There are underlying reasons that your body resists weight loss and wants to hang on to extra weight. Inflammation and a compromised metabolism due to stress are the most common reasons.

We all know stress as mental/emotional stress; divorce, a death or an illness in the family, or it could be long hours at work or loss of work, or running yourself too thin with kids and life obligations.

But stress also comes from our environment: drinking water, air, and food. Then there’s dietary stress. We may be intolerant to the food we eat or we may be eating too much processed food and not enough of the food we need to truly nourish ourselves either because we don’t know what that is or because we don’t feel like we have the time to prepare our meals. Not so obvious stressors are environmental toxin exposures. For example exposure to mold or mercury toxicity from fish or from metal in our teeth. Personal care products are loaded with toxins that are absorbed by the skin. Another less obvious toxin is all the hours we spend on technology. How can electronics and social media be toxic? What they do is they don’t let the mind rest. If the mind doesn’t rest, the body doesn’t rest. If the body doesn’t rest your metabolism is compromised.

The stress could have occurred many years ago and that occurrence could have put your body systems in a compensatory state and each passing year you put on a few more pounds. Your stress response is designed to help you through times of stress. But when chronically engaged for months and months then years and years it begins to falter. And since this stress response regulates many of your other body systems, your metabolism and inflammatory system, you begin to put on weight. Cortisol, your body’s primary stress hormone is produced by the adrenal glands and plays a key role in your metabolism and inflammation. Long term stress, either emotional, dietary, or pain/inflammation causes cortisol to become depleted or low. A state commonly called adrenal fatigue or adrenal burnout. If your cortisol levels are out of balance your body will store fat instead of using it for fuel. The body is in survival mode and it is storing fuel for long term survival.

Using a functional medicine approach I will help you identify the underlying causes of your weight gain. Using functional labs to identify nutritional deficiencies, levels of toxicity, digestive health, we can test and correct your key body systems that may be contributing to your weight-loss resistance and empower you with simple and sustainable lifestyle tools to restore your optimal body weight for long term success.