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
Hormones make you hungrier, so there’s your “calories in.” Hormones make you crave more calorie dense options. Do you really think your willpower is more powerful than the body’s unconscious evolutionary mechanisms to maintain homeostasis, given an effectively unlimited supply of ultraprocessed foods? How arrogant of you.
Hormones also affect the “calories out” part of the equation, arguably to a greater extent. They affect your base metabolic rate. They affect your non-exercise activity thermogenesis (a.k.a. NEAT), with a death by a thousand cuts. Hormones make you fidget less or not pace while on the phone due to hormones. You might become more lethargic and do fewer chores. You can become winded more easily in a workout.
Put it another way: everyone knows amphetamines, Ozempic, and cigarettes keep you thin. It’s also well established that certain psychiatric medications cause obesity for the vast majority of patients. Nobody with a lick of common sense argues that drugs can’t affect your weight. So why are “hormones” any different? Because they’re natural? Opium is natural too, you silly hippie.
Imagine you’re super tired every day and you aren’t sure why. You can eat your normal amount but your body is compensating in the background. It thinks you’re going to be starving soon so it shuts down your energy expenditure. Your heart rate slows. You try to exercise but you’re really tired so you end up sleeping more. Suddenly that same caloric load is adding weight to your body.
Your body smart and has millions of years of evolutionary history to keep itself alive. Starvation is what it protects itself against best and it will override what your conscious brain wants in order to do that.
In case you still have the ability to get through responses here’s an example of how hormone imbalance can an effect that isn’t just gaining weight
I have a hyperactive thyroid with an auto immune disease. This means I’m always at a high state of metabolic activity and always feel hungry. Basically I don’t have the ability to feel full for more than a few minutes. If I’m not constantly keeping the system running by drinking something or chewing gum I want to eat something from when I get up until I fall asleep. Snacking throughout the day doesn’t help neither does eating a big meal. It’s just a state of being decently hungry all day.
The boosted baseline metabolic level means I have a higher base daily calorie usage so I can lose weight fast. On the other hand if I let myself eat I can put in weight just as fast since I’m not actually using all the nutrients I consume. With medication the hunger and some other symptoms can be managed but it doesn’t go away.
They don’t. You get fat from consuming more energy than you utilize. Hormone imbalances simply make that calculation more complex, but it’s still the same math.
Because they’re still absorbing more calories than they’re burning. There’s no way for this to not be the case. Their body may be making them absorb more calories from food than normal folks. Maybe their “hormone issues” make them hungrier and harder to satiate.
But it’s always about the caloric balance.
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