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Ready to go deeper? Learn more about the 3 Week Inflammation Detox and the 12 Week Whole Health Solution at www.andrearobertson.health

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Dr Andrea Robertson is an Osteopath, Naturopath, and Nutritionist. The information shared in this podcast is for educational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice. Always consult your healthcare provider before making changes to your health regimen.

Show Notes

Episode Transcript

Andrea: [00:00:00] Why is it that everything you used to do just doesn't work anymore? You've been doing everything right. You've cleaned up your diet, you're moving your body, you're doing all the things you've been told to do, and the weight will not move.

I want to talk about this as a biological problem, not as a behavior problem. and biology responds to very specific, very targeted interventions that have nothing to do with eating less or trying harder. The root cause is not in her food diary, it's in her inflammatory biology . that made sense back in caveman days, but it makes no sense whatsoever in modern life, where the threat is not a predator or a lack of food over winter, but a chronic inflammatory load and a full inbox.

Before we dive in, a big thanks to our first sponsor, Madame Tiger. When I was planning this podcast, I reached out to a number of brands who I love and adore, and Madame Tiger didn't hesitate to support me. That says something about the brand that makes me love them [00:01:00] even more. So I've got my tiger nut milk chai right here with me today, and honestly, that's not for the promo.

This is my real-life nearly every afternoon ritual. Madame Tiger's tiger nut milk, it's dairy-free, FODMAP friendly, no nasty additives or seed oils, and it makes the most incredible chai. If you haven't tried it yet, go and check them out at madametiger.com.

Our second sponsor today is Mineralite, an Australian electrolytes brand. And I have to tell you how I found them, because this is a genuine story. Now, I'm really into paddle tennis, some may say obsessed . And a friend of mine introduced me to Mineralite to use for my hydration support during games. I was a little curious because I'd been recommending clients avoid those terrible sugary sports drinks for years, but I wasn't really sure what other options were available.

I now know that Mineralite is the option I'll recommend. It's unflavored and contains no sugar, no sweeteners, no artificial colors, no nasty additives. Just clean electrolyte support in drops you can add [00:02:00] to your water or any hot or cold drink. And my paddle? It was noticeably different. My energy held, my focus held, and I even won some games.

Mineralite is now in my water every single day. Go and check them out at mineralite.com.au or find them in most pharmacies and health food stores throughout Australia and New Zealand

Andrea: Why is it that everything you used to do just doesn't work anymore? You've been doing everything right. You've cleaned up your diet, you're moving your body, you're doing all the things you've been told to do, and the weight will not move. Or it moves just a little bit, and then comes straight back on. I have sat with hundreds of women in exactly this place, and the answer is never what they expected.

I'm Dr. Andrea Robertson, osteopath, naturopath, and nutritionist. Here, we nourish because food is medicine, and what you eat changes everything. We heal because the body has an extraordinary capacity to self-repair when we remove what's blocking it.

And we rise because feeling well isn't the destination, it is the [00:03:00] foundation for living the life you truly desire. This is Nourish, Heal, and Rise.

nourish, heal, and rise. Nourish, heal, and rise. Nourish, heal, and rise

Andrea: Before we begin, a quick and important note. Everything I share on this podcast is for educational purposes only. It's not personal medical advice, and it can't be, because in the context of this podcast, I don't know your health history, your medications, and what else is happening in your body. What I want this podcast to do is give you the knowledge to ask better questions, understand your body more deeply, and make more informed decisions in partnerships with the practitioners who do know you.

If something resonates and you wanna take action, please work with a qualified healthcare provider who knows your full picture

Welcome back to Nourish, Heal, and Rise.

I am so glad you are here for episode three. If you've been following along from the beginning, you heard me in episode one introduce the eight most common [00:04:00] signs of chronic inflammation that I see in women's bodies.

And in episode two, we went deep on sign number one, which was inflammatory fatigue, the kind that sleep doesn't fix, and why no amount of going to bed earlier will solve it if the underlying biology isn't being addressed. Today, we're moving on to sign number two, and I want to say something before we even begin, because this topic carries more emotional weight than almost any other in the women's health space.

Weight that will not shift, particularly around the middle. So it's women who are eating well, exercising, doing everything right, and the weight simply will not move, or it moves briefly and then comes straight back on, or in some cases, it is actually going in the wrong direction despite every effort to change it.

I have sat across from hundreds of women over the years who have described this exact experience, and what I notice consistently, without exception, is that by the time they arrive in my [00:05:00] clinic or work with me online, they've almost started to believe that the problem is them.

Like, that they're not disciplined enough, not consistent enough, not trying hard enough. That somehow despite everything they're doing, there is a personal failing that is responsible for a body that won't cooperate. I want to dismantle that story completely today, completely and permanently. And I wanna do something specific in this episode that I think is missing from almost every weight loss conversation in the wellness space.

I want to talk about this as a biological problem, not as a behavior problem. Because as long as we frame weight loss resistance as something that happens because of what you are eating or how much you are moving or not moving, we're gonna keep missing the actual drivers, and we're gonna keep sending women back into this cycle of restriction and frustration and self-blame that does nothing for their health, and a great deal of damage to their relationships with themselves and their bodies.

And I [00:06:00] know I'm getting passionate, but I am so passionate about this topic, and I'm so excited to share with you today these biology drivers. Because the biology is the story, and the biology is what gives us answers.

And when you understand what is actually happening inside a body that is carrying chronic inflammation, what it does to insulin, your cortisol, your thyroid, your hunger hormones, your fat distribution, your metabolism, the story then changes entirely when you understand that. Weight loss resistance is a biochemistry problem,

and biology responds to very specific, very targeted interventions that have nothing to do with eating less or trying harder. So here's what we're gonna cover today. We're gonna go through the 10 most significant biological drivers of weight that won't shift, and I want you to notice as we work through them, how many of them connect back to the same underlying inflammatory picture.[00:07:00]

Then we're gonna move into the practical, specific action steps, and we're gonna finish with what the research and my clinical experience tells us about how long to expect this change to actually take, and also what to expect as you implement these steps. So, let's get into it. But before we go into the mechanisms, I wanna spend a little moment making sure we are describing the same experience, because weight loss resistance is not the same as simply wanting to lose weight Weight loss resistance is when you are actively doing the things that should, by conventional logic, create weight loss, and your body is not responding.

You are eating in a way that you believe to be healthy. You're exercising. Maybe you've tried multiple approaches, calorie restriction, low carb, intermittent fasting, plant-based eating, high protein, and none of them have produced lasting change.

Weight loss resistance is also characterized by where the [00:08:00] weight sits, so the abdomen, the tummy, the belly, the middle. Women describe it as a softness around the waist that wasn't there before, or a thickness through the midsection that no amount of crunches or cardio seems to touch. And clothes fit differently through the middle, even if the overall scale number perhaps hasn't changed dramatically.

And there's a feeling of being puffed or inflamed, particularly after eating, that goes beyond kind of just a normal feeling of fullness. And it is often accompanied by the other signs that we're talking about in this series, so the fatigue we addressed in episode one, the brain fog that's coming in the next episode, the joint aches, the gut issues.

Because these are not separate problems. They're just different expressions of the same underlying chronic inflammation state.

I had a client, I'm going to call her Julia just for privacy reasons, who came to see me when she was 47. She was actually a personal trainer, and she knew nutrition [00:09:00] deeply. She knew exercise. She lived it professionally every single day,

and she trained her clients in exactly the kind of methods that should theoretically produce and maintain a healthy weight. And Julia had gained six kilograms over the 18 months before we worked together in a way that made, like, no sense to her at all. All of it had landed around her middle.

But she was training six days a week, eating what she described as a very clean diet, like plenty of vegetables, lean protein, minimal processed food, and the weight just was going in the wrong direction. So of course, Julia was super frustrated, but she was also mortified because she felt like she should know better.

She thought that if she, of all people, could not manage her own weight, what hope did her clients have? And so she had started quietly questioning whether she should even be doing the work she was doing. When I looked at Julia's full picture, the inflammation was significant. Her cortisol was chronically elevated, and she was training high intensity six days a week without adequate recovery, [00:10:00] which is itself a significant inflammatory burden on the body.

Her estrogen was declining, which is kind of normal, but that was having an impact as well. Her insulin sensitivity had quietly shifted over that previous 18 months too. And her thyroid, on a full thyroid panel rather than just a TSH, was showing very early signs of impaired T4 to T3 conversion.

Julia was not failing at weight management. Julia's metabolic environment had changed,

and nobody had helped her see it or respond to it appropriately. So when we worked together, we reduced her exercise load before we increased it. We added recovery days as a non-negotiable. She didn't like it very much, but she did come on board. And we shifted her training to include more progressive strength work and significantly less high-intensity cardio.

No more HIIT classes for Julia. For reasons I'll explain when we get to the muscle and metabolism section in this episode. We also addressed two remaining inflammatory drivers in her diet that she hadn't yet [00:11:00] removed, and we added targeted nutritional support for her thyroid and cortisol.

It was beautiful because over 12 weeks, the weight started to shift for Julia for the first time in 18 months. It wasn't dramatically, like in day two or week one, but it was steadily and consistently over 12 weeks. And over that 12 weeks, she lost eight kilos. She was very happy with that. And more importantly, though, Julia started to understand why it had stalled for her.

And so the shame dissolved completely when she understood the biochemistry. It was not her. It was never her. And that is what I want for you today, too. So let's go through the biology. We're gonna go through the nine biological drivers of weight that won't shift. And I'm starting with driver one, insulin resistance.

Insulin is the hormone your pancreas, which sits at the very kind of top middle part of your abdomen over towards the left-hand side. So insulin is the hormone your pancreas produces every time you eat carbohydrates. And then [00:12:00] glucose, it gets broken down into glucose or sugar, enters the bloodstream.

So insulin's job is to act like a little key, unlocking the door to your cells so that glucose can enter and be converted into energy When this system is working beautifully, it is one of the most elegant pieces of biochemistry in the body. Glucose arrives, insulin's released, glucose enters the cell, energy's produced, clean, efficient, and seamless.

Insulin resistance is what happens when the cells stop responding to insulin's signal. The locks have become kind of stiff. We need a lock maker. What are they called? Locksmith. We need a locksmith, but more and more keys are needed to open the same door.

So the pancreas responds by producing more and more insulin because it is doing its best to compensate. And here is the problem. Insulin at chronically elevated levels is a fat storage hormone. It directs excess glucose, which can't get [00:13:00] into those resistant cells to be used for energy, to instead be stored as fat, particularly in and around the tummy.

Which is why women with insulin resistance can be eating moderately, exercising regularly, and still gaining weight around the tummy. It's not about that old model of calories in versus calories out. Oh my God, kill me if I ever hear that ever again. Here we have a hormonal signaling problem, and chronic inflammation is one of the primary drivers of insulin resistance.

The same low-grade, systemic, ongoing immune activation of chronic inflammation that makes you feel tired and foggy and achy is also making it really hard for your body to manage glucose and release stored fat.

I want to make something very clear here because I think it is one of the most important things I can say in this episode. Insulin resistance and weight gain are not simply the result of eating too many carbohydrates or too many [00:14:00] calories. Insulin resistance can develop and does develop in women who are eating well by any reasonable definition of that phrase because the driver's not just food.

The driver is the inflammatory environment in which food is being metabolized. A woman who is chronically inflamed, chronically stressed, chronically sleep-deprived, and carrying significant gut dysbiosis can develop insulin resistance even on a carefully managed diet because the root cause is not in her food diary, it's in her inflammatory biology The visceral fat, the fat

that accumulates deep in the abdominal cavity around the organs, that is characteristic of insulin resistance. And it's not just cosmetically concerning. The problem is visceral fat is itself metabolically active. It produces inflammatory cytokines. It makes inflammation worse, which means that the more visceral fat we accumulate, the more inflammation it generates, [00:15:00] which worsens insulin resistance, which drives more fat storage, which makes more inflammation.

So you can see it's a very vicious cycle that is incredibly hard to interrupt through just diet alone without addressing the inflammatory foundation.

Breaking insulin resistance requires reducing the inflammatory load, stabilizing blood sugar through food choices and meal timing, building lean muscle mass, which is the primary tissue that clears glucose from the bloodstream, and in some cases, supporting insulin sensitivity with specific nutrients, including magnesium, chromium, berberine, and inositol.

Therefore, my favorites. But we will come to some practical steps shortly. that's a little about the first biological driver of weight loss resistance, insulin resistance. Now let's go on to driver number two, cortisol dysregulation with belly fat storage.

Cortisol, your primary stress hormone, plays a significant and underappreciated role in fat distribution, and specifically in fat accumulation around the [00:16:00] organs in the belly. So visceral fat cells, the deep fat that surrounds our organs, have a significantly higher density of cortisol receptors than the subcutaneous fat cells elsewhere in the body.

So now let's differentiate between visceral fat, the tummy fat, and subcutaneous fat that we'd see like on our hips and thighs

Because I want you to understand the difference. Subcutaneous fat is the fat you can pinch. You know, it sits just beneath the skin on the arms, the thighs, the hips, and also on the surface of the abdomen. It's inactive when we think about it from a metabolic standpoint compared to visceral fat Visceral fat, by contrast, is the fat you can't pinch.

Like, it's deep inside the abdominal cavity, and it's wrapped around the organs. So in relation to how these fat cells respond to cortisol, think of it this way. The fat around your middle is highly sensitive to cortisol. When cortisol is chronically elevated, which happens in the context of chronic stress, chronic inflammation, or HPA axis [00:17:00] dysregulation, which we talked about in episode one, well, when cortisol is chronically elevated, the abdomen responds by storing more fat.

It is an evolutionary mechanism. The body is holding more energy reserves close to the vital organs in anticipation of sustained threat. Like, that made sense back in caveman days, but it makes no sense whatsoever in modern life, where the threat is not a predator or a lack of food over winter, but a chronic inflammatory load and a full inbox.

So chronically elevated cortisol also directly drives insulin resistance, because cortisol raises blood glucose as part of the stress response, which then requires more insulin, which worsens insulin sensitivity over time. Cortisol also suppresses thyroid function. It reduces growth hormone, which is something that's really essential for muscle maintenance, and it disrupts the hunger hormones called ghrelin and leptin.

So cortisol dysregulation is not just one driver of [00:18:00] weight that won't shift. It is a multiplier that amplifies every other driver simultaneously. The cortisol picture in women with weight loss resistance is often one of chronic low-grade elevation. Not the dramatic cortisol spike of acute stress, but like a sustained, relatively modest elevation that over months and years rewires fat distribution, impairs metabolism, and makes the tummy weight stubbornly resistant to change.

Okay, so cortisol is our second biological driver of weight loss resistance. Let's now go on to driver number three, which is thyroid dysfunction and metabolic slowdown. When we talk about metabolism,

We are essentially talking about your thyroid gland that sits here in your neck, the front of your neck. The thyroid hormones it produces, and specifically the active form T3, determine the rate at which your body burns energy at rest. Think of it as, like, the [00:19:00] dial that controls the- Idle speed of your car engine or your body engine.

When T3 and the receptors are functioning well, your resting metabolic rate is healthy and working well. But when thyroid function is impaired, your metabolism slows down, it's less flexible too, and you need fewer calories to maintain your weight. And any calories consumed in excess of that reduced requirement are stored with remarkable efficiency as body fat.

And as we discussed in the fatigue episode, episode number two, chronic inflammation suppresses thyroid function through multiple mechanisms, reducing T4 production, impairing T4 to T3 conversion, and increasing reverse T3, which is like the inactive decoy that blocks T3 receptors and prevents the active hormone from doing its job.

The result from a weight loss perspective is a woman whose metabolic rate is generally running slower than it [00:20:00] should. She feels cold when others are comfortable. She gains weight on calorie intakes that would not normally do so in a person with a normal thyroid function. And she's frequently told that her thyroid is fine based on a TSH result that does not tell the whole story.

TSH stands for thyroid-stimulating hormone, and here in Australia, it is usually the first and only test done to check thyroid. However, if weight loss resistance is part of your picture, a full thyroid panel, full thyroid blood test of TSH, T3, T4, reverse T3, antibodies, and even urinary iodine are all essential pieces of investigation.

I cannot tell you how many times I've picked up undiagnosed thyroid issues with the women I work with, so I absolutely believe these tests are not an optional extra and very much worth a little bit of extra cost that comes with getting those tests done.

In particular, when I test thyroid antibodies, I regularly find women where these are [00:21:00] elevated, yet their TSH still sits within the normal range. What elevated antibodies tell us is that the immune system is actively attacking the thyroid gland. So that is an autoimmune thyroid disease, most commonly called Hashimoto's thyroiditis, and it can be present or progressing for years, sometimes decades, before that TSH marker changes enough to trigger a conventional diagnosis.

So there are women who have been told repeatedly that their thyroid is all fine, and technically, at the level of their TSH, it may be. But perhaps their immune system is quietly dismantling their thyroid tissue, and that process, which is inflammatory by nature, contributes directly to the fatigue, the weight resistance, the brain fog, and the hormonal disruption that we are discussing throughout this series The thyroid is a topic I feel so strongly about that we're gonna go and do a dedicated deep dive episode on it in the near future.

Hashimoto's, the inflammation [00:22:00] connection. And what to actually do when antibodies are elevated. Then the gluten question, and how to work with your GP to get the investigation and support you actually need. It's a big topic, and it definitely deserves its own full episode, so watch out for that one.

And so an underperforming or sluggish thyroid is our third biological driver of weight loss resistance. Let's go on to driver number four, estrogen decline. This is the driver that catches so many women off guard because it happens in the context of perimenopause, often years before what most women would recognize as menopausal symptoms.

So as estrogen begins to decline, which can start as early as your late 30s, well before periods become irregular, fat distribution shifts. So fat that previously sat, you know, preferentially on our hips and thighs and buttocks, which is metabolically relatively benign, like it doesn't cause any problems there.

That fat, it's almost like it begins [00:23:00] redistributing to our tummy, to our abdomen, and this is not weight gain in the sense of total body mass changing dramatically or a big increase on the scales. It's a change of where the body stores its fat, and it can feel very confronting for women who have maintained a stable weight for years to suddenly notice that their shape is changing in a way that does not respond to anything that they are doing.

At the same time, declining estrogen increases the production of inflammatory markers. Let me explain why. Okay. Estrogen, when it's at its optimal levels, has significant anti-inflammatory effects in the body. It modulates immune function. It reduces the production of pro-inflammatory cytokines. So unfortunately, as estrogen declines with perimenopause and menopause, that anti-inflammatory protection reduces.

Isn't that kind of sad? Then this creates a more pro-inflammatory environment, which worsens insulin resistance, which [00:24:00] further drives tummy fat accumulation, which generates more inflammation. Ugh. Oh my goodness. What a vicious cycle. However, ladies, not all is lost. Don't despair. It is a cycle that requires a whole system approach to interrupt it, but it can be interrupted Which is also why managing perimenopause well is so important for your long-term health.

I'm gonna have a chat about how to do that in a specific perimenopause-focused upcoming podcast. So stay tuned for that one. It is gonna be a game-changer for so many of you. Plus, it's important that your perimenopause years be supported with the anti-inflammatory lifestyle approach we are discussing throughout the eight episodes in this series on chronic inflammation.

Okay, so perimenopause is not just about hot flushes, brain fog, and peri rage. It's about metabolic health even more so. It is super important that you live a lifestyle and eat in a way that avoids developing insulin [00:25:00] resistance, or it works on reducing insulin resistance if you're on the way. It is super important to maintain your muscles, and it's extra important to protect the metabolic function within your body that determines how well your body manages energy and weight throughout the perimenopause transition and beyond.

We will be going into this later in this episode, so stay tuned. Okay, so estrogen decline and fat redistribution is our fourth biological driver of weight loss resistance. Let's now go on to driver number five, which is gut dysbiosis and the microbiome-metabolism connection.

The research on the gut microbiome and body weight is one of the most exciting and rapidly evolving areas in metabolic science right now, and what it's showing us is something that would have seemed almost unbelievable 15 years ago. Like, we did not learn anything about this when I was at uni because the research about the microbiome didn't even exist back then.

Makes me sound kind of old, but it doesn't feel that long ago. I really love how rapidly the [00:26:00] science is developing in this field. So many exciting things have been discovered, and I'm sure so many and more are still yet to come. Who would've thought I'd be so excited about the science to do with poo?

Only a naturopath. Anyway, Did you know the specific composition of bacterial species in your gut directly affects how your body processes food, how much energy it extracts from that food, how it stores fat, and how it regulates appetite? How cool is that?

There are certain bacterial species, Firmicutes and Bacteroidetes are the most researched, whose ratio in the gut appears to directly influence metabolic efficiency. So we want to know what that ratio is.

An imbalance in this ratio, driven by a low-fiber diet, chronic stress, alcohol, antibiotics, or high sugar intake, shifts the microbiome towards a configuration that promotes fat storage, [00:27:00] drives systemic inflammation, and impairs the gut's ability to produce the short-chain fatty acids that support insulin sensitivity.

It's a big sentence there, so let me just note, short-chain fatty acids are powerful anti-inflammatory compounds produced by your gut bacteria when they ferment fiber from the plant foods you eat.

Something else that's really cool is certain gut bacteria also directly produce compounds that influence the production of GLP-1, glucagon-like peptide-1, which is your body's natural satiety hormone. Satiety means satisfaction. When the microbiome is healthy and diverse, GLP-1 is produced in adequate amounts.

Appetite is well-regulated, blood sugar management is more effective, and fat storage signals are quieter. However, when the gut is dysbiotic, so there's an imbalance in the bacteria, GLP-1 production is impaired, and the cascade of poor satiety, poor [00:28:00] satisfaction, and blood sugar instability, and increased body fat storage follows.

  This is, incidentally, exactly what the GLP-1 medication class, the drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy, that you've almost or certainly been hearing about.

That's what these medications are designed to address, but pharmaceutically And I want to talk about those medications specifically a little later in this episode, because there is a very important conversation we need to have about them. But back to the microbiome. Beyond the microbiome metabolism research, gut dysbiosis also drives systemic inflammation through the mechanism of intestinal permeability, otherwise known as leaky gut, which allows bacterial endotoxins called lipopolysaccharides to enter the bloodstream.

So essentially things that shouldn't be getting into the bloodstream. In someone with leaky gut, These molecules leak between the cells lining the gut, so they enter the bloodstream, and they trigger an immune [00:29:00] response that directly worsens insulin resistance and promotes fat storage.

The gut connection to weight loss resistance is not a side thought. It is central, and the gut needs to be supported really well to help with weight loss. Okay. That's gut dysbiosis as our fifth biological driver of weight loss resistance.

Now let's go on to driver six, leptin resistance and the hijacked hunger signal. Leptin is your primary satiety hormone, so the hormone that helps you feel satisfied when you eat. It's produced by fat cells, released into the bloodstream, and travels to the hypothalamus in the brain,

where it signals that you have adequate energy stores, suppresses appetite, and encourages the body to burn rather than hoard energy. In a body where everything is working well, this is a really beautiful self-regulating system. If more fat stores, there's more leptin, there's less appetite, and the body burns more energy.

It's a really elegant system. Oh my God. Saying elegant system. It's [00:30:00] funny the things that pop into your head. This makes me think of something my auntie used to say to us when we were younger. So instead of saying, "I'm full," after you'd had enough to eat, she wanted us to say, "I've had elegant sufficiency," which I forevermore have said completely incorrectly, and I've always said, "I've had eloquent sufficiency."

Anyway, I digress. Back to the elegant system of leptin. When there is leptin resistance, this elegant system is disrupted completely. Leptin resistance develops in the context of chronic inflammation, elevated triglycerides, and in many cases just obesity itself, and it's where the brain stops responding to leptin's signal.

So despite high levels of leptin circulating in the bloodstream, because there's plenty of fat tissue producing it, the hypothalamus in the brain behaves as though the body is starving. It suppresses metabolic rate, it drives appetite more, it promotes fat storage,

and it makes the women experiencing it [00:31:00] feel this never-ending hunger even after adequate meals. And makes it feel impossible for her to lose weight no matter how hard she tries.

This is because her brain is actively working against her. But do not despair. I've got tips to share later in this podcast to help you realize not all is lost. On another note, inflammatory cytokines, produced when we've got too much chronic inflammation in our body,

directly interfere with leptin receptor signaling in the hypothalamus, which is why leptin resistance is so closely associated with chronic inflammation. And then elevated triglycerides from a diet high in sugar and refined carbohydrates, of course. These elevated triglycerides physically block leptin from crossing the blood-brain barrier, preventing it from even reaching the hypothalamus to deliver its signal.

This means that addressing blood sugar balance, reducing the intake of sugar and refined carbohydrates, and reducing systemic inflammation are not separate strategies for separate problems. They are the same strategy for the [00:32:00] same underlying problem, restoring leptin sensitivity and allowing the brain to accurately interpret and perceive the body's energy status.

So our sixth biological driver of weight loss resistance was leptin resistance. Now let's go on to driver number seven, undereating and metabolic adaptation. This is one that surprises most women, and the one that decades of conventional weight loss advice of calories in versus calories out has inadvertently created. So if you've spent years, or in many cases of the women I work with, decades eating in a significant calorie deficit, restricting, dieting, cutting, reducing, your metabolism has adapted, and not in a direction that helps you.

Here's what happens. When you consistently eat below your genuine metabolic needs, your body interprets this as a survival threat. You are, from the body's perspective, in a [00:33:00] famine, and it responds accordingly by down-regulating your metabolic rate, reducing the rate at which you burn energy at rest. It achieves this through multiple mechanisms: reducing thyroid hormone conversion, lowering body temperature, reducing the energy used up during movement, decreasing the thermic effect of food, and critically, reducing muscle mass, because muscle is metabolically expensive and the body will sacrifice it to reduce energy expenditure.

The result is a metabolism that has genuinely become less efficient over time. A woman who has been restricting for years may have had a resting metabolic rate that is significantly lower than it should be for her age and body composition, which means that the calorie level at which she maintains her weight is lower than it would be in a woman who has never fully restricted, which makes further restriction increasingly ineffective and increasingly worse off for you.

[00:34:00] There is something called metabolic adaptation or, in more extreme cases, adaptive thermogenesis.

Thermo means heat, genesis means to create. So this means the process of how your body produces and regulates its internal temperature through burning energy is actually changed. And it's one of the most compelling arguments for why chronic restriction is not a sustainable or effective long-term weight loss strategy.

And it winds me up because that message is still one that's out there to this day so much in gyms and in clinics, and it just doesn't work. The path out of metabolic adaptation is not to restrict further. It is, counterintuitively, to actually eat more Specifically to eat more protein, which has the highest thermic effect of any macronutrient out of carbohydrates, fat, and protein, and directly supports lean muscle maintenance.

So the thermic effect [00:35:00] refers to the energy your body burns by simply digesting and processing the food you eat. And as I said, protein has the highest thermic effect of all. So eat more protein. It also means your body actually burns more calories just breaking down protein compared to fats or carbohydrates.

And then please strength train, because building muscle, building lean muscle, is the most powerful tool available for increasing your resting metabolic rate over time.

We will talk about this more later in this podcast episode, though. Okay, so that's undereating and metabolic adaptation as our seventh biological driver of weight loss resistance. Now, let's go on to driver eight, set point theory and why the body defends a weight range. I learned about set points about, oh, maybe 15 years ago at a conference that I was at in Adelaide, and it's something I talk about constantly with the women I work with.

I think it is one of the [00:36:00] most important concepts in this entire conversation today because it explains something that so many women have experienced and never had a name for. So your body has a defended weight range, a set point. It's not a fixed number. It's more like a thermostat setting. And just as your home thermostat will activate the heating or cooling to bring the temperature back to the set point whenever it drifts, your brain and your body have a sophisticated array of biological mechanisms that activate whenever your weight moves away from the set point, with the primary goal of returning it there.

The set point is governed largely by the hypothalamus in the brain. It's also the region of the brain that regulates hunger, thirst, body temperature, and the stress response. The hypothalamus receives signals from leptin, insulin, ghrelin, cortisol, and a range of gut hormones, and uses this incoming data to calibrate appetite, metabolic rate, and fat [00:37:00] storage to defend the set point.

When you lose weight in the Biggest Loser style, thinking like weight loss in a diagonal line downwards, and then you drop below your current set point, the hypothalamus responds Metabolic rate drops, appetite increases, hunger hormones rise, and the drive to eat intensifies because the body's trying to get you back to this set point.

And most of the weight then will come back. So it's not a weakness if that happens. This is the hypothalamus doing exactly what it's designed to do, which is defending your body against what it interprets as a threat to survival. And here is the most important thing that most weight loss conversations never address.

The set point is not fixed for life. It can shift upwards and downwards, thank goodness. Listen very closely to this because it blew my mind when I originally learnt this. Chronic inflammation is one of the primary [00:38:00] forces that drives a higher set point over time. So you try to lose weight and restrict calories, and you might lose two kilos or three kilos, but as soon as you're not a hundred and ten percent perfect, the weight all goes back on to where you started or sometimes even more.

When the hypothalamus is chronically exposed to inflammatory cytokines, which is exactly what happens in the context of chronic low-grade inflammation, it becomes less sensitive to leptin. And we've already discussed leptin resistance, but the set point piece adds another layer. When leptin cannot signal effectively to the hypothalamus, the hypothalamus recalibrates its sense of the body's appropriate weight upwards.

It begins defending a higher weight range, a higher set point, which is why for many women, each cycle of dieting is responded by a rebound to a slightly higher weight than [00:39:00] before. The set point has shifted up, and the body is now defending that higher range with the same vigor it previously defended the lower one.

Now, chronic stress also raises the set point through cortisol's direct effect on the hypothalamus and on fat distribution. Gut dysbiosis also raises the set point through the inflammatory signals that dysbiotic bacteria create. Poor sleep also raises the set point through its effects on ghrelin and leptin, the hunger hormones, and hypothalamic sensitivity.

And unfortunately, years of that yo-yo dieting and restriction also raise the set point through the metabolic adaptation and cortisol cycling that we've already discussed. So you can see now weight loss is not simply a calories in versus calories out situation. The good news though, my friends, and this is very important, as I said, the set point can also shift downwards, and it [00:40:00] shifts downwards through the same mechanisms that drive us up, but applied in reverse.

Reducing chronic inflammation, restoring leptin sensitivity, healing the gut, protecting the sleep, managing cortisol, building lean muscle. Yes, these are 100% weight loss strategies, but they are also set point recalibration strategies, and the difference matters because a recalibrated set point means the body is no longer actively fighting to return to a higher weight.

It is now defending a lower one, which is why the approach I use in my programs produce results that last, not because women are white-knuckling maintenance, but because the underlying biology has genuinely changed. We aim to lose weight slowly by eating enough food, by eating enough calories, by eating enough protein, and we see set points change for the better.

It's like weight comes [00:41:00] off, goes downwards, then we see a set point where nothing changes with weight loss, and nothing changes in what the ladies are doing, but the weight just stops coming off for a few days or even up to two weeks. That's the longest I've seen a set point recalibration take.

But then again for no reason or no change in nutrition, we see the weight starting to come off again. Then another set point where the weight doesn't change for a few days. It's also where I retrain my clients with their mindset to not worry or panic when they see the weight loss stop for no reason for a few days or a week or two.

But instead, I encourage my ladies that I work with to say, "Isn't that interesting? That must be a set point," rather than going, "Oh, my God, I've stopped losing weight." So it's just, "Isn't that interesting? That must be a set point."

It literally changes everything in how we look at weight loss. When I talk about set point work with clients, I often use the analogy of a thermostat because it kind of works, and it's a thermostat that has been set too high [00:42:00] for years. You can open a window to cool the room down temporarily, but the thermostat will keep turning the heat back on.

The real solution is to adjust the thermostat setting. That is what the anti-inflammatory nutrition approach does. It recalibrates the thermostat from the inside Okay, so set points were our eighth biological driver of weight-loss resistance. Now let's go on to driver nine, which is sleep deprivation and appetite hormone disruption.

Sleep and weight are connected in ways that are far more direct than most women realize. Poor sleep, particularly inadequate deep restorative sleep, drives serious changes in two critical appetite-regulating hormones. I've talked about them a little bit. I've been sprinkling them in in this episode, but now let's talk about them more.

Ghrelin, it is your hunger-stimulating hormone, and it rises with sleep deprivation. Then leptin, which is your satiety hormone or your satisfaction hormone when it comes to food, it falls with sleep [00:43:00] deprivation. The result is that after a poor night's sleep, or even , chronically poor sleep over weeks and months of disrupted sleep, you're genuinely hungrier, you feel less full easily, and you get cravings for more high-calorie, high-carbohydrate foods.

Studies consistently show that sleep-deprived individuals consume significantly more calories the following day after a bad sleep because their appetite hormones are accurately reflecting a body that has received less restoration than it needed, and it's trying to do some compensation.

Sleep deprivation also elevates cortisol, which as we have already discussed, drives belly fat storage. It also impairs insulin sensitivity, it increases systemic inflammation, and it reduces growth hormone production. Growth hormone, which is released primarily during deep sleep, is essential for fat metabolism, muscle maintenance, and cellular repair.

For women [00:44:00] with weight-loss resistance who are also experiencing poor sleep, and this combination is extremely common, addressing sleep quality is not secondary to addressing food and exercise. It is equally equal. The hormonal environment created by poor chronic sleep will undermine almost every other strategy, so you must work on sleeping well.

More about that later. Okay, so sleep deprivation was our ninth biological driver of weight-loss resistance. Now let's go on to driver number ten, the compounding effect of diet culture. I felt like I wanted to stab myself when I said diet culture, 'cause that's, ugh, it's been so toxic over the years.

And I want to spend a moment here on something that's not a s-single biological mechanism, but that I think is critically important to name because it does overlay and amplify every other driver that we've discussed So many of the women who come to me with weight that won't shift have been dieting in one form or another for decades.

They started restrictive eating often in their [00:45:00] teens or their twenties, usually driven by social pressure or cultural messaging about what bodies are supposed to look like. In my era, think Kate Moss-type bodies plastered all over fashion magazines. And these women who are exposed to that have cycled through low-fat diets, low-calorie diets, low-carb diets, the Atkins diet, the lemon detox diet, the cabbage diet, meal replacements, juice cleanses, literally every iteration of restriction that has been marketed to them across the years.

And I have to admit too, even with a naturally lean body, But with the body weight pressures I perceived for myself of being a dancer since I was young, even I restricted and tried some of these terrible diets.

Oh my God, if only I knew then what I know now. Each cycle of restriction followed by an inevitable rebound, which is not a failure, but a physiological response, it leaves a mark on the metabolism as we have discussed, on the relationship with food, creating patterns of [00:46:00] restriction, guilt, and then reactive overeating that make intuitive, nourishing eating more difficult.

And on the hormonal environment because the toxic stress of dieting is itself an inflammatory stressor. And every time you enter a significant calorie deficit, cortisol rises. Every time you break a diet and overeat, insulin spikes and cortisol rises again. And the cycle of restriction and rebound is, at a physiological level, a cycle of chronic low-grade stress, and it accumulates over time in exactly the ways that we've been talking about.

There is also a significant psychological cost that I do not want to minimize. Years of focusing on restriction, of cataloging food as good or bad, of measuring self-worth against a number on the scale.

This creates a relationship with food and with your body that makes the nourishment-first approach I'm describing feel genuinely counterintuitive, even [00:47:00] uncomfortable, and that discomfort is real and valid And it's worth acknowledging that for some women, working through it with a psychologist or therapist who understands disordered eating patterns alongside the clinical nutritional work that I do can be a really powerful combination.

I want to say something to the women who have lived with this experience. The approaches that were supposed to help you often made the underlying problem worse, not because you failed at them, but because they were not designed with an understanding of the biology that we have just discussed.

A calorie-restricted low-fat diet does not address insulin resistance. It does not restore leptin sensitivity. It does not heal the gut microbiome. It does not support thyroid function. In many cases, it actually worsens these things. The approach that works and the approach that I see produce consistent, lasting results in women with weight loss resistance is not restriction.

It's restoring the biochemical environment in which the body can [00:48:00] regulate weight naturally, and it looks very different to anything diet culture has been selling. Now, I want to go on to part two of this podcast, which is what we can actually do to help weight loss resistance.

 

 

Andrea: Our second sponsor is Mineralite Liquid Electrolytes. And if you're still reaching for one of those sugary sports drinks when you need an energy hit, please stop. I say this with love, but they're full of sugar, artificial flavors, and things that are actively working against your [00:49:00] health goals.

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a quick word on GLP-1 medications.

I'm sure you've heard of these by now, Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro, and the others in this class, and we need to talk about them because they are impossible to ignore in any weight loss conversations happening right now. And I think there is a really important perspective that is not being widely discussed.

GLP-1 receptor agonists work by mimicking the action of glucagon-like peptide one. That's the natural satiety or satisfaction hormone that your gut [00:50:00] produces in response to food. Remembering, as we said earlier, a healthy, diverse gut microbiome helps produce GLP-1s in adequate amounts on its own anyway.

But these GLP-1 medications, they work by slowing gastric emptying, so food moves more slowly through from the stomach to the small intestine, which prolongs satiety or satisfaction. Then they signal to the brain that the body is full. They do improve insulin sensitivity and reduce blood sugar, and for many people, they produce significant weight loss.

I'm not dismissing these medications. For some people, particularly those with significant metabolic disease or where other interventions have been genuinely exhausted, they can be clinically appropriate and genuinely helpful. But here's what I am seeing in my practice and what I think deserves far more attention in the public conversation about these drugs I see them being prescribed to people that could do this without medication.

Because GLP-1 medications do [00:51:00] not address the underlying inflammatory environment that drove the weight loss resistance in the first place. In fact, from what I've seen, they actually worsen inflammation. They pharmacologically suppress appetite and improve insulin signaling, but the cortisol dysregulation, the gut dysbiosis, the thyroid impairment, the leptin resistance, the metabolic adaptation, none of these are addressed by the medication.

They will continue, and in some cases, they worsen. I am seeing women come to me who have been on GLP-1 medications who have lost weight and experience a significant increase in inflammatory symptoms, joint pain, fatigue, gut disturbances, mood changes, and in some cases, skin reactions.

Rapid weight loss, particularly when it includes significant muscle loss, which is a real risk with these medications if protein intake and strength training are not carefully managed. In itself, that significant fast, rapid weight loss is an inflammatory burden and an inflammatory stressor on the body as well.

Then there's [00:52:00] also the question of what happens when the medication is stopped. The biological mechanisms driving the weight loss resistance have not been resolved. The gut microbiome has not been restored. The hormonal environment has not been rebalanced. And in the majority of cases, when the medication is ceased, the weight returns because none of that stuff's been sorted out, and the weight returns often completely and sometimes beyond the original starting point.

I want to be clear. If you are on one of these medications and finding benefit, I'm not telling you to stop. This is a conversation that you need to have with your prescribing doctor. What I am saying is that these medications are most effective and most sustainable in their outcomes when they are used in conjunction with, not instead of, the underlying lifestyle and biochemical work we are discussing in this episode and throughout this series.

So if you are considering GLP-1 medications, I would encourage you to also be asking, what is driving my weight loss resistance at a root cause level? [00:53:00] And what work can I do on my gut, on my inflammation, on my thyroid, on my cortisol, on my insulin sensitivity, on my sleep?

What work can I do on those so that my long-term metabolic health is restored, not just temporarily managed? And ask yourself, could you do that work, support your body in that way without these medications? I would say for most of you, yes,

because I see that happening every day with the women I work with. Okay, so now I've got the GLP-1 chat out of the way, Let's go on to my 10 steps of what you can do to begin addressing weight loss resistance. These are the same strategies I use in women in my clinical practice and in my programs, the ones that consistently produce change where medication, restriction, and willpower have not.

Step one, stop restricting and start nourishing. I know this sounds counterintuitive, but chronic restriction is sustaining the metabolic [00:54:00] adaptation that is making weight loss impossible. The goal is not to eat less. The goal is to eat in a way that restores insulin sensitivity, supports thyroid function, fuels lean muscle, and reduces inflammation.

That means eating enough food. It means not skipping meals. It means not living in a calorie deficit so aggressive that your body interprets it as a threat and doubles down on fat storage. The women who consistently produce the best weight loss results in my programs are almost always the ones who, counterintuitively, trust me, they trust the process, and they increase their food quality and quantity in the early weeks, particularly their protein, rather than restricting further.

Which takes me to step number two, prioritize protein at every meal. Protein is the single most important macronutrient for women with weight loss resistance, and most women are eating far too little of [00:55:00] it.

Remember before when I told you that protein has the highest thermic effect of any macronutrient, meaning your body burns more energy just digesting it compared to fat or carbohydrates. And protein is also directly required for building and maintaining lean muscle, which is your primary metabolic tissue, the tissue that clears glucose from your bloodstream and sets the baseline of your resting metabolic rate.

Protein supports satiety hormones, or it's the food, the macronutrient that makes you feel most satisfied, which means it reduces the ghrelin-driven hunger that often drives overeating. And protein stabilizes blood sugar.

A protein-rich meal blunts the glucose and insulin spike that a carbohydrate-dominant meal produces. Oh, and now it's come time for me to introduce you to something I think is seriously important and that I teach all of my clients about. I want to introduce you to something called the protein leverage hypothesis, because I think it [00:56:00] explains a pattern that so many women recognize in their own eating, but have never had a framework to understand.

The protein leverage hypothesis, developed by researchers Simpson and Raubenheimer,

proposes that humans have a biological drive to obtain a certain level of protein each day, and that when protein intake is not met, the body compensates By driving hunger and food intake until that protein requirement is met. In practical terms, this means that if you are eating a diet that is low in protein, you'll be driven to overeat other macronutrients, carbohydrates and fats.

Your body needs protein, but your brain gets muddled up, and it thinks it needs just energy, so it goes for the quickest sources of energy. Hello, sugar and carb cravings that don't even hit the spot. Your body is not being unreasonable.

It's being very reasonable indeed. It needs protein, and it will not stop signaling hunger until it gets it. This is why [00:57:00] low-protein diets produce persistent hunger, even when total calories are adequate. When the protein target is met, the hunger signal quietens, not because of willpower, but because the biological driver has been satisfied.

The target I work with for most women with weight loss resistance is between one point two and two grams of protein per kilogram of ideal body weight per day. For most women, That is significantly more protein than they are currently eating.

And the most important place to start is breakfast. Twenty-five to thirty grams of protein before anything else every single day. Okay, eating enough food and eating enough protein were steps one and two of what to do about weight loss resistance. Now let's go into step number three, build lean muscle with progressive strength training.

Muscle is metabolically active tissue. One kilogram of lean muscle burns approximately three times as many calories at rest as one kilogram of [00:58:00] fat. Building lean muscle is therefore the most sustainable long-term strategy for raising your metabolic rate, your resting metabolic rate.

That's your energy burner baseline, and for improving insulin sensitivity. And the type of training matters. Chronic high-intensity cardio can actually worsen cortisol elevation when you do it without adequate recovery. It can drive muscle breakdown rather than muscle building. And while it burns calories during the session, it does not produce the lasting upregulation in resting metabolic rate that comes from increasing lean muscle mass.

Progressive strength training, which means lifting weights that are challenging for you and progressively increasing the demand over time as your strength improves, this style of lifting specifically improves insulin sensitivity by increasing the number and sensitivity of glucose transporters in muscle cells.

Don't you love a bit of science on this? It also supports growth hormone and testosterone production, both of [00:59:00] which are important for metabolism in women, not just men. It also preserves bone density, which is critically important in the context of declining estrogen with menopause.

And strength training builds lean muscle mass that changes the metabolic picture long term. So a note on what progressive strength training actually means in practice, because I want it to be specific. It means resistance training

where you are genuinely challenging your muscles, not just going through the motions with weights that feel comfortable. The muscles need a reason to adapt and grow, and that reason is load. Three to four sessions per week of thirty to forty-five minutes each with genuine rest or gentle movement between sessions, not extra high-intensity work.

That is an effective starting structure for most women. So each time you need to increase reps or increase weight. With my training, I'm now at the point where I lift challenging weights in that eight to twelve rep range, but each time I hit twelve [01:00:00] reps and I can do that, I add a quarter or a half a kilo on with one to two reps in reserve.

And so that's how I'm always doing progressive overload. Now, I think I should get my trainer to come on and do an episode with me on this podcast because I'd love for you all to understand the system too so you can apply it as well. And if you are new to strength training, please do not let that be a barrier.

Start where you are. Bodyweight exercises, resistance bands, or light weights with professional guidance are perfectly appropriate starting points. And visit my YouTube channel, Barre with Andrea, because I have some great starting workouts there even for beginners with barre workouts. But it's the progression over time is what really matters, not the starting load.

Okay, so building muscle with progressive strength training is step number three for weight loss resistance. Now let's go on to step number four, stabilize blood sugar at every meal. Every meal should contain protein, fat, and fiber in that priority order. These three elements together slow the absorption of [01:01:00] glucose from food, moderate the insulin response, and sustain satiety or satisfaction between meals.

So have a mouthful of protein first at every meal too, before the carbohydrates. There's been some great studies that consistently show that eating protein and vegetables before more starchy carbohydrates at a meal significantly reduces the post-meal glucose spike compared to eating the same foods in reverse order.

Something as simple as eating your chicken or fish before your rice or potatoes produces a measurably better glucose response. How cool is that? Then avoid meals that are predominantly carbohydrate with minimal protein and fat, like toast, cereal, rice-only dishes, fruit-based snacks on their own, particularly first thing in the morning when blood sugar management sets the tone for the entire day.

Remember in episode two when I talked about eating a chocolate Easter egg on an empty stomach at 5:45 AM recently? Oh my God, I felt terrible for the whole entire day, and so learn from my mistakes there and [01:02:00] eat your protein for breakfast. Okay, step number five on what to do about weight loss resistance is to remove the primary dietary inflammatory drivers.

Think refined sugar, industrial seed oils, ultra-processed foods, alcohol, and for those with sensitivities, gluten and conventional dairy. These are the primary dietary drivers of the inflammatory environment that sustains insulin resistance, worsens cortisol dysregulation, damages the gut microbiome, and makes fat loss physiologically very difficult.

Now, I'm not asking for perfection. I'm asking for a committed, structured period, 6 to 12 weeks at minimum, of removing these drivers consistently enough that the inflammation has a genuine opportunity to reduce, and the metabolic environment can begin to shift. This is the foundation of my three-week inflammation detox program and my 12-week program to give the body a structured, supported [01:03:00] experience of what it feels like when the inflammatory load comes down, and the change in the weight picture within the first three weeks is often the first real evidence many women have had in years that their bodies can change.

Let's go on now to step six, heal your gut. Given the profound connection between gut microbiome composition and metabolic health, gut healing is a non-negotiable component of addressing weight loss resistance.

 

Given the profound connection between the gut microbiome composition and metabolic health, gut healing is a non-negotiable component of addressing weight loss resistance. The foundational strategies, okay. Increase dietary fiber significantly. Aim for thirty or more different plant foods per week because diversity of fiber sources drives diversity of beneficial bacterial species.

Then include prebiotic foods, garlic, [01:04:00] onion, leeks, asparagus, Jerusalem artichokes, green bananas. These feed the beneficial bacteria associated with better metabolic health. And then add fermented foods, but carefully, especially for those of you with histamine intolerances. So add sauerkraut, kimchi, coconut yogurt, water kefir.

They're all great sources of live beneficial bacteria, but they are high in histamine so as I said, be careful if that's you. And then remove the gut disruptors: refined sugar, alcohol Gluten and dairy in many of you will be a bit of a disruptor for a short period of time, so it's good to take them out, and also avoid any unnecessary antibiotic use.

And then consider whether comprehensive digestive stool analysis testing might be warranted if you've done everything else and the weight is still not shifting, particularly if gut symptoms are part of your picture. Identifying specific dysbiosis, overgrowths, parasites, or gut [01:05:00] pathogens with a functional medicine practitioner can unlock a piece of the puzzle often that dietary changes alone cannot address.

If you'd like support with this, let me know because my team and I can help. So step six of what to do to support weight loss resistance was heal the gut. Now let's talk about step seven, protect your sleep.

As we discussed, sleep deprivation drives ghrelin up and leptin down. It elevates cortisol, it worsens insulin resistance, it impairs growth hormone, and increases inflammation. Poor sleep and weight loss resistance are a deeply entangled pair. You cannot address one without addressing the other. So I have five very powerful sleep practices that I specifically want women with weight loss resistance to do.

One, have consistent going to bed and waking up times, including weekends. Two, have a cool, dark bedroom, sixteen to nineteen degrees.

Three, have no [01:06:00] screens for thirty minutes before bed. Four, eat a small protein and healthy fat snack just before bed, so a few little nuts, tablespoon of almond butter, to stabilize blood sugar overnight and prevent the cortisol spike that can sometimes wake women between one and three in the morning.

And then five, add magnesium glycinate, three hundred to four hundred micrograms before bed, which supports both sleep and insulin sensitivity. So step seven of what to do to support weight loss resistance was to protect your sleep. Now let's talk about step eight Support your stress response.

Cortisol management is not a little add-on to a weight management strategy. Given everything that we have discussed about cortisol's role in abdominal fat storage, in insulin resistance, in thyroid suppression,

and thyroid suppression, . It is as clinically important as nutrition and movement. The practices that most [01:07:00] consistently reduce cortisol in women with chronic elevated cortisol are these. Regular gentle movement in nature. Even a daily 30-minute walk reduces cortisol over time.

Two, extended exhale breathwork. Think in for four counts, out for six to eight counts. 10 to 15 repetitions. This directly

activates the parasympathetic nervous system, Which is your rest, relax, digest nervous system, and the kick-on effect of that is lower cortisol. And then reduce the high-intensity exercise load if it is excessive. As counterintuitive as that sounds, because a body already carrying a high cortisol load, for that body, more intense exercise is more stress, not the antidote to it.

And then schedule in structured time without demands, time that is genuinely restorative, not just time between tasks. I work with women on this piece [01:08:00] consistently, and I work on it myself too. Like, I'm literally a work in progress in this department. But it's also one where the cultural messaging is pretty unhelpful.

Like, how many times has someone asked, "How are you?" And you say, "Great, thanks, but I'm so busy." How is it that we have made busy a good thing? The message we get from our society, like work harder, move more, push through, do it all. But for a woman whose cortisol is chronically elevated, that is adding fuel to the fire.

So step eight of what to do to support weight loss resistance was to support your stress response. Now let's talk about step nine, investigate the hormonal and thyroid picture properly. If Weight loss resistance is significant and persistent, the full hormonal and thyroid picture needs proper investigation, not just a TSH and fasting glucose, but a comprehensive panel that includes TSH, free T3, free T4, reverse T3, [01:09:00] urinary iodine, vitamin D, B vitamins, homocysteine, fasting insulin, fasting leptin, a full sex hormone panel including estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, and SHBG, and if not recently done, a full iron panel including ferritin.

This panel tells a story that the standard blood count simply cannot, and it gives you and your practitioner the specific targets to address rather than a general sense that you should eat less and move more. If you're in Australia, many of these tests are Medicare rebatable when ordered through a GP.

A functional medicine GP or an integrative GP or a naturopath with prescribing access can help you also navigate which tests are most relevant to your specific picture. But for someone like me, unfortunately, as a naturopath, we're not covered on Medicare for these blood tests.

But again, my team and I can help you here if you're looking for support. In Australia also, you can get some really great blood tests done through some online pathology prescribing [01:10:00] services. And then step ten on what to do about weight loss resistance is to give it time. Genuinely, give it time. The metabolic environment that drives a weight loss resistance has typically been developing for years.

Reversing it takes time, and setting realistic expectations is essential

because the frustration of expecting faster change than is biologically possible is itself a cortisol driver. What I tell women in my programs with weight loss resistance is this: in the first three to six weeks, you will likely notice changes that are not primarily about the scale.

The bloating will reduce, energy will improve, the sleep will feel more restorative, the brain fog will lift a little. These are the biological signals that the inflammation is reducing, and the metabolic environment is beginning to shift. These are the leading indicators. The scale is like a secondary [01:11:00] indicator.

It responds after the biology has already started to change. Health first, weight loss as the side effect. Consistent change in body composition, like real sustained change, typically takes three to six months of this approach applied consistently, not three to six weeks. And that is not a failure of this approach.

That is the reality of restoring a system that has been dysregulated for a long time.

So in closing, weight loss resistance is not a willpower problem. I want you to hear that as clearly as I can say it. It is a biochemistry problem. Specifically, it is a problem of an inflamed metabolic environment, one in which insulin resistance, cortisol dysregulation, thyroid suppression, leptin resistance, gut dysbiosis, hormonal decline, sleep disruption, and metabolic adaptation have all [01:12:00] converged to create conditions in which the body is doing exactly what inflamed bodies do, holding on, storing, protecting.

Not through any failure on your part, but because that is the physiological response to the biology that chronic inflammation creates. I want to briefly tell you what to expect as you begin implementing these changes because I think managing expectations is as important as the steps themselves, and unrealistic expectations are one of the most common reasons women abandon approaches that are actually working.

So in the first week, you'll probably notice some weight loss, which is usually the fluid accumulation you're letting go of as chronic inflammation starts to reduce. Then in the next two to three weeks, the changes you're likely to notice are not so much on the scale number.

They are in how you feel, like less bloating, more consistent energy throughout the day, better sleep, fewer afternoon cravings, a [01:13:00] clearer head. These are the leading indicators, the biological signals that the inflammatory environment is beginning to shift. They are more meaningful than any number on a scale because they tell you that the direction is right and the biology is responding.

The scale, if it does move in the first few weeks, as I said, that is often showing the reduction in fluid retention rather than fat loss. As I said, chronic inflammation drives fluid retention. It's that puffiness, that uncomfortable fullness, and when inflammation reduces, the fluid comes down.

This can be several kilograms in the first few weeks, and it can feel really good and really dramatic. It is real change, but it is not the same as the gradual sustained loss of visceral fat that comes over months. We'll have both of them. We'll have the quick one at the start, but then that sustained one over months.

Because genuine fat loss, particularly from the visceral abdominal fat that is most closely tied to the inflammatory picture, typically becomes measurable and consistent from [01:14:00] week six to 12 onwards This is where the changes in insulin sensitivity, cortisol, and thyroid function begin to produce a genuinely altered and improved metabolic environment in which the body is able to release stored fat.

And continued progress, the full resolution of weight loss resistance in women with a significant inflammatory load often takes six months to a year of consistent application. And I know that feels like a long time, but compare it to the years most women have already spent cycling through restriction and rebound, the yo-yo dieting, with no lasting outcome.

And then the math starts to look very different. It starts to make sense. And biochemistry, unlike willpower, responds to specific targeted informed interventions applied consistently over time. The insulin resistance responds to protein, strength training, and blood sugar stability. The cortisol responds to genuine rest and [01:15:00] nervous system support.

The thyroid responds to reducing inflammation and removing the things that suppress its function. The gut responds to fiber, diversity, and the removal of foods that damage it. And the leptin resistance responds gradually but genuinely to all of the above. Start today with steps one and two. So stop restricting and add protein to every meal, starting with breakfast.

Those two shifts alone begin to change the hormonal environment in which fat loss either happens or does not. Next episode, episode number four, we are moving on to sign number three of chronic inflammation, which is brain fog.

Why inflammation makes it feel like your brain is wading through cotton wool. Why it is happening more often than you might expect in women at midlife, and what to do to get your clarity back. All of my free resources, my three-week inflammation detox diet, and my 12-week whole health solution can be found at [01:16:00] andrearobertson.health.

Everything you need is right there waiting for you. If you loved today's episode, please take 30 seconds to leave a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you're listening to your podcasts. It genuinely helps more women find the show so they can nourish, heal, and rise too. Until next week, nourish your body, keep healing, and never stop rising.

I'm Dr. Andrea Robertson, and this has been Nourish, Heal, and Rise.

 

And a final thank you to Mineralite, the liquid electrolyte drops I genuinely use every single day. Naturally sourced electrolyte and minerals with no sugar, no sweeteners, no artificial colors. Just add the unflavored [01:17:00] drops to your water and you're done. If your energy is flat and yet you're drinking plenty of water with no change, this might be exactly what you're missing.

Check them out at mineralite.com.au and I'll link to them in the show notes below as well. I'll see you in the next episode Nourish, heal, and rise. Nourish, heal, and rise. Nourish, heal, and rise