You Don't Have a Calorie Problem. You Have a Hormone Problem.

Most of my questions lately have been about how to lose weight, which really translates to how to burn more fat. Let’s be clear: weight is simply the mass of the human body, which is made up of many components, including muscle, organs, and fat. We don’t want to lose organ or muscle weight, so that leaves fat as the real issue.

In other words, you don’t want to lose weight, you want to lose fat.

That might sound obvious, but if your only method of success is a bathroom scale, then I think I’m making my point clear. If you lost 10 pounds, what was it?

The second part of this dilemma is that you need to drop the calories-in versus calories-out idea. It’s not about counting calories. It’s about your hormones, and no matter what you do in a diet, if you cannot control your hormonal imbalance, you cannot lose weight.

You also cannot fight your hormones; they are way too powerful.

Of course, the whole concept of lowering calories to lose weight makes sense at face value. Reduce the incoming calories and increase the outgoing calories, and you should lose weight. Not rocket science, just logic.

But logic does not account for physiology. The whole calories-in versus calories-out concept is based on the metabolism not changing, but it does. When you lower your intake too much, the metabolism slows to protect you. It also fires up a bunch of hormones to protect you.

That’s right: weight loss is a hormone issue, not a formula of calories in versus calories out, and the more you diet, the harder your body works against you!

How many times have you followed the calories in versus calories out formula only to fail within a 5–7-year period?

So, the first thing we need to understand is that we have hormones that control our hunger and how we store fat, but we also have hormones that help us burn fat. The trick is to de-stimulate the fat-storage hormones and trigger the fat-burning hormones.

Before you diet, you must understand that while certain hormones are created to burn fat, others make you store more fat. You also need to understand what triggers the hormones that make you store fat. Unless you know these things, weight loss will be impossible; it will end in failure and weight gain, like almost everyone you know.

Sure, you could go to an endocrinologist and get your hormone levels checked. However, you rarely get the right ones checked, and many times, if deficiencies are found, you will be given synthetics that do not match the power of your natural hormones. You might also be given something to counter a hormone imbalance but not address the actual cause of that imbalance. Thus, you must stay on the drug for life rather than being cured, and now you are dependent on a drug!

That does not sound like a sound approach to weight loss, and it isn’t.

But why are the hormones that make the difference ever talked about? Perhaps because the industry has a huge profit margin. Like, $90 billion in 2024 and scaling towards $150 billion in 2026!

Perhaps people just don’t want to understand the endocrinological implications. Who knows. In this blog, I’m going to cover the hormones that increase fat storage and the hormones that decrease it. Then I’ll cover sound weight loss advice that gives you a no-fail approach.

Ready?

Insulin: The Fat-Storage Switch

The first hormone we need to be concerned about, one that is responsible for lowering our blood sugar, is called insulin. The main function of insulin is regulating your body’s energy supply in the form of glucose.

Insulin is critical for transporting glucose to the liver and muscle cells for energy. Sugar is the first line of energy for the body. It is derived from sugar products and highly processed carbohydrates such as white bread, muffins, doughnuts, and the like, but it can also come from complex carbohydrates, proteins, vegetables, and even fats.

Here’s the first thing I want you to note: sugar is your most immediate source of energy. Insulin is there, ready to keep spikes of sugar in your blood under control, but if you always have plenty of sugar, you have no need to burn fat for fuel.

This is the first and most fundamental lesson in losing weight: you must stop giving your body sugar to burn as its only source of energy and flip the fat-burning switch instead. In other words, to lose weight, you must eliminate insulin spikes.

Sugar in excess causes the pancreas to release insulin to control blood sugar, but not before the sugar has acted on certain body parts to make distinct physiological changes that hurt your body in the long run.

Your brain, for instance, uses sugar as a main source of fuel, but it can also function on ketones. Excess sugar stimulates dopamine, a feel-good chemical that triggers sugar cravings. But there’s a good chance that excess dopamine production can lead to dopamine resistance, and that’s a problem. In Parkinson’s disease, there is not enough dopamine in the areas of your brain responsible for movement. This leads to problems with muscle stiffness and walking. This should give you a little insight into why people potentially develop Parkinson’s in the first place.

Your liver does not do well on excess sugar, either. Rapid rises in blood sugar tend to overwhelm the liver, leading to fatty liver and cirrhosis over time.

Perhaps the most damaging effect of sugar is on your joints. Sugar is inflammatory . It not only leads to stiffness in your joints, but it also causes an increase in free radical damage and the release of cortisol, a hormone that, along with insulin, causes you to gain weight around your mid-section.

The problem is that insulin, in its effort to lower your overall sugar levels, is also really good at increasing your fat storage. That means eating too much sugar causes inflammation, insulin spikes (eventually leading to insulin resistance), and almost entirely eliminates your ability to burn fat and therefore lose weight, while increasing your ability to store fat.

In the absence of insulin, all the effects of insulin that increase fat storage are reversed. Thus, if you want to lose weight, you must lower your insulin levels (spikes).

Now, this is hard to do if your diet contains a lot of sugar or processed carbohydrates, or if you take insulin as a diabetic. To be fair, you do not have to eliminate insulin spikes completely. After all, insulin has a job to do. But you must keep it low and controlled.

Look, you can do whatever you want in order to lose weight, including starving yourself, but unless you control your insulin, your body will fight you through the entire process.

Those diet plans that still allow you to eat a slice of pizza, a sandwich, or dessert will ultimately nullify any chance you have of burning fat. That includes working out, too. It will not help unless, first, you control insulin. And that includes that energy drink with sugar you took before your workout.

It does not take many sugary carbs to block weight loss, either, and those effects can last up to 24 hours. Plenty of time for you to eat more white flour or sugary carbohydrates that are no longer worthy of being called food.

Lowering your calories cannot work under these circumstances. If you eat less but still include white flour carbs and sugars, you will simply gain weight as your body learns to store more fat.

Ghrelin and Leptin: Hunger vs. Satiety

Eating too little also stimulates the hunger hormone. That hormone is called ghrelin. Ghrelin has many functions, but it gets its namesake from stimulating hunger when you don’t eat enough (calories in versus calories out, remember?).

It is also impossible to ignore, and when it activates, it can increase food intake by as much as 30%. This makes a low-calorie or starvation diet about the worst thing you can do.

In addition, ghrelin attempts to suppress insulin secretion to reduce glucose storage in the organs but increases it in fat cells. Ghrelin also stimulates glucagon, another hormone that I will talk about later.

There’s an interesting dynamic between ghrelin, the hunger hormone, and leptin, the satiation hormone. Leptin is produced from your fat, and a little from the small intestine, and it helps regulate the energy balance by suppressing hunger.

Only when you diet, it doesn’t work properly, and it fails to turn off hunger. The harder you diet, the more immune you are to leptin, and yes, that makes you overeat.

Carbohydrates, Fiber, and Insulin Spikes

Now that we are clear on insulin, let’s talk a little about carbohydrates, of which we generally accept two kinds: simple and complex. Carbohydrates themselves can be placed into three categories: starches, sugars, and fiber. Starches and sugar are simple; fiber is complex.

Fiber is the only carbohydrate that does not elevate insulin. That means the greater the fiber content of your food, the lower the insulin factor and the lower the fat storage, provided the sugar content is not artificially high.

What has lots of fiber but still provides carbohydrates? Vegetables. Lots of fiber, about 25% carbohydrates, and no sugar spikes, unless you use dressings with high fructose corn syrup or seed oil (did you check the label?).

If you must add other carbs, keep them below 50 grams a day, and better yet, 25 grams a day (for at least 30 days). All food can increase insulin, including meat, but that insulin spike is short-lived and relatively minimal. Remember, simple carbohydrate spikes can have lasting effects that take 24 hours to resolve.

Seed Oils and MSG: Hidden Triggers

And so that we are clear, this includes seed oils, too. Yep, those oils like vegetable oil and safflower oil that you keep being told are healthy, but are anything but.

Sure, these oils provide omega-3 fatty acids, which help inflammation, and vitamin E, too, which may help reduce cholesterol. But this is only part of the picture. The part the marketers leave out is that seed oils were manufactured back in a time when we had no meaningful regulation on them, and the research was flawed in so many ways it’s hard to count.

Yes, vegetables should be healthy, but vegetable oils have an omega-6 fatty acid ratio that is way too high, and omega-6 fatty acids promote inflammation, which increases free radical damage, which leads to more disease, not less.

We’re not talking about one study; we’re talking about trial after trial. But that’s not all. Seed oils also spike your insulin levels. According to a Chinese study published in the Journal of Nutrition, 2020 , seed oils are directly associated with obesity and type 2 diabetes.

Another study published in Endocrinology in 2020 compared three different diets high in fat: soybean oil, modified soybean oil (low in linoleic acid), and coconut oil.

To give you a little background, the same group of researchers in PLOS ONE in 2015 found that soybean oil fostered increases in obesity, diabetes, insulin resistance, and fatty liver in mice. In 2017, the same group learned soybean oil was being engineered to be low in linoleic acid to induce less obesity and insulin resistance. But in the 2020 research, they found no such protection, especially in the brain, where critical processes take place. This is primarily due to their highly processed state, which causes insulin spikes, inflammation, cellular damage, and is also estrogen-like endocrine disrupting.

If we look closely at historical charts on obesity and attempt to match that growth with other industry introductions, we do find it closely relates to synthetic chemical use in farming. However, we also note that household cleaners, seed oils, and ultra-processed carbohydrates contribute. We should also note that an increase in the use of sugar continues to dominate the market, even though the industry has attempted to limit that by using multiple names for the product. Last count, there were 56 different names for sugar.

Bad carbs are not the only culprit in increasing insulin. Monosodium glutamate (MSG) is another bad egg in the basket of unhealthy choices. MSG is not only used at your favorite Chinese restaurant, though, but is also found in chips, frozen dinners, fast food, instant noodles, and many other processed foods too.

Even though the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has not banned it yet (shaking my head), MSG consumption has been linked not only to obesity, but also liver damage, blood sugar fluctuations (and consequently insulin spikes), elevated risk of heart disease, nerve damage, behavioral problems, and increased inflammation.

To add insult to injury, MSG may make you eat more, too, compounding your weight loss issues. I suppose we could add the sodium issue into that mix, too. Excess sodium makes you thirsty, but it also pulls water away from muscle and organ tissue, which increases cramping, muscle knots, and tightness.

Estrogen, Cortisol, and Thyroid Slowdowns

The biggest issue we have with weight loss is estrogen levels getting too high. Elevations in estrogen can occur through many mechanisms, including taking birth control pills. But the most prevalent activator includes environmental pollutants, primarily from synthetic chemicals used in farming agriculture.

Overconsuming sugars and ultra-processed carbohydrates is also a major driver of estrogen dominance, as is cortisol production due to inflammation and stress.

The combination of these factors interferes with the thyroid gland and its ability to function. This is mostly due to increased estrogen leading to increased thyroid binding globulin that tends to bind both thyroxine (T4) and triiodothyronine (T3) tightly, preventing them from metabolizing.

To compound this, elevated estrogen yields lower progesterone, which can lead to copper retention if zinc is too low. This combination also reduces thyroid function. Progesterone is also a neuro-protectant, meaning that low levels can harm nerves in the right environment. Decreases in progesterone and dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA), and increased estradiol and estrone, tend to increase insulin, which increases weight gain.

There are a number of drugs that also interfere with estrogen levels. Prednisone is one of them. Prednisone will accelerate bone loss and interfere with thyroid function, too.

To be clear, high estrogens from an inflammatory diet increase insulin production, which in turn increases fat storage. So, your diet needs to focus on reducing insulin spikes, and to do that, you need to lower your carbohydrates.

You also need to avoid increasing any endogenous estrogens that couple with xenoestrogens and phytoestrogens .

Putting It Into Action

What can you do to reduce your exposure to insulin spikes and estrogen-promoting foods and chemicals?

First, you need to avoid foods that spike insulin (did I say this enough yet?). You cannot win the weight loss game unless you avoid sugars, sweeteners, and ultra-processed carbohydrates.

Next, mix your lifestyle with a form of intermittent fasting. My favorite way to do this is to eat a good, high-protein breakfast but include sourdough toast; eat a lunch of protein and vegetables; and then eat protein only for dinner by 6 p.m., then do not eat again until breakfast.

Supplement this with vitamin D3 and K2. Vitamin D3 helps lower cortisol because it lowers inflammation. Also, berberine, because it mimics metformin in controlling insulin. We also need to lower inflammation and cortisol levels, and we do this with exercise, especially strength training.

Why strength training? Because strength training releases irisin, which stimulates the fat cell to burn off more fat in the muscle. Remember, cortisol is an anti-inflammation fighter. It is there because your diet is inflammatory, which is why your estrogen is too high and your progesterone too low.

Finally, drink water with about a half teaspoon of apple cider vinegar. This helps keep blood sugar levels stable in your blood. Other claims that it helps weight loss are not necessarily untrue, but it does so because it helps stabilize blood sugars.

I mentioned irisin earlier because it is an important fat-burning hormone that is only released when we either strength train or train cardiovascularly using speed burst techniques such as Sprint 8. But there are many other fat-burning hormones that we need, and they are also stimulated by exercise in general.

Nine Fat-Burning Hormones That Work Synergistically

There are nine main hormones that we know about right now that work synergistically. These are your holy grail of weight-loss hormones that accelerate fat loss.

Keep in mind that fat is not burned by a fat cell. It is reduced to a free fatty acid, released into the blood, and then it travels to the muscle, which breaks it down further and uses it to produce energy. Therefore, the more muscle you have, the better your ability to burn fat. Some people call this metabolism.

The important point is that exercise triggers the hormones that burn fat; therefore, diet alone cannot optimize your results.

Let’s look at these nine hormones, briefly, and where they come from:

1) Growth hormones are one of the better understood hormones. They are made by a small gland in your brain called the pituitary gland. Once formed, they are moved into the bloodstream, where their first stop is the liver. They assist the body in repair mostly, so they are most active when we sleep. Thus, poor sleep can negatively affect these hormones’ effect on the body.

Growth hormone is also known as the anti-aging hormone. It helps to build up cartilage and collagen, and, of course, build lean muscle where fat is burned. It is stimulated by protein and strength training.

2) The next hormone is insulin-like growth factor-1 (IGF-1). It is made in the liver but triggered by growth hormone. The basis of this hormone is to give the body fuel between meals by releasing stored sugar (glucose) and fat. Thus, while insulin increases the body’s ability to store fat, IGF-1 encourages the body to burn that fat as fuel.

As you may have guessed, IGF-1 is stimulated by exercise, but it is suppressed by a diet high in sugar and ultra-processed carbohydrates.

3) The next hormone is testosterone. Most people believe this is primarily a male hormone, but both men and women produce it. In women, it is lower because they obviously don’t have testes to stimulate it, and they have more estrogen, which counters its production.

Testosterone is stimulated by exercise, especially strength training. It assists in developing more muscle (where we can burn more fat), and it also assists in repair as we sleep.

By now I am certain that you understand the connection between IGF-1 and testosterone. Both are produced by strength training. IGF-1 acts like a growth hormone alongside testosterone. Both are stimulated by strength training or speed training. Studies also find that we can increase IGF-1 with intermittent fasting and moderate protein increases where the protein is in the 40% or higher range.

4) Next is glucagon. Glucagon is sometimes called the weight-loss hormone, but before you run out and get it in a bottle, understand that it is stimulated by protein and high-intensity exercise, and supplementally, it is unlikely to do any good.

Glucagon is produced by the pancreas, so it is neutralized by insulin production. As you know, insulin helps you store fat, but glucagon helps you release and burn it. Protein intake also helps your body release it.

While this hormone is stimulated by dietary protein, taking too much of it can lower the fat-burning effects a little.

5) The next hormone might surprise you a little: vitamin D. Yes, vitamin D is actually a hormone, and people who have a vitamin D deficiency are more likely to be overweight or obese.

That’s because vitamin D works with another hormone called leptin. Leptin signals the brain when you are full and therefore to stop eating. One study, published in the Indian Journal of Endocrinology and Metabolism (2022), found that leptin resistance was correlated with lower vitamin D levels. It noted that leptin resistance is a major contributor to obesity.

6) The next hormone is adrenaline, and it is the main hormone that releases fat from the fat cells, so it has generated a lot of speculation. Generally speaking, this hormone prepares the body for stressful situations. You likely recognize it when people talk about an adrenaline rush, especially in near-miss situations.

But how does adrenaline fit into a weight loss scenario? You can’t run around trying to get narrowly missed by a bus, and chronic adrenaline elevations have a negative effect on our health since adrenaline increases heart rate and blood pressure.

Nonetheless, adrenaline and noradrenaline prompt the breakdown of fat to provide more energy when you need it.

How do we take advantage of short-term adrenaline production? Exercise, especially strength training. Adrenaline and noradrenaline markedly increase during intense exercise bouts, causing an increased release of fats.

7) Thyroid Hormones are our next fat-burning hormones, and perhaps one of the most obvious. T3 and T4 control the speed of your metabolism. Generally, it’s stimulated by thyroid-stimulating hormone (TSH) in the pituitary gland of the brain.

Once your thyroid releases T4 into the blood, it converts it into T3, because the thyroid can better use it in this manner. But there’s another side to it. While potassium and zinc are known to help the body convert T4 to T3, estrogen is known to increase thyroid binding globulin, which binds both T4 and T3 tightly and does not easily break them down for metabolism.

Cardiovascular exercise can increase T3 and T4 and decrease TSH. Most studies recommend exercise if you have thyroid issues. Cardiovascular exercise, and likely strength too, causes significant increases in thyroxine.

8) Next up are two hormones, notum and lipocalin-5, that speed up the body’s ability to burn fat.

These are super interesting hormones because in one study they protected mice from developing diabetes and cured that diabetes after other mice got it. That’s pretty impressive, and they are produced by both strength and cardiovascular exercise.

Lipocalin-5 is made by fat cells and enhances muscle tissue’s ability to metabolize and absorb dietary nutrients, which is also thought to reduce the chances of obesity.

Notum, a myokine produced by muscle, appears to promote thermogenic activity in the body and protect against weight gain, and help bone remodeling. Strength training is the best activity for increasing it.

But be careful: there are at least three hormones, including insulin, that store fat. When insulin spikes, the fat-burning hormones are ineffective, and that makes it difficult to lose weight.

So, do resistance training, cut processed carbs and sugars, watch your seed oil intake, and don’t eat too late at night, especially snacks.

You can do this!