While improving your diet and exercising are fundamental to losing weight, they often aren’t enough. There are other forces at work within your body that affect how you metabolize food. Integrative medicine looks at all these factors:

• Nutrition. Even if you believe you’re eating a healthy diet, you may not be getting all the nutrients you need, in the right amounts. These imbalances can lead to more stress eating. Another issue regardig nutrition are food sensitivites. When present they can cause swelling, inflammation, and retention of fluid. 

• Hormones. Your thyroid or an imbalance of hormones such as progesterone, testosterone, estradiol or cortisol can sabotage your efforts to lose weight. Leptin, in particular, can cause problems because it actually controls other hormones that regulate how much you eat and how well your body releases fat from storage areas. Some people, especially those who are overweight or obese or who tend to eat a lot of unhealthy foods, are resistant to Leptin. Check out this article written on Leptin.

• Stress. Many people overeat or eat unhealthy foods when they feel stressed. If you’ve been telling yourself there has to be a better way to cope, you’re right. Integrative medicine often uses acupuncture to help reduce stress, because acupuncture releases endorphins that work within your body as mood enhancers. Acupuncture also helps to rebalance your Qi, internal energy channels that can affect cravings and digestion.

• Pain. It’s hard to get excited about exercising if you hurt somewhere. Pain can come from numerous sources, so naturopathic doctors work to uncover the specific cause of your pain, then offer a variety of ways to alleviate pain without resorting to heavy medication or surgery. Some options include nutrigenomics and acupuncture. 

• Age. Once you reach your late 20s, you start to lose muscle mass. It’s an insidious process that is so gradual you may not notice for years that your body is replacing muscle with fat – until you’ve gained weight. Diet and exercise, especially exercise that builds up muscle mass, are key to reversing this trend.

Physician-guided weight management.

A complete holistic investigation reveals what’s really going on with your body, so your doctor can recommend tailored treatment to bring your systems back into balance. That might include correcting hormone levels or boosting nutrition with vitamin shots, nutritional supplements or IV nutrient therapy in addition to helping you establish dietary guidelines. If you’re suffering from pain, treatments such as acupuncture, physical therapy or dietary changes can help, or your doctor might recommend targeted injections or other holistic pain relievers.

At Southwest Integrative Medicine, we also offer a detox diet program that can jump-start your efforts to lose those winter pounds. If your body’s internal detoxification systems are impaired, toxins can accumulate in your body, causing a wide range of endocrine and metabolic problems. The detox diet helps to enhance your bodies release of toxins and inturn helps you lose weight.

Knowing which factors are negatively affecting your ability to lose weight puts you back in control. Getting proper treatment to address those problems means you can be healthier year round. It will be easier to maintain an appropriate weight, so next winter you won’t have to worry about weight gain sneaking up on you.