Dr. George Best: Hi! This is Doctor Best of Best health and wellness from San Antonio, Texas. This is part five, all of my series on why can't I lose weight. In today's video, I'm going to be discussing probably the most common of the glandular influences on weight loss and that is the adrenal glands. The adrenal glands are small glands, which one on top of each kidney and what they do is they produce a lot of very important hormones; they're involved to a lot of processes in the body.
Although purposes of this video, I'm going to be discussing is just two of those hormones, the ones that are involved primarily in fat gain and fat loss. The first of those hormones is what's called cortisol. Many of you're probably have heard of cortisol, there is been a lot of products on the market that report to help you as your cortisol issues, Cortislim and some of those things and you know the commercials will talk about belly fat as being a problem from cortisol and that's exactly true. The problem is a lot of products of there for dealing with the high cortisol levels is that your actually adrenal stimulans. In over a long period of time, what happens is that they burn out the adrenals even more and cause because it actually gain weight more of it but basically what you want to do with an adrenal type of issue is control stress and we'll talking about that you know in just a minute.
The other adrenal hormone that is involved in weight gain and weight loss is adrenalin. And most of you have probably heard of adrenalin, you know that it's kind of speed up, it's adrenalin makes your heart faster makes you breathe faster, increase your blood pressure. And it's basically a response to an immediate threat or a short-term type of stress. Adrenalin is because of it's feeding you up, it actually, you'll say it as a fat burning hormone, it actually help you to lose weight. And there has been a lot of times that intended to actually increase adrenalin, some of them, others, there supposedly reducing cortisol or actually increasing adrenalin and that's how they actually work, but things like nothing is a more speed is one of those things that will increase your adrenal levels for a while.
But the problem is when you reach a certain point, you'll burn out the adrenals completely, you'll start for losing adrenalin, and the it will become very, very difficult for you to lose weight and in fact most people start to gain in that part. So, coming back to cortisol. Cortisol is a fat storing hormone and by using commercials talking about the belly fat. Cortisol will cause the body to gain when you around the midsection, which usually have a flabby, saggy type of way around the waste line. There was at one time and there still is in some parts of world at a right good purpose for cortisol, people have cortisol just make sure. Cortisols are actually a curl survival type of hormone even when it comes to fat storage.
If you imagine that's you're living on the frontier back at 1800's, life is pretty tough factor and people are under a lot of physical stress, food were short and so. Cortisol actually was a very post survival hormone memory circumstances like those and like existence some other parts of world today. And what it did is that when the body got under a lot of stress and in most cases, which primarily a physical type of stress as you would be working hard intend in the field show, kept in fire with that kind of stuff when you're under a lot of physical stress, the body would produce cortisol, so that it would give you some storage of fat around the midsection so that you can run food become scares because the most days in the winter time, if we got very scares, you would have something drawn during those times where you can get lot of food and you'll also still have to be very physically active.
So, it was actually a good thing under those circumstances. The problem is that in a modern society, first of all we were run into a situation where we can't get food because I mean we got grocery stores and fast food places are open 24*7 and also because our stresses switch more from a physical type of stress to an emotional type of stress. Emotional stress while it's still registers in the brain, and then in the body as stress it causes cortisol release, it doesn't produce the same calorie burning that physical stress does. So, there enlace the problem and so cortisol is a fat storage hormone primarily relating on time stress.
Now, we talked about adrenalin being something that burns fat and that's true, the problem is that under chronic stress, especially chronic emotional stress, the body can only produce adrenalin for so long, it's short-term type of hormone. What happens is that usually the body is ability to produce adrenalin will fall off a lot sooner than its ability to produced cortisol. So, a lot of people will actually lose weight under severe stress initially, and then they start to gain weight, when the adrenalin falls off and the cortisol remains high. So, what do you do about adrenalin related weight? Well, first obviously is try control stress as best as you can things like yoga, meditation, exercise perhaps the right type of exercising as all discuss in minute. And just basically, trying to do the best you can to keep your stress reactions to a minimum.
The other thing that you want to do is you want to eat a diet that has some protein in it, people with a lot of stress actually have a slightly need for protein. So, the general recommendation I made on earlier video are if you're eating a daily about four ounces high protein food such as you know a meat or a fish or chicken or a just something that fat natured that's usually a good recommendation from those people, you can grow a little bit higher when you have an extra amount of stress or you can grow a little higher if you happen to be larger individual, so that's the basic recommendation on that.
You also want to stay away from the cortisols that we've talked about all along in the series because even though carbs tend to be create more against stress times, especially things like chocolate, they're going to cause a lot of -- with being able to lose weight and ultimately what they do is they cause a lot of blood sugar swings that really don't help your stress levels lot.
He get into a situation for your blood sugar crashes that's going to stress you out really bad way to, so you better off to stay away from the carbs. Finally, we come to exercise programs that as I've mentioned adrenals are kind of the exception to move on exercise. If you've got that belly fat type of deposition, you really better to stick with low intensity, high duration right exercise, so minimum of about 30 minutes and really closely to an hour, if you sleep better. The only exception on that minimum is if you're have some type of health condition that makes it difficult to exercise at long so you have severe arthritis or perhaps -- are something like that, where you have difficult in breathing, then do what you can. Every big count, you can't just, oh, I going to do 30 minutes, well -- spend time exercising and that's not what I'm saying, do what you can and if you're consistent with exercise you won't improve to where you can do more and more of the time.
But for most people 30 minutes on a minimum, 60 minutes is more ideal and you want to do 45 days a week. For adrenal types, I don't recommend strength training it released initially until we get their adrenal situations settle down somewhat. So, you better off with cardiovascular type exercises like walking, swimming and bicycling. And again, during that more intensed you don't want to go super hard, yeah there watched the comfortable case for that 30, 60 minutes. That pretty much covers the adrenals and I'll be covering some of the other hormone and glandular issues in up coming parts of the series. For now, I'm signing off. Thank you for watching.
Transcription by:
Scribe4you Transcription Services