Today we're talking again about weight loss. I like to talk about this a lot because it is one of the top two things that we see in practice. The other one being low energy, so low energy and losing weight. Those are two things that almost every person that seeks out help with us says, "I don't have enough energy and I want to lose weight."
So, let's talk about reasons why it can be hard to lose weight. We always want to find the root cause of someone's problems when they come to see us, whether it's weight loss or low energy, hormone imbalance or thyroid problems, digestive issues... whatever it is, we want to find out what's driving that. With weight loss, a mental exercise that we go through when we talk to people, is to try to figure out if the person who wants to lose weight has a tactical issue where they're just not implementing the right strategies or if they have an underlying root cause like a mitochondrial dysfunction issue, a hormone imbalance, thyroid problem or nutrient deficiency.
If you missed last week's post on melting pounds without having a meltdown, we talked about an approach you can take that's very programmatic and organized and things you can do to try to lose weight. That will apply to one group of people. They need some good information, they need a solid plan. They need to be able to execute that plan, measure their success, They want someone to be accountable to, and help them if they need help, answering questions or being motivated and inspired. That's one group of people. And then there's another group of people where that's not enough. They have some other things going if you pop the hood and look at what is going on in their body. We find out maybe they have a high toxic load or they have some mitochondrial dysfunction that just means they struggle to produce energy and this slows down the metabolism. Maybe there is a hormone or thyroid imbalance, things like that. Going back to toxicity, maybe they have some genetic things going on like an M-T-H-F-R variant where they have a higher need for a certain type of methylated B vitamins and they're not getting enough of those. A
If you have the things mentioned above happening, some of the programmatic tactical things don't work as good as they could because there's an underlying cause. So, sometimes that looks like we dig in with blood work and we have a really good health history review and we find out what's going on so that we can address those underlying issues. But for a lot of people really just having a good solid plan in place will get them so far, and that's the piece that they're missing.
We have created a program in our office. We're calling it Lighten Up, and it's for that specifically... Weight loss. Sometimes people don't want the whole commitment or financially they can't afford to go through a functional medicine workup with labs and things like that, but they know they need to lose weight.
Let's talk about obesity for just a minute. It's the number one, I believe it's the number one crisis that we have going on right now in our country. As of 2024, 42% of our population is obese. If you look back at pictures and statistics from 40 years ago, that number was only 15%! Why is that? There's a lot of speculation and a lot of thought around that. But if you look at that obesity as a driver for so many other health conditions, we know for example, with the COVID-19 issue, the people that had a lot of trouble with virus and mortality with covid, they were the ones with metabolic dysfunction, the ones that were overweight, pre-diabetic, things like that. So there's a huge comorbidity where those kinds of people did really poorly fighting off this virus. So it's not only that being overweight really ups your chances of having a metabolic dysfunction disease like diabetes. We are in the chiropractic business also, and most of the people that come in that are experiencing a lot of joint pain and back pain. In fact, about 80% of the population will have back pain at some point. That's almost everybody. For most of the people, this problem could be solved if they could lose 50 pounds or a hundred pounds. They have joint pain and it's because they're carrying around all this extra weight. It doesn't just affect you metabolically, it affects your joints and musculoskeletal issues too.
This is one of the reasons that my husband and I joined forces and thought we really need to offer weight loss solutions for people that maybe don't want or can't afford to go through a huge functional medicine workup. This problem is HUGE and the solutions are kind of scary sometimes. We're doing a lot of research and prep for our next article on some alternatives to our program that have some scary side effects. We want to bring you good information. Some of the solutions that are floating around right now seem amazing, but is that really a healthy way to do it? What are some of the things to consider if you're thinking about that and is there a better way?
We will have a lot to say about that, and we want to bring people information that is scientifically validated and proven to work, but also things we have we done in our office with a lot of people and we know it works. When we put together a program, we said what works in practice that is also validated with as much research as we can find? Realizing that research on anything medical is going to be very biased to prescription medication because there's a lot of deep pockets involved with that. Unfortunately, people that are advocating for healthy lifestyle strategies like what we do never seem to be heard. Those kinds of things tend to never see the light of day because there's no money to be made. I can't patent "Eat your vegetables" and sell it and make millions of dollars. However, if I have a weight loss drug, I can make tons of money on that. So that's just something to think about.
If you're struggling to lose weight, kind of take stock of yourself in your own head and ask whether you just need some good information and a plan or if you need some lab work and a deeper dive into underlying issues. Once you know that, you will know what to do.
We put people into those two categories in an effort to help connect them with what will best serve them in their search for weight loss and better health. We connect in person or do a call so we can figure out which way to go. It's there for you if you want to use it as a resource. I just wanted to kind of introduce that concept so that if you're struggling with losing weight, you can put yourself in one of those two buckets and you can finally get the help you need because it is possible to lose weight. It's not super easy. Sometimes you have to have some mindset changes, but it can absolutely be done. Once you do that, it's sustainable because you flip a switch and it's no longer some fad diet that lasts two months and boom, you're back on the hamster wheel of gaining the weight back and then feeling frustrated. It's truly a life-changing experience once you get that and figure out which camp you're in and what you need to do.
To your health,
Dr. Jeni
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