Losing weight can often feel like a battle. Yo-yo dieting, strict resolutions, and unrealistic exercise goals can lead to feeling defeated. At BeBalanced, we understand this frustration and offer holistic solutions to help women get to the root cause of losing stubborn weight and keeping it off. Besides your diet and activity level, there may be some hidden roadblocks keeping you from losing weight. While it’s important to move daily for circulation and lymph movement, and to eat a clean healthy diet (that means no processed foods), there are other issues that contribute to making it difficult to achieve your healthy weight loss goals.

If you have been struggling with your weight, take our free hormone assessment and consider the following.

Digestion:

During digestion, the incomplete breakdown of foods can cause your cells to miss absorbing key nutrients from the food you are eating. This can cause you to feel hungry even after you’ve just eaten, and your body reaches into food stores, starving for nutrients. Though the food doesn’t break down, it is stored as fat in reaction to perceived starvation. This manifests in feeling bloated and uncomfortable.

Solution: Taking a good digestive enzyme (like our Super Digest) to break down the carbohydrates, proteins, and fats can work wonders. Recommended enzymes end with the letters ase, so look for lipase (breaks down fat), protease (breaks down proteins), and amalase (breaks down carbohydrates). This type of supplement can vastly improve the breakdown and assimilation of your foods and allows your cells to feel full and satisfied. This will help balance your blood sugar, giving you less cravings and more energy.

Hormones:

Do you feel out of balance in a way you can’t really put your finger on? It may be related to your hormones. Imbalance in this area can cause your body to hold on to more fat and retain fluid by stimulating fat cells with the wrong message. This can cause you to gain weight or not be able to lose weight efficiently. Estrogen tends to become dominant while stress can cause the hormone progesterone (which is a natural fat burner and diuretic) to be depleted. Most PMS or menopausal symptoms are due to low progesterone levels. Out-of-whack hormones can cause your body to lose its ability to lose weight and adversely affect your emotions, sex drive, and sleep patterns.

Solution: Start by finding out if you could benefit from natural hormone balancing by taking a free hormone assessment. If an imbalance is determined, your local BeBalanced center will reach out with a customized hormone balancing solution and weight loss program to help you with everything from fat burning to improved sleep and moods, all of which can affect weight loss.

Liver:

While the liver is one of the most enduring organs, it’s difficult for it to keep up with the amount of toxins we take in on a daily basis. When this happens, its job of breaking down fat and processing our hormones moves to the back burner and impedes weight loss efforts. Our livers are responsible for processing food absorption, as well as all toxins and free radicals.

Solution: A simple herbal and vitamin combination can be taken to support your liver in detoxification (such as our Hepra Support). You want to look for ingredients like dandelion root, milk thistle, and burdock root in a capsule form. You may also try an herbal tea blend of these ingredients to enjoy in the morning. One of our favorites is a delicious Dandy Blend coffee substitute. It is a water-soluble powder available online or in many health food stores. Another great but gentle way to effectively cleanse the liver is to replace your morning coffee with hot water and freshly squeezed lemon. Dietary changes can jump-start the process of clean eating by eliminating alcohol, wheat, dairy, simple sugars, and excess caffeine from your body and help you to feel better.

Emotions:

Aside from the obvious stress and pressures of the day that may cause us to binge eat, emotions can also affect our relationship with food, causing our body to hold on to more weight as a form of protection. BeBalanced’s healthy weight loss programs takes a holistic approach to losing weight and will help you with everything from emotions, to hormones, and nutrition. With any weight loss plan, there are typically emotional reasons tied to the weight gain.

Solution: It is good to do some emotional “house cleaning” when you begin any weight loss plan, as there are always some emotions attached to the reason you gained weight to begin with. It is helpful to pinpoint stored-up feelings and let them go. Meditation, prayer, meeting with a therapist, or some form of energy work, perhaps in the form of Reiki therapy, can greatly benefit this area. My personal favorite is using a weighted eye mask while listening to relaxing music and sound wave therapy CDs to allow myself to deeply relax.

If you relate to any of the topics in this article, we can help. At BeBalanced, our healthy weight loss program has helped thousands of women reach their goals, and you could be next. Don’t lose hope, find BeBalanced!

For more information, schedule a free consultation at your local BeBalanced center. We offer both in-person and virtual support.