8 Steps to Start Balancing Your Hormones for Weight Loss

There are many things you can do naturally to support your hormones in order to lose weight. First we want to build a healthy foundation. Building a healthy foundation consists of making certain nutritional and lifestyle changes, then we can build upon it with more targeted, specific nutrients, supplements that are specific to your body and needs.

Lay Your Foundation

Eat A Nourishing Diet

Replacing inflammatory foods is one of the most important things you can do to balance your hormones. If you’re eating sugars, processed foods, gluten, dairy and inflammatory oils, this is where you need to start. Make healthy swaps for foods that are free from sugar, vegetable oils, wheat and milk ingredients. Focus on foods that will nourish your hormones, such as avocados, squash, bone broth, wild fatty salmon and antioxidant-rich berries.

Drink Pure Water (with salt!)

Drinking tons of water without adding minerals back in can actually impede optimal hydration and leave you depleted in minerals. Adding a pinch of salt to your water and food is an easy way to add in some good minerals to support your stress response, adrenals and hormones. Make sure it’s a high quality salt like Himalayan salt without synthetic iodine.

Work On Your Sleep

If you’re not sleeping well, it’s going to be very difficult to balance your hormones and lose weight because your hormones are affected greatly by sleep. In fact, your hormones run on circadian rhythms, which sleep helps regulate. We can use nutrition and natural sleep supports to make sure this area is setting you up for success!

Practice Hormone-Balancing Movement

If you feel like something is off with your hormones, but you still have great energy, don’t have intense stress and sleep well, shorter HIIT workouts and weight training may be beneficial for weight loss. On the other hand, if you’re very fatigued and burned out, we wouldn’t recommend doing anything that intense just yet. Practicing more mindful, slow movement such as walking or yoga can be more beneficial than a HIIT workout. Additionally, avoid long-distance cardio like spin or running if you’re struggling with hormonal balance and hormone-related weight gain.

Build Upon Your Foundation Wisely

Supplement Intentionally

It’s easy to get sucked into taking a million supplements, but we really need to be supplementing intentionally to make the most impact. The best way to supplement intentionally is to work with a professional who is knowledgeable about how to use supplements properly to help you reach your goals. It’s extremely important to be supplementing in the correct order, with high quality products and not just take any “magic pill” product you see on social media!

Consider Functional Testing

Running the right tests, such as a Functional Hormone Panel and having your gut assessed with a GI MAP can be game changing in the results you see with your diet and supplement protocol, because it will give you root-cause answers and be highly personalized to you.

Address Your Specific Hidden Food Intolerances

This can be done through a nutritionist-guided elimination diet. Alternatively, a Food Intolerance Panel can be run to find which foods are creating inflammation, imbalance and inhibiting weight loss for your body specifically.

Reduce Your Toxin Load

This is a big one! We must also reduce our toxin load when working on balancing hormones to lose weight. Many toxins such as BPA, BPF, pthalates, fragrances, etc. are endocrine-disruptors and obesegenic chemicals that significantly interfere with our hormones over time.

To chat more about how we can help you get on the path to healing and finally get results, email us at hello@winnipegnutrition.com!

Sources: