a proper balance of fat and muscle that’s right for your gender, height, age, and general health. You can be a size 4 and still not be at a healthy weight! It all starts with knowing yourself.
The first step is finding out what’s going inside you. At Medical Transformation Center, we begin getting to know you with a series of diagnostic tests that are indicators of your unique health profile. This gives us early warnings of any problems and alerts us to conditions that may be interfering with your weight loss goals. Some advanced diagnostics we offer include:
We also offer genomic testing that can tell you your risk of developing certain diseases. While this might sound frightening, it’s important to remember that genetic testing doesn’t tell you what diseases you will certainly get. It can only tell you what you’re at increased risk for, and the earlier you intervene with lifestyle changes, the more likely it is that you will never develop these disorders in the first place. These same changes usually contribute to achieving a healthy weight.
Many people are living with disorders that affect their weight management. They have no idea the power these influences are having on their bodies, yet all their weight loss attempts will be frustrating failures unless something is done.
Autoimmune disorders are a range of conditions caused by some abnormal function in the immune system. At its most basic, such a disorder means your immune system is attacking a part of your body as if it were a foreign invader. This causes pain, inflammation, and organ malfunction. All can interfere with your ability to lose weight.
Thyroid disease is one of these disorders. When the body attacks the thyroid, all your hormones can be thrown out of whack. This can cause fatigue, weight gain, and muscle aches. Celiac disease is another autoimmune disorder. Because this disorder makes it difficult for your small intestine to absorb the nutrients it needs, weight gain can result as your body impels you to eat more calories than you need in order to get the nutrition it is missing.
People with chronic fatigue often feel exhausted even after sleeping through the whole night. Chronic fatigue can cause memory loss, muscle and joint pain, and weight gain. While science has still not identified the cause of this disorder, it can be triggered and exacerbated by a viral infection, stress, food sensitivity, immune system issues, and hormone imbalances.
In functional medicine, we seek to optimize your health in every way by identifying any possible triggers and helping you achieve the nutritional balance you need for good health. In most cases, shifts in nutrition and lifestyle changes can greatly improve chronic fatigue.
You may be living with the effects of mold exposure and be completely unaware of it. The most obvious signs are usually those we associate with allergies: sort throat, persistent cough, postnasal drip, or skin rash. But weight gain is another, lesser-known side effect to some kinds of mold exposure. If nothing else, exposure to mold could cause you to feel tired and slow, as all allergies do, keeping you from the active life you need for healthy weight management.
Mold can be outdoors or indoors, and one of the most insidious features of mold is that no two people react to it in the same way. That means your personal treatment plan must be built around your needs. At Medical Transformation Center, we can conduct a targeted detox that will flush the mold from your system. We then move to boost your immune system through better nutrition to get you on the path to feeling and functioning your best.
We all know about the big allergies, like allergies to peanuts, dairy, or shellfish. But many of us have an intolerance to other foods that can cause inflammation, weight gain, and fatigue that keep us from living the active life we long for. Part of achieving a healthy weight is identifying the foods that cause you issues, detoxing from them, and establishing dietary patterns that make sense for you.
Everybody is different, and while all of us need protein, fat, and carbohydrates, we don’t all need the same amounts. Just speaking generally, we know that men need more protein than women and that most people need far fewer carbohydrates than the average American diet provides. We can help you understand what your body needs and how to re-form your diet to get more of what you need and less of what you don’t. This will help you naturally achieve a healthy weight.
Part of knowing yourself is knowing that your mental and emotional needs affect your overall health and weight. Our bodies were made to respond to stress. When we’re in danger, the fight-or-flight reaction kicks in, spurred by ramped up hormone production, and this enables us to perform near-superhuman feats in rescuing a child from danger or running to safety. The system works brilliantly, but it’s made to be used only at certain times.
The problem with modern life is that we endure chronic stress from our jobs, family, and lifestyle. This chronic stress messes with hormone production, and particularly cortisol. Cortisol, the stress hormone, prevents us from losing weight. That makes sense in the larger evolutionary context. For our ancient ancestors, cortisol signaled there was danger and now was no time to be letting go of nutrition reserves stored in the fat cells. For us, this same signal forces our bodies to hold on to unwanted weight.
Our hormones can’t tell the difference between the stress of facing imminent famine, running from a saber-toothed tiger, or simply getting into it with our spouse over who is taking the kids to school. Constant, low-level stress makes weight management especially tricky, and part of functional medicine is learning healthy ways to reduce that stress.
Allergies and food intolerances are personal to each of us, but there are also outside factors that affect us all. These fight against our weight loss attempts constantly, and the only way to fight back is to know the enemy and develop a plan to meet it.
Every day, we’re inundated with ads for junk food. Junk food isn’t high-fat or high-calorie: it’s low nutrition. Avocados are high in fat and calories, for example, but they are not junk food. Junk food offers us almost nothing in return for the calories we ingest, meaning we feel dissatisfied and constantly want to eat more.
Beyond that, junk food is typically filled with foods that provoke a stress and inflammation response, like refined sugars and grains, toxic seed oils, chemicals, and trans fats. Part of maintaining a healthy weight is understanding that “calories-in-calories-out” is far too simplistic. 500 calories of broccoli and unprocessed, grass-fed steak are simply not the same as 500 calories of cookies and crackers.
It’s not easy to choose healthy, whole foods in this environment, but it is possible. And with the right motivation, education, and support from functional medicine, it’s even easier. We can help you identify real foods, read between the lines of nutrition information to find what food manufacturers aren’t telling you, and help you develop an effective plan to achieve a healthy weight.
Our world is filled with toxins. Heavy metals and dangerous pesticides and other chemicals destroy our endocrine system, mimicking estrogen when they enter our bodies and making it much harder to lose weight.
We can help you with a full detox that flushes these out of your system. Then we work with you to identify where the toxins are coming from and how to avoid them. Empowered with information and a plan, you’ll be able to choose personal care items, food, and household cleaning products that do what they claim without the unwanted side effects.
A healthy weight isn’t determined by your height and the number on a scale. It’s determined by what’s right for you. It’s the right balance of fat and muscle for your body, and achieving a healthy weight means more energy, strength, and stamina. The old methods of weight loss don’t always work, and the old medical interventions are generic and focused on numbers.
Contact Medical Transformation Center in Louisville, KY today. We’re not focused on numbers. We’re focused on you. We know that weight loss is complicated but worth it, and we’re motivated to help you achieve a healthy weight that leaves you looking, feeling, and living your best life. Don’t wait any longer. Find out today how you can achieve a healthy weight, and a healthy life, through functional medicine.
