Hormone Therapy May Help You Lose Weight

I am always shocked when I read this statistic: 33% of women in America are obese; 62% are overweight. That’s the bad news. The good news is that obesity among women may be stabilizing.

What is obesity exactly? If your doctor tells you that you are obese, it means your body mass index is greater than 30. A normal body mass index should be less than 25. A body mass index of 25-29.9 is overweight.

Being overweight or obese is the number one health problem facing women today. Period. It leads to diabetes. Hypertension. Cardiovascular disease. Strokes. It can even contribute to cancer. Being obese is a disease, and it should be treated as such.

Here’s what I tell patients who are obese: for your health and longevity, we need to help you lose weight. We’ll start by assessing where you are with your body. Eventually, we’ll put you on a weight loss program, but we need to make sure your body is ready to lose weight first.

How would a body not be ready to lose weight?

Well, if you have estrogen dominance, your body may work against you losing weight. Think about women over forty who start to gain weight around their middle section. They’ve stopped ovulating and stopped producing progesterone. But they are still producing estrogen. That means they’re experiencing “estrogen dominance.”

I know, I know. More medical speak. Don’t worry about what “estrogen dominance” means exactly. Just know that estrogen tells everything to grow… including fat cells. So if you’re in an estrogen dominant state, that’s going to do nothing but promote weight gain.

If we don’t address the estrogen problem, you’re not going to be able to lose weight very efficiently. That’s why we often start with hormone therapy.