Reset Your Hormones And Lose Weight

A few key hormones that affect ab fat can dictate whether you cinch your belt or let it out a few notches.

- Lesley Rotchford

So what is it about the midsection that makes flab want to hang around it so much? You have a cadre of hormones always at the ready to usher fat into the most convenient storage units – that is, those in your core, close to your organs, explains Dr Aaron M. Cypess, a researcher at the National Institutes of Health in the US. But here’s the upside: You can manipulate your hormones and get them to work in your waistline’s favour. You’re about to learn how.

Know your fat hoarders

They are cortisol, insulin and testosterone. At normal levels, however, they don’t actually cause belly fat. It’s when their levels are consistently high that the flab gets stockpiled. “In fact, having belly fat is a key indicator of hormonal imbalance,” says Dr Sara Gottfried, the author of The Hormone Reset Diet.

When you’re stressed, your body starts cranking out cortisol, which releases fat from fat stores and dumps it into the bloodstream to give the liver and other organs energy to deal with the perceived threat. Whatever fat isn’t used gets stored in ab tissue, which houses four times as many cortisol receptors as fat storage units in other areas of the body meaning that with chronic stress, cortisol just keeps parking fat in your middle.

The situation then becomes a vicious circle: The more belly fat you have, the more cortisol you naturally produce. At times when you can lessen your stress, the cortisol circulating in your system becomes inactive and is eventually filtered out by the liver and kidneys. “But fat tissue contains an enzyme called HSD, which can switch on inactive cortisol before your organs can get rid of it,” says Shawn Talbott, the author of The Cortisol Connection.