What about weight?
Weight is a topic which, for many women, consumes much of our headspace. We are exposed to so much conflicting information, and to conflicting diet and exercise recommendations, that it is really difficult to know what to do. In answer to all this conflicting advice, and perhaps why it exists… what is best for a long term healthy weight for you depends on your individual biology, your physiology, your stress levels, your hormone levels, your food preferences, and your movement choices.
If you would like to maintain your ideal weight in the long term it’s often more helpful to see how you can improve your metabolic health[1]. Your weight will be ideal as a great side effect.
Many functional medicine practitioners therefore advocate for long term healthy dietary changes, such as the Core Food Plan which was developed by the Functional Medicine Institute. The long term impact of eating healthy whole foods, healthy fats, less sugar and no processed foods ultimately leads to less stress on your system, resulting in lower levels of cortisol and insulin relating to food intake. Ultimately this leads to long term weight loss and better health. Many doctors do not focus on calorie restrictions, and rather encourage implementing healthy lifestyle changes, which have the positive side effect of a decrease in fat stores.
7 – 9 hours of restful sleep per night is important for weight loss. Ideally, you should eat at least 2 hours before going to bed in order to allow your possible rise in blood sugar levels to subside before going to sleep. Simply giving your digestive system at least a 12 -13 hour break between dinner and breakfast, has many health benefits which we will discuss further workshop 4 where we explore intermittent fasting.
In addition resistance training to increase lean muscle mass leads to improved insulin sensitivity. Increased muscle mass leads to improvements in growth hormone levels and is more metabolically active.
[1] Metabolism: The three main purposes of metabolism are: the conversion of the energy in food to energy available to run cellular processes; the conversion of food to building blocks for proteins, lipids, nucleic acids, and some carbohydrates; and the elimination of metabolic wastes. (…). The word metabolism can also refer to the sum of all chemical reactions that occur in living organisms, including digestion and the transportation of substances into and between different cells, in which case the above described set of reactions within the cells is called intermediary (or intermediate) metabolism. (Wikipedia, kein Datum)