As of my current understanding, you need calories to get fat, how can some hormonal issues lead to weight gain? Where does all the energy comes from?
In: 2115
You sit down at lunch and there is a skinny healthy person and a larger person with hormonal issues.
They both currently weigh the same.
They both eat the same thing day in day out.
After a year the skinny person will be the same weight and the hormonal person will have gained a ton.
Why? Hormones regulate how your body breaks matter down to use as energy.
A hormonal person needs to reduce food intake to maintain a steady weight but because their body isn’t utilizing the food they are eating their body has massive food cravings.
This is an effort of starvation rather than healthy weight loss.
Most people end up eating more to satiate their never ending hunger.
Now you have a person who is eating more food to get energy but the body is just collecting fat because it can’t process it.
The fat doesn’t come out of nowhere, it’s processed from ingested food like everything else. Hormones control how much of it is broken down, metabolic rate, how much organic compounds are turned into fat, behavior, etc.
There isn’t one hormone that controls weight either
Can also affect how energetic you feel. So if you don’t change your eating habits but you feel less energetic , and don’t move as much, you gain weight.
So much misinformation in the replies. Here are some hormones that can cause you gain weight and what they do:
– **ghrelin**, **leptin**: People can have imbalance in these hormones causing them to feel much more hungry and hence eat more. Some people produce no leptin or have resistance to it making them essentially always hungry.
– **estrogen**: Controls fat deposition and can cause people gain weight even if they eat the same amount of food
– **insulin**: Controls how much nutrients can be absorbed by your cells for energy. Imbalance or resistance can cause blood glucose spikes and excess fat deposition.
– triiodothyronine (**T3**), thyroxin (**T4**), **TSH**: Control your metabolism which can cause you burn less calories from the food you eat and store the rest in fat.
To make things worse estrogen and leptin can be produced by your fat tissue which means the more weight you gain the more imbalanced your hormones can become.
One thing that is always left out of the “calories in, calories out” is that your metabolism is *not* set and static. It changes throughout the day and depending on activities.
So while a normal metabolism might burn 1,000 calories, a hormone issue might cause it to burn 900 calories. Then if you restrict calorie intake, a normal metabolism might drop to 950 buy a hormone issue might drop to 700. So the calories out portion changes as well. And if your metabolism is only burning at 70%… That will make you feel real cruddy and unable to do anything.
You don’t get fat without food. Period. We’re not plants, we don’t absorb energy just by sitting around.
Hormones affect **how** the body uses energy, and how much of it is consumed vs. stored. Hormones can’t create fat out of thin air.
Hormones can cause cravings (making it harder to control intake), mismatched hunger/satiation signals (causing your body to lie about how hungry you are), and lower energy availability (making physical activity feel harder).
So just like a person with any issue CAN overcome that issue, hormonally fat people are capable of dealing with it by lowering intake and increasing activity, but it’s harder for them, and that amount of mental energy expenditure to be constantly managing diet and activity levels will probably preclude them from managing other things because there’s only so much mental energy to go around.
There are also a couple conditions which mess up storage and unpacking signals (also hormonal). The first makes your cells just turn sugar into fat too fast – basically it just makes it so eating food makes fat BEFORE it gives you energy for the day, so you always feel hungry and tired because you don’t have enough food in your system while constantly getting fatter. The second doesn’t let the fat turn back into sugar like it’s supposed to – thus you have to literally starve yourself to get the fat off because your system won’t consume it, it will literally start breaking down muscle tissue before it starts using fat stores. Obviously both of these conditions can lead to some excessive obesity and require medical management.
Just about everything in your body is controlled by hormonal feedback loops. Ghrelin, insulin, leptin, cortisol, testosterone, estrogen and probably more all have roles that can affect your weight. Any disorder that affects hormone levels or your body’s feedback to them can make it easier to over eat, more difficult to access fat stores for energy, etc.
Not exactly the same, but similar- I have anxiety issues. Carbs will dull anxiety for a period of time. Many people who aren’t aware (myself included for some time) will eat to numb their anxiety without realising that that’s what they’re doing.
I’ve managed to get on top of things now for the most part, but I put on 14kg due to eating to calm my anxiety.
The food adds the fat, but the eating is a coping mechanism.
It’s a misconception that hormonal issues directly lead to weight gain. They do not reduce your basal metabolic rate. You still need to be eating in a caloric surplus to gain weight, and even with PCOS/diabetes/whatever a person with one of those conditions will lose the same about of fat on 1200 calories a day as someone without those conditions.
The thing that leads to weight gain with these conditions is water retention and messed up hunger cues. I personally have PCOS, and depending on where I am in my cycle I can hold on to 7+ lbs of water. This makes it appear like I’m not losing any fat when I’m in a calorie deficit, because the rate at which I retain water is faster than the rate at which I lose fat. When I chart weight loss over months though, the fat loss is evident. Your hunger cues can also be insane with hormonal issues, which is why it’s frustrating to be told to exert willpower and just eat less – your body thinks it’s starving when it’s not. However, calories in calories out is simply thermodynamics, and hormonal issues don’t change this.
Edit: forgot to add this – hormonal issues can cause your effective calories out to be lower by reducing non exercise activity thermogenesis (NEAT). A lot of the calories we burn come from fidgeting and puttering around, but when you’re bedbound with fatigue that part of the calorie budget is decreased. This can make it feel like your basal metabolic rate is decreased and you’re inherently burning less calories, but it’s not the case.
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