hey guys dr childs here today we're going to be talking about what your body fat says about your hormone levels in other words we're going to be talking about what it means when you have body fat or excess body fat on different areas of your body what you may not know is that most weight gain at least in my opinion is attributed to changes in your hormone levels okay this is especially true of certain patients especially those with thyroid problems and existing hormone imbalances and what type of hormone imbalances you have dictate where that body fat is going to grow and is going to accumulate so if you have a let's say a strange pattern of body fat accumulation on your body this information may help you if you don't know me i'm dr childs i'm an internist and i specialize in helping people with thyroid problems helping people with hormone imbalances and of course helping people lose weight we're going to talk a little bit about body fat and how that relates to your hormones today so it's a little bit different but it'll cover the weight loss aspect of what i was mentioning before as well so before we talk about this i want to mention that this is not an exact science okay what i mean by that is that there's a lot of overlap between these areas and if you have it's very possible for you to have let's say body fat in your upper arms and it could be due to something some other hormone imbalance not related here or it could be due to genetics or something like that however in my experience in treating a lot of people i find that this information is at least directionally correct or mostly correct in most case in many cases okay what that means is that usually if you have body fat in these areas you have a problem um some sort of hormone problem that i'm going to be mentioning and talking about a little bit further here so take it with a grain of salt but and it's not perfect but it is a good guide and can help you to figure out where you should be putting your attention so let's talk about fat on the upper arms and lower legs now these are areas which are unusual we'll say for people to gain body fat and in my experience people who have body fat in their upper arms and lower legs tends to be caused by estrogen progesterone and testosterone imbalances so these are your sex hormones and i will tell you from my experience that this sort of body fat can't really be targeted like you can't do exercises specifically for your upper arms to lose that fat in that area that's not really how the fat loss works but if you can target and at least test for these estrogen progesterone and testosterone you may have a chance of reducing or at least eliminating that body fat but i will tell you compared to the other places that we're going to be talking about treating body body fat in the upper arms and lower legs areas is very difficult because there probably is a strong genetic component in addition to these so i have had success in helping people but this tends to persist so for instance let me give an example let's say you lose um you have body fat all over let's say you're 50 pounds overweight but you have excess fat in the upper arms and upper legs that will probably be the last place that you lose weight you'll lose it in your stomach you lose it in your your chest and your back etc you lose it on all those places first before your body starts to take that fat away from the upper arms and legs i've had good success in treating people with this problem using hcg which is human chorionic gonadotropin if you use it correctly i'm not talking about the hcg by diet by the way i'm talking about the use of acg as a hormone which balances these sex hormones and also your thyroid so i have videos on how to use hcg why i like using it and so on but don't confuse hcg as a there as a therapy by itself with with the hcg diet that's not what i'm talking about okay so the next one that's number one the next one would be abdominal fat now this one is pretty straightforward and usually correct okay and it usually is an indication that you have one or both of these problems and that is insulin usually insulin resistance and or cortisol which would be an adrenal problem so abdominal fat means that you just have fat in the belly area and i've seen a lot of patients who have fat and they really only have it concentrated just in the belly if you have fat like you know let's say you're 20 30 pounds overweight and 90 of it is located in your abdomen or in the belly area we'll just call this belly fat it's all very very very likely to be related to insulin and our cortisol now insulin uh you get insulin resistance from eating a lot of carbohydrates especially sugary foods things like that but also cortisol which comes from stress can also make insulin worse which is why these things tend to go together so a lot of people who have cortisol issues which would be adrenal issues that they get from excess stress day to day stress things like that not sleeping enough reliance on caffeine pretty much any of the symptoms of adrenal fatigue if you have recurrent stress that will cause an insulin problem and that's why these things usually go together the good news is all you have to do to treat those problems is it will you know you treat the cortisol you treat the insulin and your belly fat should go away you can treat cortisol problems using things like adrenal adaptogens and adrenal glandulars and insulin can be treated with diet and it can also be treated with supplements such as berberine glucomannan there's a lot of supplements alpha lipoic acid chromium etc so there are ways for you to treat insulin as well as cortisol including medications by the way that are very effective at treating and low rate insulin there aren't really good medications to lower cortisol there are a few but they're insanely expensive so i don't recommend them and also when you have over-the-counter supplements like adrenal adaptogens and glandulars it's preferable to use those instead of medications if possible so focus on your cortisol focus on your adrenals and by doing so you also need to focus on insulin and that should help you lose that belly fat now of course this assumes that you're eating a healthy hopeful diet you definitely need to be doing something like that a lot of people have had success using things like keto and carnivore i'll just abbreviate that well i guess i'll write it all out these type of diets can help especially with insulin resistance but they have other issues that they may cause problems with your thyroid and so on so be aware and be cautious if you ever try to do those kind of diets to lose things like belly fat the third place would be fat in the trunk and or the neck area again the trunk if you're not familiar with that terminology what it means is anywhere basically aside from your arms and legs so imagine all of your fat is just in your trunk it should be your breast your back your belly that sort of area so truncal obesity and or obesity in the back of the neck is usually almost always a cortisol problem now this i would say belly fat is a minor cortisol problem as you get these sort of issues that means you have a pretty big cortisol problem you may actually start to see elevations in your serum cortisol levels or if you check a salivary cortisol you'll see it actually become start to become high because these are kind of signs pre-signs of cushing's disease and things like that conditions which cause actual high elevations of cortisol the elevation of cortisol which causes belly fat is not usually super high okay it's usually it's usually not reflected in your in your thought in your lab test um and it's usually just a problem with the receptor and the signaling and so on inside the body but once your cortisol starts actually elevating that's when you can get problems and you start to get the trunk of obesity and the obesity sort of in the back of the neck area sometimes referred to as buffalo hum okay so the next place would be decrease muscle mass so i know we're talking about body fat but understanding what's happening with your muscle mass also gives you a clue as to what's happening with your hormones and there are a lot of women many men as well but a lot of women who suffer from decreased muscle mass or i would say here the inability to put muscle mass on so if you're going to the gym if you're working out or if you're and you're not noticing gains in terms of the size of your arms or legs or or your butt area that's a concerning sign okay you should see improvement and by the way if you're not doing anything but you're seeing your your muscle mass shrink or reduce over time that is most likely a sign that you have decreased testosterone in both men and women testosterone is important for regulating how much muscle mass you have and so low testosterone which again is important in men and women can cause this decrease in muscle mass or what we call atrophy um atrophy of the muscles so that's just another way to put it but definitely be looking at your testosterone now you'll see a lot of overlap here so let me just explain this in this case i mentioned decreased muscle mass is associated with decreased testosterone but i also also mentioned that fat on your upper arms and lower legs can be caused by decreased testosterone up here it's usually a combination of all three of these and down here this one's usually just an isolated event of just having low testosterone but again remember right from the very beginning i gave you that warning this is not perfect but it does tend to correlate pretty well let's go on to the next one the next one we're talking about whole body fat um this one is a little more uh generic but in my experience almost all the time uh whole body fat over the entire body let's say it's just evenly distributed you have it in your your arms and your legs it's almost as if you know you're just your whole body is sort of growing from your skin everywhere just expanding outwards that type of fat is usually a thyroid problem usually low thyroid problem and or a leptin problem now i put left in here leptin is one of the most important fat storing hormones in fact i think it is the most important hormone especially when you're trying to lose weight um or you're interested in weight loss and the thyroid impacts a lot of people because it manages your metabolism so if the metabolism drops you may just start to gain weight everywhere in your body it's not really specific so thyroid related weight gain is not doesn't have any specific areas where it will cause fat on the body if you have that problem same thing with leptin these are just sort of generic problems that cause full body or whole body weight gain i should point out here though that both of these problems can impact one another and take for instance the thyroid thyroid problems can start to cause give you estrogen progesterone and testosterone problems as well so what may happen and this might be you depending on how far along you are in your thyroid disease you may develop thyroid disease start to just gain you know 10 15 pounds over your whole body and then as this thyroid causes estrogen and progesterone problems then you might develop problems in your upper arms or in your butt area or thighs and so on so it can your weight gain can sort of evolve over time as these things impact one another okay so just be aware of that um you can test for all these problems by the way so that's usually what i recommend but in the absence of being able to test let's say your doctor doesn't want to or doesn't know how doesn't know this information you can use these the the places where you're gaining weight as a guide to help you figure out what type of hormone problems you are experiencing next would be fat on the thighs and or butt region this is almost always due to a increase in estrogen so anything that is causing estrogen dominance or excess estrogen in the body will cause weight gain specifically in those areas i should include here the breast as well so if you're having breast enlargement if you have an enlargement of the thighs and butt area all of those areas tend to be exclusively caused by an increase in estrogen it could be caused by a decrease in progesterone which can cause a relative increase in estrogen that is something that does happen but usually women who experience this sort of weight gain it almost always caused by too much estrogen that could be genetic by the way it could be from thyroid problems it could be from a lot of different issues so just be aware of that it doesn't doesn't tell you why it's happening and just says that high estrogen tends to cause weight gain in these specific areas so lastly let me lift this up so you can see it we're going to be talking about weight fluctuation so there are a lot of people who talk to me and they'll say hey my weight is fluctuating like crazy five to ten pounds every single month that is almost always not fat by the way although i have seen a couple cases where where it may be fat it's hard to tell exactly without getting something like a dexa scan but in the cases of rapid weight loss it's usually always related to progesterone levels so usually high progesterone progesterone for whatever reason seems to cause changes in fluid and changes in water shift so you can quickly and rapidly gain weight and lose weight depending on how progesterone impacts how much fluid you're carrying at any given time and if you get rid of it you can pee it out and that's why you can lose a lot of weight and it also seems to be that progesterone does seem to have some impact on fat mass right same way that estrogen does but it's a little bit different and so i'm not convinced that it causes true uh weight gain in the form of in the form of fat like the increase in an abdominal or the increase in adipose tissue however for sure it can cause shifts in your overall weight which i think are probably related to water or fluid chips so if that is happening to you if you're rapidly going through five to ten pounds of weight changes every single month especially if it's related to your period or some some aspect of your menstrual cycle such as ovulation that's a sign you definitely want to get checked so what do you do if you're experiencing this the first thing is to get those serum lab tests just order these tests get your estrogen get your progesterone get your testosterone get your leptin get your insulin get your thyroid get your cortisol you can check for all of these things insurance covers it it's totally it's not a big deal to get them you can check most of them in your blood cortisol you can check in other places as well but you can definitely at least check them all as a cursory glance just in your blood get these tests and see if they are abnormal there are things which influence the accuracy of these hormone tests so for instance if you're taking birth control you can't look at your estrogen and progesterone levels because birth control suppresses them basically down to zero so you have there are some things that you have to take into account as you look at these but by checking your hormones out it can tell you what's going on inside your body and how and why you are gaining weight and by targeting the targeting these things which i have tons of their which i have tons of videos on which show you how to for instance lower your progesterone or increase your progesterone or lower your estrogen or naturally increase your testosterone naturally increase your thyroid and so on you can impact these in a positive way so if you have any questions about what we've talked about here leave your comment below if you think that you match any of these body uh fat areas and and you think that it's related to your hormones let me know as well i'd love to hear about that and that's all i have for you guys today and otherwise i will see you in the next one