Weight Management

Weight Loss

Working Out But Gaining Weight? The reasons are

Most people lose weight or maintain their current weight when they get regular exercise, but that isn’t true of everyone. It is possible and even common among certain body types to gain weight when exercising rather than losing it. If you’ve experience this phenomenon, don’t worry too much about it. Here’s an explanation as to why this might happen to you and what you can do in order to solve this problem.

1. The process of exercising puts stress on your muscles. This stress is actually a series of minute tears in the muscle fiber. The way your body gains muscle is by building more fiber around the damage. However, your body doesn’t always recognize these tears as exercise, especially if you lived a sedentary lifestyle prior to working out. Instead, it sees the tears as a form of trauma and tries its best to repair that. This includes retaining more water and fluids around the area, which can cause a rise in water weight. In most cases, this added weight goes away after a few weeks of maintaining the same workout routine. Eventually, the body recognizes the damage to the muscle fibers as intentional, not accidental.

2. Water retention is the most common cause of gaining weight after exercising, but it isn’t the only reason this happens. The way your body builds muscle can cause some increases in weight as well. This could occur as the body provides fuel to your muscles. In this case, the fuel is a sugar called glycogen, which can bond with the water in your body to add pounds. As another possibility, your body may begin adding lean muscle mass, which doesn’t show up as visibly as other forms of muscle. In both of these cases, your body will adapt to the changes over time. Eventually not only will the weight gain go down, but you will start to notice an increase in your overall muscle mass.

Acupuncture and weight loss

Acupuncture is a traditional Chinese medical practice of placing fine needles into the body at specific points for therapeutic effect.there are two schools of thought on how acupuncture works: The Western perspective whereby acupuncture releases endorphins which produce natural euphoric activity, and the traditional approach where acupuncture regulates the flow of QI, or energy, bringing the body back into balance.

Also, Acupuncture is effective at controlling physical craving and avoid overeating. Around for more than 2,500 years, this relatively painless healing technique has become more and more popular in Canada over the past two decades, and is now recognized as a safe and effective treatment for everything from migraine pain to infertility, and is often used to help with weight loss and weight management especially for simple obesity ( weight gain not caused by disease or medications).

How Insulin Affects Hormones

Insulin is a hormone that regulates the change of sugar, starches, and other food into energy that your body burns up or stores as fat. Excess insulin increases the amount of male hormones circulating in the blood and also amplifies the effects of these hormones on all cells

To make matters worse, insulin insensitivity contributes to weight gain, especially in the belly area, and insulin insensitivity makes it harder to lose the weight. These set-up a negative feedback system as belly fat excretes hormones that make you feel hungry—causing you to eat more and send insulin levels even higher.

Promising studies have shown that acupuncture can be effective in both reducing insulin levels and helping you lose weight. Combining acupuncture with diet and lifestyle changes is a very effective way to reach a healthy weight and get your hormones back in balance.

Should you try it?

To incorporate acupuncture into your own life, it is advised that you must first have a consultation with your chosen practitioner to clarify the reasons for your weight problem, whether physiological due to issues such as a slow metabolism, menopause or thyroid problems, or behavioural due practices like overeating and binge eating.

Weight Loss Treatment

The “why” for weight loss is more important than “how to” lose weight. We help you discover and focus on your “why.” This helps motivate you to finally lose and keep off the weight.

Our unique weight loss program consists of:

Acupuncture

Acupuncture treatments increase blood circulation, promote sleep, balance hormones, reduce cortisol levels, and de-stress your body (toning down your fight or flight response). Recent studies have shown that acupuncture has a unique ability to influence obesity hormones. Research measuring the effectiveness of acupuncture for weight loss found treatments increased the ghrelin in the body, a hormone that controls meal initiation, and decreased leptin, the hormone that regulates fat storage and metabolism.

Balanced Diet and Menopause Diet

The balanced Diet is a whole foods, low glycemic, and anti-inflammatory diet. Research suggests that this diet is close to the best diet for attaining and maintaining your ideal weight.

Phytoestrogens

Foods that nourish the organ systems associated with menopause include: dark blue/purple fruits like blueberries and black berries, walnuts, ginger, black sesame seeds, barley, kidney and other beans, squash, lentils wheat germ, seaweeds, legumes, quinoa, chicken, lamb, and wheat grass.

Asian women rarely experience hot flashes, probably because their diet contains large amounts food rich in certain plant estrogens called "phytoestrogens." A healthful source of phytoestrogens are "lignans," compounds found in a variety of whole foods including grains and cereals, dried beans and lentils, flaxseed, sunflower seeds and peanuts, vegetables such as asparagus, sweet potatoes, carrots, garlic and broccoli and fruits such as pears, plums and strawberries.

Hypnosis

An effective method of achieving change, hypnosis is a valuable tool for self-empowerment and continuous personal growth.

Gentle Detoxification

Eliminating toxicity and inflammation are the two most effective ways to address long term weight loss and sickness & disease. We currently recommend you start with the Thorne 3-week mediclear detox and have continued supplementation for another 1-3 months using a liver detoxifier by Lorna Vanderhaghe called "Estrosmart."

Sleep

Research has shown that a lack of sleep can lead to weight gain. Both cortisol and insulin levels can spike and become elevated from getting less than seven hours of sleep. Chronically elevated cortisol leads to inflammation, weight gain in the abdominal midsection, and rapid aging. It is this abdominal fat that increases your risk for heart disease and diabetes.

Exercise

Exercise is one of the most effective ways to balance your hormones and lose weight. Exercise burns calories and helps regulate your insulin levels, reversing some of the metabolic imbalances that contribute to weight gain and fertility problems. Furthermore, when you exercise, your body rewards you by releasing a cascade of feel-good hormones (endorphins). These endorphins are Mother Nature’s antidepressants, lowering your stress and boosting your sense of wellbeing.

You can get the positive effects of exercise by just walking for 30 minutes every day. The effect of your workout can be further enhanced by incorporating more activity into your daily routine: try parking your car a few blocks from work or your destination or taking stairs instead of an elevator whenever possible, as well as hiking, biking, or swimming.

Stress Reduction

Chronic stress can lead to elevated cortisol levels which in turn can lead to inflammation, insomnia, irritability, and increased abdominal fat. Practices such as qi gong, yoga, meditation and tai qi are very effective ways to reduce stress and induce deep relaxation.

The Surprising Reasons Not Losing Weight

You’ve been eating healthy, sleeping plenty, and working out like a warrior – why hasn’t the scale budged?! There are few things more frustrating than committing to a healthy lifestyle and reaching a plateau in the results. There are many factors that could be at play, so read through our list of culprits and determine which ones apply to you.

1. Your Routine –If you’ve stuck to the same workout routine for the past 4-6 weeks, chances are your results have plateaued. As you progress through your workouts, your body becomes more efficient, meaning you burn fewer calories doing the same routine. This is an easy problem to fix; all you need to do is switch it up! If you’ve been breaking a sweat with long duration, lower intensity cardio sessions, try an interval workout. If running isn’t your thing, try strength training. There are endless possibilities – the more variety you include in your workouts, the more results you’ll see. Changing up your routine a bit at this time of year is also a great way to avoid exercise boredom and keep your body from hitting that dreaded progress plateau that you must stay clear of.

2. You Never Miss a Workout – While it’s great that you are consistent, your body needs a break every now and then to recover and rebuild lean, healthy muscles. Try taking one day of each week and include at least one low intensity workout in your routine weekly.This will create the perfect balance of fat-burning workouts and muscle building recovery.

3. Sleep – You’ve heard a hundred times how important sleep is, and you’re about to hear it again. Sleep is a key factor in weight loss, and not getting enough can even lead to weight gain.Sleep can balance out stress and weight gaining hormones, so give your body the rest it needs with at least 7.5 hours each night.

4. Calorie Balance – As hard as you try, you cannot out-exercise poor eating habits. Fuel your workouts with healthy and energizing snacks, recover with protein packed meals afterwards, and nourish your body with plenty of vegetables and fruits throughout the day. As hard as it may be to stick with healthy eating, committing to clean, and whole foods 80% of the time will provide you with some pretty rewarding results.

5. Over-training – If you’re a committed workout warrior (and kudos to you!); you need to be watchful for the signs of over-training. If you notice yourself gaining weight, feeling fatigued, have aching muscles, or experience a loss of appetite, you may be over-training. Take a couple weeks off to let yourself recover fully, take simple walks and eat healthy, then return to your regular workout routine gradually. While exercise is a wonderful thing for your body, too much of anything is not a good idea – everything in moderation!

Working Out But Gaining Weight?

The potential reasons are: