Vesna: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Peak Revival Podcast. My name is Vesna, and today I'm going to talk about the 3-step hormone reset to lose weight, build muscle and increase your energy. It is the end of the year and you've probably been celebrating, socializing, overeating, over drinking, probably not exercising as much in your [00:01:00] routines kind of thrown out and you feel Maybe a bit sluggish, like you've already gained weight and maybe your goals for this year were to lose weight and you haven't.
And so I want to talk about what we use in my programs with a lot of success and what we do a little bit differently in a way to address the hormones when it comes to losing weight with struggling to lose weight. you know, so I have a lot of women that say to me like after 35 my body changed the things that I used to do.
My eating plan, my exercise plan doesn't work like it usually did. I've got more belly fat, I've lost muscle, I've lost tone, I've lost strength. There are things that I can't do anymore that I used to be able to do. Right. So all of these changes do occur. As we get older. So basically we reach our muscle peak at 25, which seems very young.
And it's all pretty much downhill from there. Not really, but it is a slow decline from there. Okay. Now we can prevent this and we can reverse this. So what women tend to see is that [00:02:00] as we get older, due to the hormonal shifts, women start to notice weight gain, there's more weight on the belly, there's the flabby arms, there's the butt that's flabby and everything's just kind of dropping and sagging and moving in the wrong direction and you don't feel like you have that tone anymore.
And so, it's very common, um, If you've tried the calories in kind of calories out, that doesn't work at this phase, right? Because there is such a hormonal profile that's not being addressed when we're looking at just calories in calories out.
So the biggest factors that, you know, after the age of 35 that really creates this hormonal profile that, you know, makes it harder to lose weight, makes it easier to gain weight and, you know, our body shape does start to change. And number one, it is the hormonal changes. Yes, absolutely. Our hormones are starting to change.
That makes us more prone to insulin resistance. This is when we basically are more primed to store body fat and we feel more tired and we can't utilize the energy on our [00:03:00] body. But also stress, like normally by this age we're dealt with a lot of stress and as women into their forties, they're dealing with even more stress in this stage of life, like career or business, family, caring for aging parents.
All of this is on your shoulders on a daily basis. So it's a lot of stress and stress. contributes to, change in our hormones that makes it easy to gain weight, right? So as we have more stress hormones, our body increase our chances of increasing insulin resistance, leptin resistance, all these factors that help to, you know, manage our weight more naturally.
They are affected by these stress hormones, and we, like I said, we're more primed to gain weight when our stress hormones are high. There's also poor food quality, things like GMO, preservatives in our food, processed food, sugar, alcohol, all of that stuff will create nutritional deficiencies which will slow our metabolism down.
So it's not really feeding a healthy metabolism. And the other factor is long term chronic dietingcutting out major food groups, [00:04:00] restrictive eating. I will say this to women and they'll be like, Oh, I'm not really dieting, but they have that diet mentality. And what I mean by that is that they're always watching what they eat.
There's good foods, there's bad foods, there's good days with food, there's bad days with food. So there's that diet mentality that kind of is, you carry it around with you all the time unknowingly, but then often it's trying restrictive food plans that eventually end up breaking down your metabolism.
Okay, so what is the three step hormone reset to lose weight, build muscle and increase your energy? Number one, we're going to look at three key areas. Number one is the adrenals. The adrenals are part of the stress response system. They produce our stress hormones like cortisol. When the adrenals are activated due to stress, due to blood sugar level dysregulation, due to burnout, due to so many factors.
Then we are not able to burn body fat for fuel. Okay. Our body will only go for glucose instead of body fat for fuel, which means that until we are relaxed, Our body does not choose body fat as a fuel source, [00:05:00] right? And so it's just from our hunter gatherer days, really. So when we're in danger, our body is not looking for the, for the body fat, it's looking for glucose, right?
Because it's giving us an explosive form of energy you know, to fight or flight, right? And so we need to make sure that our body is more relaxed, that the stress response system is switched off. in order to burn body fat for fuel. So essentially our body needs to feel safe to burn body fat for fuel.
So how do we do this, especially when you're stressed, right? So remember how I said, with stress, we're going to get more insulin resistance, which is going to put more weight around the belly. And it's kind of that dangerous fat, right? It goes around the organs, around the liver. And then it also makes us prone to leptin resistance.
So leptin resistance is where we have natural mechanisms inside our body that tell us, through leptin, how much body fat we have on board. Our brain Picks up on that communication and it will either based on how much body fat we have If we have too much [00:06:00] it will rev up the metabolism and it will reduce our appetite and cravings But when we have too much stress that communication is not happening, right?
So the cortisol interrupts that communication So the brain is not picking up on those leptin levels. So it thinks you don't have enough body fat So guess what it does? It lowers your metabolism, slows it down, and it increases your appetite and your cravings because, you know, we need a certain amount of fat to stay alive and, to keep us insulated and all sorts of things, right?
So it's a safety mechanism. So, too much cortisol or when our adrenals are activated too much is going to affect that natural communication that we have, our natural ability to to maintain our body weight very easily through these hormones, right? So we want to stop that from happening. And so the way that we do that, even if your life is stressful, right?
You might be listening to this and going, Oh, I'm never going to be without stress, right? But you can reduce the stress hormones in the body, right? And the way that we do this, so the first part [00:07:00] that I recommend is using carbohydrates at the right dose at the right time, cycled in a couple of days a week.
So carbohydrates like your high GI carbohydrates help to switch off. The stress response and bring your cortisol back to normal levels. And so what you want to look at is cycling these carbohydrates into your week. So you don't want to have them every day, these high GI and you know you want to start off with about half a cup portion size and the kind of carbs I'm talking about is like fruit, starchy vegetables, your brown rice, even your gluten free oats.
Those kinds of things help to switch off that stress response. So it's almost like the adrenals become like this, fat switch in a sense that your adrenals are telling your body to either burn body fat for fuel or to burn glucose. Okay. And so we want to switch it to burning body fat, which means we have to relax the adrenals and we do that through cycling those carbohydrates.
The second phase that we want to focus on, uh, the systems like the [00:08:00] pancreas and the liver, which are really responsible for a big part of our metabolic burn rate. And so what we want to do is we want to detoxify one part of, you know, working on the liver is to detoxify because toxins are stored in our body fat.
So the more toxicity we carry, the more body fat we need in order to house that toxicity. Okay. So it just makes sense that we would need to detoxify then, right? To release. Unlock all of that stored body fat so we can burn it off. And so by working on the liver, that's what we're doing. We're detoxifying, we're alkalizing the system, but we also want to increase the protein to help kind of draw out that that body fat.
But we also want to address the pancreas, which is producing the insulin. So we want to have no carbohydrates in this phase, right? We wanna bring insulin right down. So that way, again, so we're working on the adrenals to relax the body so it feels safe to burn body fat for fuel. The second phase, we're bringing down insulin, we're going to start [00:09:00] drawing on the body fat that's already stored so that we're primed for the third phase.
We get into the third phase, in the second phase, what we really want to do to nourish those key systems, like I said, is no carbohydrates, but we want to make sure that you have. Lots of green veggies to detoxify and lots of protein for the amino acids for the liver and to also unlock stored body fat.
Okay, so we've got the adrenals, we've got the pancreas and the liver in that second phase. And then the third phase we're looking at the thyroid. So the thyroid gland is the queen of the metabolism, right? And our thyroid hormones are what contribute to a super fast metabolism. So our thyroid hormone T3 helps to burn fat from our belly, our butt.
Our backs, our thighs, everywhere, right? And so we want to have a healthy range or a healthy amount of T3. But we also want to make sure that we don't have reverse T3. So this is a very common problem. Reverse T3 kind of comes in and it pushes T3 out, preventing it from getting [00:10:00] onto the cell receptor site.
So this means that, actually your T3 levels could be great when you do a pathology test, but your reverse T3 is high, right? So it's blocking the action of T3, so you're not getting that body fat burning, right? And this is common in high stress states. It's common in restrictive eating. So if you've been on a very restrictive, diet plan, cutting out major food groups, super low calories.
And so we're also looking at poor liver function, which is affected often through fatty liver and insulin resistance. And, Things in our diet that has contributed to this kind of fatty liver profile and that's what causes our liver function to go down which means we produce too much reverse T3 and It blocks T3 right and it's also toxicity plays a role in here as well But the thing that we really see is that stress and restrictive eating okay, and then too much processed foods So we want to make sure that T3 is getting in there It's doing what it needs to do and we want to nourish the thyroid gland. So this is stage three. So we want to look at T3 [00:11:00] Healthy fats, your nuts, your seeds, your fish, in good amounts.
Okay. We want to look at nutrients like selenium, which we can get in Brazil nuts. Something like six Brazil nuts gives you a daily dose of selenium. So all of these nutrients are important to make sure that your body and your thyroid is producing enough of the active T3 and it's not producing the reverse T3.
So if you're nourishing these key systems, you're going to be nourishing the hormones that are responsible for a super fast metabolism. Okay. And so we have clients that come through our program that lose Tina lost a 10 and a half kilos, which is about 23 pounds in six weeks. And Madeline lost eight kilos in four weeks, which is about 17 pounds and not feeling hungry, eating about five or six meals a day, making sure that they do not miss any meals, still eating carbohydrates and really nourishing the system.
So the metabolism. comes back online. Your body's able to burn body fat for fuel more easily. And I always [00:12:00] say this process while you are losing body fat and retaining muscle, It's really a process to repair your metabolism. And I always say the side effect is weight loss, okay? Because at the end of it, women, they find themselves, they will go on a holiday or something, and they kind of deviate off the plan, and then they notice, actually I haven't gained the weight, and I've still lost some weight.
And that is because the metabolism is in a much better place, right? In order to manage, self manage, their body weight naturally, without them having to think about it.
So, if this is interesting to you, you would like to know more. I did a full training last week on this, where I talked more about these three phases, what you need to do, what you need to eat, and how they all work. If you'd love a copy of that training, there's a link just below this video that you can click, and you can head over to the training.
