The Livy Method Podcast - Let's Talk Hormones with Dr. Olinca Trejo, ND, HB.Kin - Winter 2024

Episode Date: April 9, 2024

In this Guest Expert segment, Gina talks hormones and weight loss with Dr. Olinca Trejo. Dr. Olinca is a licensed, board-certified Naturopathic Doctor in the province of Ontario. She also holds an honours degree in Kinesiology and has achieved her certification and internship in bioidentical hormone replacement therapy (BHRT).You can find the full video hosted at:https://www.facebook.com/groups/livymethodwinter2024Topics covered:Introducing the topic of hormones. So, what are hormones?There are so many hormones that play a role in supporting your body in this processThe role of melatonin, cortisol, and reproductive hormones in SLEEPWhat happens to your body when you are not getting that deep sleep and the impact on weight lossWhen you are tired, you are more likely to make choices that are not aligned with your goalsSleep deprivation and the impact on insulin and your blood sugar levels Perimenopause and menopause and the hormones that impact your sleepThe impact of reduced quality of sleep on men and their hormonesHow working on your sleep helps your hormonesThe effect of poor quality sleep on your ability to cope with stress and your resilienceStress and your flight or fight response and the hormones that play a roleAre you living in a constant state of stress?Women, as a result of how we are socialized, do you care for everyone else but yourselvesFinding the opportunity to deal with that stressThe impact of stress on your weight loss journeyStarving yourself is one of the most stressful things you can do to your bodyHormones involved in your metabolism; the role of your thyroidGhrelin and Leptin and the impact on your weight lossInsulin resistance and chronic stressDopamine and its impact on your choices and your metabolismOur current food environment gives us way too much dopamineEstrogen, testosterone and progesterone and your mood The role of dopamine and serotonin on your moodHow restrictive diets impact your serotonin levelsOxytocin and the importance of community to your weight loss journeyAre your hormones in a traffic jam?If you are making an effort to maximize, you are doing so much to help your hormonesThe role that hormones play in women is only starting to be understoodYour metabolism is truly impacted by the amount of muscle mass you have on your body Menopause and perimenopause and the impact on your mood and body compositionMedications during menopause and perimenopause and having that conversationWellness is not a state of being. It's a state of actionMen's hormones and the reduction in testosterone, what else could be going on? Testosterone therapy for menTake action!! There are so many things that you can do to make a real difference and help you lose weightemail: [e-mail] learn more about The Livy Method, visit www.ginalivy.com. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I'm Gina Livy and welcome to the Livy Method podcast. This is where you'll have access to all of the live streams from my 91 day weight loss program. With a combination of daily lives, guest expert interviews and member stories, there is something new almost every day. Miss the morning live? Want to re-listen to one of our amazing guest experts? Well, this is the place. This podcast is hosted on Acast, but it's available on all podcast platforms, including the one you're listening to right now, Spotify, Apple,

and Amazon Music. New year, new me. Season is here, and honestly, we're already over it. Enter Felix, the healthcare company helping Canadians take a different approach to weight loss this year. Weight loss is more than just diet and exercise. It can be about tackling genetics, hormones, metabolism. Felix gets it. They connect you with licensed healthcare practitioners online who'll create a personalized treatment plan that pairs your healthy lifestyle with a little help and a little extra support. Start your visit today at felix.ca. That's F-E-L-I-X dot C-A. You're going to have this ability to now reframe.

Allow yourself time throughout the day to stress the fuck out. The thoughts and the feelings and the behavior cycle can start changing. Dr. Alinka Trejo is back with us today. We are talking hormones and weight loss. I mean, who is ready for this conversation today? Hello. Good morning. Hello. Good morning. Happy Valentine's Day, everybody. Yesterday. Yes. Yes. Right back at you. Okay. So let's, how are we going to get into this conversation? Because people are trying to lose weight. For those of you who might have missed it, Dr. Alinka is very familiar with the program. We've had numerous conversations with

her. In fact, just a few weeks ago, we talked about sleep and we also talked about hormones tied into that as well. So people try really hard to lose weight in a healthy way, but everyone is concerned about hormones and it's such a big conversation. Obviously we have limited time today and we're going to work on some, some things in the future where we can expand on this conversation, but where do we start with hormones and weight loss? Should we start with what they are or how they impact weight loss? Where do you think a good place to start is? Yeah, I think that's a great place. Um, we can start with what hormones are and this way to think about hormones is that hormones are chemical

messengers that, um, uh, direct different functions in your body from, you know, blood pressure to blood glucose, to your metabolism, to your sleep, to your reproduction, to like your desires for food and appetite. Hormones are involved in everything. You can't function without them. Honestly, you can't. And the thing is that people get so annoyed with them because hormones, I always think of them as like this really big orchestra that when they're all in sync and playing beautifully, everything sounds perfect and you're in balance. But when there is one of them that's off and that is beating to its own tune, like you can kind of hear the melody, but things are just off. Right. And that is exactly

what happens with hormones. It only takes a couple of them to be off for everything to fall apart. Well, I love that. That makes so much sense. Okay. Yeah. Go ahead. No, I was going to say, and I think that this is why it's such a big conversation to have, because there are so many hormones that play a role into how you're feeling, the choices that you're making, what your body is going through, why it's holding on to fat, why it can't build muscle. And so I, just like you said, I do think that this is just a snip of what we're trying to relate to people. But it is not it's not the whole enchilada.

So just like bear with us because we're going to expand on this. But this is just the beginning. OK, I love that. So should we start with the role that hormones play in your body? Like, should we just go through sleep and stress and your metabolism and mood and all that? You start there. OK, so let's talk about hormones and sleep then. Because sleep, we know from our previous conversation can have a massive impact when you're trying to lose weight. So what do we need to know about sleep and hormones? So there's, there's about six big players, right? When it comes to your sleep, there's going to be your melatonin,

which is your main sleep hormone that people think about when they think about sleep. And that kind of regulates your circadian rhythm, right? There's your production is actually happens through the day, but really the release is overnight. And it usually peaks at about two to four o'clock in the morning, or at least it's supposed to. And then that is actually counteracted by something that's called cortisol, which a lot of people know because it's a hormone that we talk about a lot in stress, and we're going to loop back into cortisol. But cortisol is the hormone that spikes in the morning, mostly because of daylight, to be honest.

And it makes you feel super refreshed and like ready to go and like ready to rumble. And cortisol is the hormone that actually has almost like the brake pedal on melatonin, because both of them can't be high at the same time. And so what will happen is that cortisol peaks in the morning because melatonin is at its lowest. And then through the day, it starts crashing, right? Or it starts, I shouldn't say starts crashing. In a healthy person with a healthy adrenal response, it starts, you know, decreasing through the day, and then it will kind of hit a lower point in the afternoon. Once you start, you know, the light starts setting, or the darkness starts setting in, and then melatonin will start rising, because again, cortisol just kind of puts the, or I guess lifts the,

the foot off the, the, the break for melatonin and the melatonin can increase. And then that's actually why you start getting sleep. Right. And then there's going to be estrogen and progesterone and testosterone, which is, which are your reproductive hormones that we're going to talk about in a little bit. But the really interesting thing is, is that your if there are any perimenopausal or menopausal women listening to this, they're like, Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, you know that we know that estrogen and progesterone have something to do with with your sleep, because estrogen to an extent, regulates a lot of your temperature, right? So it is the one that's also responsible for your temperature dropping, so that then your body can get into that deep restorative sleep.

Because if your temperature doesn't drop, you actually can't achieve that. Like you're always going to be in light sleep and you're probably not even going to be able to stay asleep. And then progesterone, which is the hormone that we produce after we ovulate, that actually promotes this like deep restful restorative sleep. And it also makes you really, really calm. And so we don't have the progesterone. What often happens is that people get this like anxiety that they feel like they can't like sleep at night that often happens in perimenopause, right? Because you stop ovulating. I always talk about how perimenopause is like the end of a toothpaste tube, you know, and sometimes you get a squirt and you get a full toothpaste and sometimes you get a push on it and you get

nothing. And sometimes you go through these cycles where like you feel like your sleep is all over the place. And that's actually mostly because of progesterone losing its role because you're not ovulating and estrogen being all over the place and you not being able to regulate your temperature. And then the last one is going to be adenosine. And adenosine is really important. We're going to come back to that too. But adenosine is the hormone that creates that sleep pressure that makes you tired so that you can actually fall asleep. But adenosine is only built up during the day as you're like spending energy, which is actually why spending energy and exercising is so important, right? And so the interesting thing about all of these things is again, like an orchestra, they all work beautifully. But the moment that, for example, your melatonin is too low and your cortisol is too high because of electronics,

right? Because again, if light is, um, uh, uh, telling your brain it's daytime and your cortisol is high and your melatonin can't peak, your circadian rhythm is going to be really, really, really off. And that is going to impact not only how quickly you're able to fall asleep, but how you're able to stay asleep and the quality of your sleep. The biggest problem with sleep that we see in weight loss is in weight loss is that when you are not getting enough of that deep restorative sleep, and when you're not getting enough of that room, a lot of the other hormones that have nothing to do with your sleep, right? Like your appetite hormones, for example, start getting really, really, really wonky because your body again, because of the high cortisol

goes into stress mode. Yeah, it goes into stress mode, which I know we're going to chat about. But when it goes into stress mode, what's going to happen is that all it wants to do, it wants to survive, right? And survival for your body feels like I need to eat more and I need to burn less. And we have so many studies that are so interesting that show that when you sleep depressed people, as they're going through a weight loss program, they're way less likely to lose weight, first of all. And the most fascinating thing is that if they lose weight, they're going to be way more likely to lose their muscle mass than they will at stores, right? Because again, when you're under stress,

that is like fuel that you don't want to let go of because eventually there's going to be a tiger that's going to be knocking on your door. You're going to need that fat store. And so the sleep component tends to be really important because even if you start losing weight, your body composition is going to change in an unfavorable way. You're going to, again, feel like you need to be eating all the time and it doesn't matter what you eat, you're never really going to be satisfied, right? And so, and then the trickier component to that is that when you don't sleep well, you usually don't make good choices.

Right. Because you're tired. And so when you're tired, you end up drinking more caffeine, which then really screws up that adenosine. Right. That adenosine that we're telling that we're talking about, like creating that sleep pressure. When you're tired, you move less. When you're tired, obviously you eat more, but usually what you eat is not fruits and vegetables. Like you're not like, I could really use some chicken right now. Yeah. You know, like you don't, you usually crave things that are going to be high energy carbohydrates, which then also impacts other hormones, right? Because

when we're talking about weight loss, we can't talk about weight loss without talking with insulin and insulin. I know it's something that, you know, we chat about all the time during the program, but insulin is a hormone that helps your body regulate your sugar and figure out what you're doing with your sugar. Are you using it right now? Are you storing it? Like, what are you doing? And there's fascinating research that's going on in this area that has shown that if you sleep deprived people, your insulin response the next day is going to be 30, like 30 fold higher. And after a week, your blood sugar sensitivity will be about 40% lower, which people that's enough to actually put them in the pre diabetes or even the diabetes category. Right. And so then what we're talking about, like, prolonged times, you know, sleep deprivation, because like, we all go through crappy sleeps every so often, right, we're talking about like chronic sleep deprivation, and that can have an impact in your blood sugar. And then

that's also going to have an impact, again, because it's an orchestra, right? On things like your blood pressure, on things like, you know, even, even things like on urination overnight, like hormones are so fascinating. But when we're talking about female hormones, one of the things that I always talk about, which is so important in a reproductive year, sorry, but also in perimenopause and menopause is that there's six differences in how we sleep. Like we know that in puberty, we all kind of sleep the same. And then as your life goes on, because of the role that estrogen and progesterone and testosterone have in your sleep, women start you know, their sleep starts becoming lighter, more broken,

and shorter, usually as we age. And so and, and men also start like changing their sleep quality. And so what that actually happens, or what that actually causes is that your stress hormones will increase, and your sex hormones will also take a hit. Right. So, for example, for men, if you sleep for less than six hours per night, your testosterone typically drops to about the levels of somebody who's 10 years older. For women, I know it's crazy. For women that sleep usually for short periods of time,

or even if you have sleep apnea, and you don't necessarily have good sleep quality, we see a lot of menstrual irregularities, we see increases risk of like miscarriages, we see a lot of weight gain, like we see, we see a lot of anxiety, we see a lot of depression. And so while you know, I know that we chatted about sleep the last time that I was here, we can't talk about hormones without talking about sleep because it is the foundation and truly is the foundation that all of your other hormones can stand on. I mean, this is, it's like you said, so fascinating, but such a big conversation, a sense like if you are, if you are watching or listening, this waiting for like your hormone issues, right? Like, whatever those might be, it's you have to listen to the whole conversation. And it's like you said, you have this orchestra of hormones. And when one is off, it affects all of them. And this is why we spend so much time on that sleep conversation. Everyone's like, Oh, I'm hormonal. I'm perimenopausal,

menopausal, postmenopausal, I've got this going on thyroid issues, you know, all these things happening. And yet they think sleep has nothing to do with that, when it plays such a huge role. And then people are like, what do I do? What do I do? What do I do? And nobody thinks to work on your sleep to help with your hormones. Yeah. The other thing that I always go back to is that when you,

especially as you're transitioning to perimenopause and menopause, which I know that we touched on the last time, but there's this huge spike in sleep disruptions, right? That happened about 40 to 60% of women will actually experience a sleep disorder in that transition. And as you start actually specifically losing progesterone, because you're not necessarily ovulating or your corpus luteum is not as strong or what have you, you become a lot less resilient to stress and a lot like things impact you in a different way. And so I have so many women in my practice, and some of you are listening, um, who tell me like, Oh my God, alcohol doesn't affect me. Or

I can, uh, you know, drink caffeine up until 9.00 PM, alcohol doesn't affect me. Or I can drink caffeine up until 9 p.m. and it doesn't impact me. Because what it actually does, and I can prove to you that it does, because I would love for you to be a unicorn and for you to not get impacted from it whatsoever, but it does. And the problem with that is that

even if you think that it's not impacting the duration of your sleep because you can fall asleep, it's the quality of your sleep that's a moneymaker, right? It's that architecture of your sleep. And so I think that we often overlook sleep hygiene and a lot of the simple things that you focus so much on with your program. And we just want the quick fix. We want it to be thyroid. It almost never is thyroid. Like we want it to be thyroid. It almost never is thyroid. Like we want it to be,

you know, insulin. Often it is insulin, but maybe it's not because of what you're eating and not eating. It's actually because of what's happening at night and because of what you did before you went to bed and because of the electronics that spiked your cortisol. Right. And, you know, I know that a lot of us, I'm guilty of this too. Like a lot of us that come home, you're stressed and you're like, I want a glass of wine, or I just want to de-stress and watch Netflix. And guess what? Like that's doing absolutely nothing good for you. In fact, it's impacting you in a negative way that then is making the rest of your, like your next day harder, especially when you're trying to lose weight,

right? And you think, you know, you get really frustrated because you're like, I'm eating all the right things. I am exercising and the scale won't move. And you posted something that I loved. And it's, it's a quote that I often use my patients. And it's, it's the, like, you know, you have to be healthy to lose weight. It's not you lose weight to be healthy. You also have to be healthy to lose weight. And so when you're not, when you're doing all the things and you can't lose weight, that's when you take a step back and you're like, there's something more than this. And I don't know what it is. And I need to figure this out.

And it's not as complicated as people think that it is. Well, and people are blaming hormones and then not doing nothing about their sleep. They're blaming hormones and doing nothing about their stress. They think they got to go get tested and your doctor's got to give you some pills or some creams or whatever, when that's probably not like, I'm not saying it's not factoring in, but how you address that is by addressing your, your, your sleep and your stress. And oh my goodness. Okay. Wow. So should we go into stress now? Yeah, I think that's a perfect segue into it. Okay. Um, so I, and you know, and I know that

this has been kind of like a stress week and you guys know what happens to stress. I'm just going to summarize that super, super quickly. But what happens is that your body sees a stress or a stressor, and it can be really like your eyes, your ears. Like it can be anything that your body senses is like a stressor. And it sends a signal to this primitive center in your brain. That's called the amygdala that interprets this images or like the sound or the emotion or whatever it is. And sends it to this control center that functions almost like a command

center that figures out like, are we running? Are we staying? Like, what are we doing? Which is called the hypothalamus. And then your body has to figure out like, am I turning on my fight or flight response? Right. And hopefully because it's a stressor and we're animals, just like any other mammal, what will happen is that you see that stressor, the amygdala interprets that the hypothalamus

says, girl, you gotta get running. And so what will happen is, you know, just as an example, you are in your, you are hunting and you see this lion and you see the lion, you're like, oh shit. And you like start running and running and running and running. And you make it to your village and you make it to safety and like your people help you fight off the lion. And then the lion leaves and everybody cheers and you live to tell your story. And like the sun looks brighter and your partner looks sexier and like everything's amazing because like the stress ended and it's fantastic, you know, because there's a beginning where you saw the lion, there was a middle where you were running away and you were fighting it. And there was the end when you got to celebrate. However,

the cause of that stress in our world is no longer a lion that's about to eat you, it's finances, and it's traffic, and it's overfilled schedules, and it's a workplace, and it's just demands on your time, right? And the stress response is physiologically the same as when you were running away from a lion that was about to eat you. So your body is seeing that perceived like threat that might be your overfilled schedule, right? Or it might be whatever it is. And your response is going to be largely the same, no matter what. And that response is going to be, the first thing you release is going to be adrenaline to get your brain sharp, your muscles full of blood flow to run away. Like it just it gets you activated to run, right? However,

your body obviously cannot live in like that high adrenaline state all the time because you die. You know, like we've all been on a roller coaster. If you felt like that every single second of your life, there would be issues. And so the next thing that kicks in is cortisol. Yeah. I mean, Dr. Paul, we had him on the other day, was talking about it's not stress, it's lack of recovery from stress. And I'm listening to you speak and I am in a constant state of stress all the time. From the minute I wake up to the minute I go to bed, I am in a constant state of stress all the time. From the minute I wake up to the minute I go to bed, I am in a constant state of stress. There is no release of the stress. And even if I try to relax because of the nature of the things I'm stressing about, they're still there. And then you try to watch TV and you're triggered by everybody else's stress or you're on your phone by stress.

The stress never ends. So we're just constantly putting out the stress without that. There's a start and it never stops. Exactly. And I think honestly, I think that the hardest part about stress is that people think, and I always think like there's, there's almost like two kinds of people, right? They are the people that like you and I, like we feel all of the things and stress. And I think that there are people who have become their own island and they will, they will come to my office being like, I don't feel stressed. And I'm like,

your brain doesn't feel stressed, but like your body is feeling stressed. And I can show you all of the ways in which your body's feeling stressed. And I think that the most dangerous thing that I often see is that, um, if emotions also cause a lot of stress, right. And I, there's a really amazing book that's called burnout that I love. And I always go back to it because they refer to emotions as this tunnel and you have to go through the tunnel in order for you to close that cycle of stress, right? Because everything in your body is through cycles. And so that's why you have a beginning, a middle and an end. And you have to go like the feelings and the stress as the tunnel that you need to get through the darkness in order to reach the light at the end.

They're not boxes that you just like stuff and like put away, which is actually what we're used to. Like with the feelings, it's like, no, no, you know, especially I'm going to overgeneralize. But I think that especially women are often socialized to be human givers. And as human givers, you have this moral obligation to be pretty and thin and calm and generous and attentive to everybody else. And if you pause and you take care of your own physiological stress response, and you rest or you sleep or you exercise or whatever it is, you're actually taking away time and energy from somebody else that you should be caring for. And so the problem is, you know, when people tell me all the time, like, and I've heard this,

you know, everybody tells me that you can't pour from an empty cup. But what I feel like is like, I have this empty cup and nobody's coming to refill it. Instead, what they're doing is like, they're coming over being like, Gina, what are you doing with an empty cup? Don't you see that Olenka has all that water, not enough cups? Like, why aren't you going to go help her? And so the challenge with that is that often we end up as a result of maybe, you know, our genetics or how we're socialized or whatever it is, is that we end up getting stuck in that tunnel and we're not actually able to close it because we don't have the tools because we've been told that we're not supposed to, because we're caring for everybody else.

And it's not the emotion or the stress that's, you know, the problem. It's actually getting stuck in that middle of that physiological experience that causes that inflammation and disease and hormonal imbalances and weight gain. It's not. And, you know, that's something that Paul said, which I love, it's like, your body will adapt to stress. Yes, to an extent, right? If you give it all of the tools, but when you were stuck in that chronic stress

and you constantly perceive it as like, there's a lion that is after me all the time, your cortisol can't come down because it's a survival mechanism. Your body wants to survive and it wants to keep running. The problem is that the finances and the kids and the parents aging and all of these things don't end. And so you just find yourself stuck without knowing how to,

it's only that you see the light, but you just don't know how to get there. And we feel like we have to carry the stress. We feel like we have to carry it with us. Oh, my God. And so this is actually why I think that doing all of the work with your stress, even if you don't feel stressed, right? Because meditation and mindfulness and changing your mindset and like all of these things sound amazing but they're only amazing if they're allowing you and giving you the opportunity to then deal with that uh stress right and like deal with it's gone because the problem is that we're at this point where it's almost like you're um the uh the the stressor or dealing with the stressor because it ends is not

the same thing as like dealing with the stress response because it ends is not the same thing as like dealing with the stress response there's this divide now right and so if you're meditating and you're like okay i just need to go into this presentation i need to feel calm and you're you feel calm for that second but then you don't deal with all of the other crap right and all the emotion and all of that stuff that's actually why you get stuck if you can meditate all you want and you can journal all you want but if you're not actually dealing with all stuck. It's you can meditate all you want and you can journal all you want. But if you're not actually dealing with all of the things

that you stuffed down into that cave that you thought was a tunnel, but then you put this big stone because there was bats and it was scary inside and you didn't want to go in there. You just thought that you could just like store it down there

and then like keep walking away. Guess what? It doesn't go away because your cortisol keeps on increasing and your cortisol as a survival hormone, what it will do is that it will prevent you from losing fat. It will only predispose you to actually gain more weight because again, your body wants to survive and you could bend over backwards and only eat chicken and only eat salad. And here we are. And that's actually what a lot of us have done, even with yo-yo

dieting, right? That's like starving yourself is one of the most stressful experiences that your body can go through especially in the setting of a environment that is high cortisol and because all your body wants to do it's like no please please please please please and we've chatted about this before what i see in my practice often is that people come in after like 20 years of yo-yoing and now they're doing everything right or what they think that they should be and they're like and another weight doesn't come off like i used to do whatever other program and i used to drop 50 pounds and now it doesn't drop and i'm like well guess what because your body doesn't trust you anymore like you've lowered your baseline metabolism

so hard because of those years of starving that now your body is like, girl, I know that you're giving me five meals a day, but like, I just don't know when you're going to starve me. So it's the dealing with that PTSD that your body has. That's actually the issue. I say this to people all the time. Your body is probably not storing fat because you are just eating all the wrong foods. It's high stress, lack of sleep, long periods of time without eating. And that's why everyone's so afraid of like, well, what if I, if I eat so often, I'm going to gain weight. If after I lose my weight and I go eat again, I'm going to gain weight. You're not because you're going to be addressing

all of these things while doing the program. And if you feel like your hormones are factoring in, you're going to address those as well. I heard you mentioned metabolism. Should we roll into metabolisms and hormones? Yeah. I mean, metabolism is like such an umbrella term, but really the main players in your metabolism are going to be things like your thyroid, which, you know, all of us, especially when you can't lose weight, you're like, oh my God, for sure it's my thyroid. I hope it's my thyroid. And I'm not saying that it's not, you know, one in every five women will typically be impacted by a thyroid condition in their lives. One in every 10 men also will. And your thyroid is mainly responsible for controlling the speed of your body's like

metabolism, right? And it will stimulate the metabolism of carbohydrates and help you kind of like use your carbohydrates and to an extent your proteins for your, you know, breathing and oxygen consumption and things like that. So thyroid is really important. Then there's going to be the appetite hormones, which are leptin and ghrelin, which we were talking about how they get impacted by sleep. But ghrelin, like your tummy feeling hungry, but ghrelin is the hormone that's produced by your stomach that increases appetite and influences your weight as a result, right? And ghrelin is so susceptible to changes in other hormones.

It's susceptible to cortisol. Like if your body feels like you're under stress, especially when it's chronic stress, acute stress, no, because acute stress, your body is like, you got to keep running, girl. Like I don't have time to eat. But chronic stress, your body will increase usually ghrelin so that you are hungrier and decrease leptin, which is the opposite of ghrelin, which is the satiety hormone or what makes you full. And again, through periods of stress or not sleeping or even as you're going through perimenosal and menopause, these hormones get greatly impacted in a negative way. Right. Where you will feel less satisfied with your meals, and you will feel hungrier all the time. Obviously, we talked about cortisol, cortisol is a big player in your

metabolism. And high cortisol levels will always impact your metabolism. Because again, as a survival mechanism, your body will start craving things that are higher in carbs and usually processed foods, higher in fat, higher in sugar, higher in salt. And because it decreases other hormones like testosterone, it can indirectly also cause insulin resistance, right? Which is the hormone that also tied into your metabolism, regulates that blood sugar and helps your body understand whether we're using sugar in that second or restoring it as fat. Um, we know that chronic stress, chronic sleep deprivation, um, chronic yo-yo dieting play a, uh, wild and, uh, very tricky mean game with your insulin where your insulin starts doing a little bit of this

and your your cells just become a lot less sensitive to it because it feels like kind of like a kid you know if you're yelling at it all the time it's like man that's just mom whereas like you yell at it once it's like oh god mom is the exact same thing that happens with insulin when insulin is all over the place all the time your cells are just like yeah girl i'm good um and so they become a lot less sensitive which is an issue. And then there are the hormones slash like neurotransmitters that I always talk about that impact your food choices, which really the main driver of this one is dopamine. And the reason why it impacts your metabolism, it truly is because of your food choices. And how I want you to think about dopamine is that from an evolutionary standpoint, dopamine was important for our

survival because it makes you feel good. And when things made you feel good, when you were, you know, just a homo sapiens or a chimp, you would continue seeking out this behavior because you needed it to survive right and so whole foods or like regular food you know the foods that you're supposed to be eating on our program um give you an appropriate amount of dopamine release and an appropriate amount of pleasure right you eat an apple you're like this is good but you don't sit there being like i love apples i'm gonna eat the whole bag no you just get an apple you're this was good. And so then you get this appropriate release of, of, um, pleasure that, you know, you get then an appropriate amount of desire for that food later on. But what happens now is that we

have this ancient brain that is coded like for survival and to want dopamine, because that's a signal that you want to survive. And it's amazing. But you have this ancient brain in our current food environment. And that's where we get into trouble, right? Because our food environment right now is engineered for highly palatable, highly processed foods that give us way too much dopamine and way too much pleasure, which results in a far beyond like hypothalamic signaling that is actually required for food, which is actually why you end up craving a lot of these foods, A, when you eat them and B, when you're stressed or when you're sleep deprived or when you feel sad or when you feel disconnected from people around you, right? Because we are 90% chimps, but like 10% bees,

like we do better in hives and with people around us. And so when you lose that connection to your hormones, to yourself, to your environment, often the first thing your body will look for is that dopamine. And why it impacts your metabolism is that it actually impacts your food choices way more than you think it does. And for sure, there's a genetic component to that because there are some people that have a genetic predisposition to want dopamine a lot more and they have more addictive behaviors.

But for most of us, like dopamine feels good. And so when you're feeling crappy, the first thing you're going to want is like just a little hit of something that just makes you feel like things are not that bad. Wow. New year, new me. Season is here. And honestly, we're already over it. Enter Felix, the healthcare company helping Canadians take a different approach to weight loss this year. Weight loss is more than just diet and exercise. It can be about tackling genetics, hormones, metabolism. Felix gets it. They connect you with licensed healthcare practitioners online who'll create a personalized treatment plan that pairs your healthy lifestyle with a little help and a little extra support. Start your visit today at felix.ca. That's F-E-L-I-X.ca.

And when you bring it all back to someone trying to lose weight, and not only that, but to the detriment to all the diets they have done before. And I mean, they just knew they just did what they were told, eat less, exercise more, starve, deprive. That's how you lose weight. And so you take your body coming from years of that, and then now trying to, to lose weight. I mean, this is, oh my gosh. Um, okay. There's so much more to get into a cognizant of time. Should we just round this out with talking about mood? Because I think how we're showing up for ourselves when we're trying to lose weight is so important. I think people don't factor in hormones when it comes to their mood. Yeah, we can do, we can do mood. We can touch a little bit on hormones, like whatever you want to do. I'm here all day. I have two hours, you know, so we can.

It is really interesting because there's, and I, again again i don't think that we can talk about mood without talking about also like your estrogen and your progesterone and like all of these other things um but you know the uh we know that estrogen and progesterone aptly a role in your mood we know that one of the first actually signs of uh apnea menopause that we start seeing might not necessarily be the uh changes in your cycle it might actually be changes in your mood and it's the same thing with men right men um with women we can start seeing changes in their hormones as early as you know mid-30s but really in perimenopause is usually like early to mid-40s um and we start seeing a

lot of like anxiety we see a lot of depression, because your brain actually has hormone receptors. And estrogen has a serotonin like impact on your brain. And so estrogen is the sister that's like super outgoing and spicy and fiery and progesterone is a sister that's like calm and collected and like chill and just wants you to stay in you know and so often when you start losing that progesterone you get a lot of that anxiety and often when you start seeing these shifts in estrogen um your mood goes up and down and up and down and up and down and sometimes you're like i'm gonna kill people sometimes like i feel so lonely and that is usually what we start seeing in men. Testosterone, which, again, starts declining at about one to two percent every year after the age of like 40 ish, 45, can also play a role in how they feel. depression because testosterone gives you a drive and like energy, right? If you have too much testosterone, you actually get really, really aggressive. So you can imagine that the deficiency

of that can give you a lot of mood swings, mood swings as well. Dopamine, we talked about dopamine is your reinforcement, making you feel happy and pleasure as far as, as part of like your brain reward system. Serotonin is a neurotransmitter that we talk about a lot when it comes to anxiety and depression because a lot of the drugs that we have actually target serotonin and like the uptake or the production and it is both a neurotransmitter and a hormone and the really interesting about about the really interesting thing about serotonin is that serotonin um it is kind of involved in things like memory and fear and stress digestion is a big one that people don't uh really think about but your gut actually

produces about 90 of your serotonin um addiction uh like you know sleep breathing uh temperature like serotonin has a role in a bunch of things and the interesting thing about serotonin that I would say that like most of us know is that it really is involved in like making you happy the challenge with serotonin is that serotonin just like most neurotransmitters and proteins I'm sorry and hormones to an extent they get made from protein. And serotonin really depends on tryptophan. And tryptophan, I wouldn't say is like the easiest thing to get from food. Like it's like it's, you know, everybody knows about like turkey, for example. Yeah.

You know, there's just actually why you feel like really satisfied and full and like sleepy after that. But tryptophan can also be found in other foods. It can be found in like dairy. It can be found in like dairy. It can be found in, uh, other like meat products and eggs. And, and so a lot of the diets often that we are very restrictive and they're not focused on whole foods, uh, or they're just starving, um, often end up, um, decreasing a lot of your serotonin production, which is why often you want to feel happy because you're losing weight. If you're losing weight, most of the time you feel really miserable. Yeah. And then there's going to be,

you know, uh, like the oxytocin, which is your love hormone and like things like that, which, again, for weight loss tends to be really, really important, because it's, it can help decrease like stress, stress and anxiety, especially when you're surrounded by loved ones, right. And so when the one thing that I always talk about with your program is that I think that the beautiful thing about it is that it gives people a sense of community. And I mean, I can talk about community all like, if we have the rest of the more than 50 minutes, but, but community is like, so, so, so, so important to your weight loss journey. Right. And I, I think that how I think about weight loss also is that like, say it's like, you know, you think about like exercise and food only as like your weight loss journey, but it's,

and that's the gas that you're putting in your car. Right. And you're just like focused on like the exercise and like the food part of it, but you just keep on putting gas in the car. But if there's a traffic, it doesn't matter how much gas you keep on putting in your car. Like your car is not going anywhere. And that traffic jam can be your sleep. That can be that you're exercising maybe too much, or you're not doing the right type of exercise. That can be that you are stressed. That can be that you're going through perimenopause. That can be that you're lonely. That can be that the food choices that you're making, sometimes because your executive brain is so exhausted from all of the things

that you were supposed to be doing that day and you didn't give it the sleep and the rest and the like, whatever it is that it needed that day. And your reward brain that just wants dopamine just for a second, because it just makes you feel good, kicks in and you have that ultra palatable food that then makes you feel like crap you know that is also clogging uh that traffic jam and so i i always use this analogy because i think that when people get stuck they always go back to the like 1980s formula that we had of like, oh, you just need to keep on exercising more and eating less. And that doesn't work. Or it works, but it only works to

an extent, right? Yeah, it works to an extent, and you may be able to lose the weight and you just get it all back plus more. And you're just compounding the program, the problem over and over and over. Again, super fascinating with how it all works together. And I'm just sort of watching the comments. I see a lot of people with sleep questions. So you've got to go back and watch the whole sleep series that we did a couple of weeks ago. Honestly, invest in the time, because if especially if you think your hormones are why you're not losing weight, and you haven't invested your time into that sleep conversation, such a huge conversation in the way that hormones impact your sleep or lack of sleep impacts your hormones. It's really interesting, because whether it's sleep, and all the hormones that play a role with that, which you know,

your melatonin, cortisol, estrogen, progesterone, adenosine, all of that, your stress, your adrenaline, and all of that, and your metabolism and your thyroid and your hunger hormones, and then you talk about your mood. And then I want people to stop a minute and think about maximizing the conversation that we had yesterday when I took you through the troubleshooting. Maximizing is addressing all of those things. That's why beyond what you are eating and when and any exercise, which obviously is important, you are already doing so much if you are making an effort to address all of those things. And if you have hormonal issues, I'm hormonal, I'm perimenopausal, I'm menopausal, postmenopausal, whatever it might be, what can I

do? This is why I can't lose weight. That is why you want to focus on all of those things you can focus on because they are all connected. Your hormones are just in a little box and specific to certain things. There isn't just like a couple hormones that factor into why you can't lose weight. This into your, the conversation on mood. I mean, this is why a lot of women, I think, and I do want to talk about men in a second, but why women are given anti-anxiety medications to manage their hormonal issues. You go, I'm, for sure, I'm perimenopausal,

I'm this, I'm that, I got hot flashes, I can't sleep, I've got that fat around my tummy, and they're like, here's an antidepressant, because I'm got that fat around my tummy. And they're like, here's an antidepressant because, um, I'm assuming that factors into, to, to a lot of what you're dealing with or how you feel about it. Yeah. And you know, I'll, I know that, um, uh, I have a lot of, uh, perimenopause and menopause can be their own conversation, but I'm just going to touch really quickly on this because I, I say this fully and you know, this, like I'm married to a medical doctor. My best friends are medical doctors. Like I started in medicine. Like this is not anything to do with me saying like medicine is wrong. I love medication. I think

antidepressants are amazing when used appropriately, But women truly were not even part of studies until like the 90s, right? We took women out of studies for a really long time because like we couldn't account for the hormonal changes. Like what if they were pregnant? And so the role that hormones play in women's bodies and how they're impacted differently than men is only truly beginning to be understood, right? Because we are a very understudied population in medicine in general, which has been predominantly dominated by Caucasian males, right? And that is a completely different story. But I want you to understand that like your hormones play a role in every aspect of your physical, your mental, and your emotional well-being.

And it's only recently, like I said, that we're recognizing like, oh, your mood might change before your cycle changes. And it's not that you're a tone and deficiency. It's that your estrogen, you're at the, you're, you're nearing that end of the toothpaste tube, right? You're so every so often you'll feel fine. And every so often you'll feel nothing. And so your hormones are doing a little bit of this.

And is that haphazard release of hormones that is going to impact things like your memory and you feeling brain fog, right? Your mood, your, um, you know, uh, your blood pressure, often your cholesterol issues, your weight. And so we know, uh, very briefly, cause I know that we're talking about weight loss, but we know that, uh, your metabolism truly depends on how much muscle mass you have on your body. And as your hormones start changing, right, that the rate at which we lose muscle mass, which happens naturally as we age, it's a lot quicker. And so after the age of about 35, we'll probably lose, if you don't do anything about it, you might lose about, I don't know, maybe 0.5% of your muscle mass every year, but around that perimenopause menopausal window,

it looks closer to sometimes up to two, 3%, right? And so what happens is that you start losing all of this muscle mass and your metabolism starts slowing down as a result of it, because you end up again with a lot less of that tissue that's very active at rest, you end up putting a lot of fat often in areas that try to compensate for that estrogen drop, right? Because your belly fat actually produces estrogen. And to an extent, up until that time, estrogen was amazing. And estrogen was helping you direct the fat where you wanted it to go, which was going to be your hips and your thighs. And once you start getting those changes, what will happen is that the fat will be directed towards your belly and away from those areas, because then you don't have that estrogen and

your body's just like, just give me a little bit of more. And whatever fat you had in your abdomen is like, I got you girl. And so they kind of start feeding into each other, right? And so then the problem is that around that time and perimenopause and menopause, and this happens also with men, because men are starting to lose about five to 10 percent of that testosterone as they near 40 as well. But around that time, you then start seeing, you know, the declining hormones that make you feel crazy. And now you're not sleeping well and you you're, you're feeling super, super tired. You feel gaslighted by everybody around you. Cause you're like, I honestly feel like I'm, I think I have Alzheimer's because like, I can't think straight. And like, I feel like my mood is all over the place. And I know I have like every

reason to be happy, but like, I don't understand what's going on. And then you start like, uh, trying to lose weight because your body starts changing the composition you can't necessarily shift the scale you have this stress sandwich i always talk about when like you have stress from above because your parents are aging and you have stress from below because like your kids are growing up and you're sandwiched in the middle be like what is my life you know because a lot of things are changing and you're starting to be like i don't know what i want in my life like i'm halfway through my life do i know, because a lot of things are changing and you're starting to be like, I don't know what I want in my life. Like I'm halfway through my life. Do I stay here? Do I not? Um, you start, you know, experiencing all of this crappy sleep quality because of your stress,

but also because of your hormones, um, you, your, uh, appetite is like all over the place. You start moving less because of all of the other factors. And we know that for a fact, um, women going through perimenopause move about 4,000 to 5,000 steps less, right? Than they did in their 30s. And so then your metabolism just starts slowing down. You start feeling crappy. You start feeling hot.

You start feeling bitchy. You go to your doctor and your doctor's like, I mean, to me, you sound like you're depressed. And so here's more serotonin. And you never had a serotonin deficiency. Your hormones were just all over the place and causing one thing in that orchestra started causing everybody to start sounding crappy. And then all of the other ones were starting to compensate. Yeah. Okay. Maybe we'll change our rhythm, right? Like this is what happened. And then the other one was like off tune and the other one was like, okay,

louder in the back. And so all of a sudden you wake up and you're like this orchestra honestly that some of them are playing reggaeton some of them are classical music the other ones are doing the polka like I have no idea what's happening with their orchestra and so the medication that you're offered sometimes some of them help for sure for hot flashes and I think SSRIs are great for people that need them but I do often think that they are over prescribed um to this population um of women specifically sometimes also of men going through their transition without actually having the conversation of like girl let's take it back a notch and like what's going on And like, what's going on with your sleep? What's going on with your stress? Like, maybe let's figure out like, it could it be your hormones? Like what, like, what could we be doing? Right? Like, are we maybe don't keep on doing endurance

activities that again, just put your body through a lot more stress. Let's focus on retaining that muscle mass by doing weight training. Like, let's have a well-rounded conversation that's well beyond the five minutes like you need some it's a talopram that's going to cure everything you don't have an s like you don't have a serotonin deficiency it's not your serotonin that changes it's actually your estrogen that changes well and with that, I just thank you for just taking a minute and not only just validating so many people listening right now, but also, you know, explaining it to us in a way where we're really seeing the big picture of all of it. I mean, this is why it's a big conversation. I mean,

we haven't even got like halfway down my notes here. And I'm thinking like, let's, we want to talk about menopause, perimenopause, postmenopausal as well, right? That they factor in the conversation. I want to talk PCOS. I want to talk hormone replacement therapy. I want to talk, talk natural supplements to support hormones. I want to talk about testing. How to support hormones. I want to talk about

testing. How would any women start to address that? But I think we're going to have to save that for another day. Cause I think it's just, it's honestly, that's a conversation on its own for sure. Cause it's so, I think this is the foundation of it for people to understand. Um, you know, there's it and I, I hope that people don't walk away with a sense of helplessness i hope that they they my goal is to actually give you the power to be like oh my god i can like my orchestra can be in tune and all playing together the same song all over again but it is a lot more complicated than just your thyroid. I honestly, I always say this, like, I hope it's a thyroid, but it never is. And the quote that I always try to ingrain and almost

like tattoo onto my patient's arms is that wellness is not a state of being, it's a state of action. And it's having the freedom to move through all of these cycles that are built into your body. Right. And so just like, this is actually why I go back to the emotions. Like it has to have a beginning, a middle and an end your stress, your sleep, everything. But like, we don't just sit there and wait for them to, uh, uh, to be perfect. It's you take the steps in order to make that happen because guess what maybe you were a baby and things were being fed to you and like you were just like sitting there like a blob being like this is amazing like you didn't have to do anything about it but now in

the world that we live in right now the truth is is that if you have to be healthy unless you're a unicorn you kind of have to work at it and you have to work at the things that sometimes are hard. I'm the, I hate meditation. Like I hate resistance training, all of the things that I know that I need to do. I do honestly, I do. I love, like I would run a marathon before I like go to CrossFit, you know, but like, I know that like what I need to do are things that are hard and I can do hard things and so can you. And so I just, I just want you to like feel the power of, I, I, you know, not because maybe I, the, the, uh, uh, I'm stuck in that stress means that I'm going to be here forever. There's things that we can do and there's things that we can teach you. And this is what your program is,

is giving you the tools for your orchestra to just sing beautifully again yes because the reality is we did talk about uh menopause perimenopause postmenopause pcos hormone like we talked about all of that in all the things that we talked about in this conversation today and the takeaway is you're probably already doing the things to help address those things. And given it's week five, and we're all about leveling up this week, this conversation is about leveling up the things that you are doing and can still do to really have an impact on your hormones, regardless of where those hormones are impacting you. So we're going to have the, we're going to have those conversations.

We're going to, we're going to have you back. We'll have those conversations specifically, but even if you're dealing with any of those, this conversation is so relevant in the way that they all work together. I do, before we go, can we talk about men and women? Cause you, you know, you touched on men and I, you know, I'm so cognizant. I'm trying to figure out how to have a more inclusive conversation about this. Um, but just for the sake of like simplifying it. Yeah. And I know we got to do better when it comes to having a more inclusive conversation and working on that. Um, but the difference between like, I will men get affected by hormones too, and never talk about it. Oh, for sure. I mean, they, you get affected by hormones too and never talk about it oh for sure i mean they

you you also have estrogen and progesterone and testosterone we just like we we all have the same hormones you just have them in a different ratio um with testosterone the the decline tends to be a little bit um i mean it honestly it happens as well there's something in medicine that we joke around that we're like oh it's probablyropause, which is like the equivalent of like menopause. The only thing that I will say is that, you know, often it can go misdiagnosed for a while because it looks like everything and it looks like nothing, right? Like with men, as they're going through that change and that loss in testosterone, they start seeing changes in libido, or they start seeing changes in like erectile function or in how the gains that they're able to make at the gym, for example, they start seeing changes in their mood, their sleep can also become crappy. But it's also around the same time that like, we start diagnosing more sleep apnea, right, which like can also become crappy, but it's also around the same time that like we start

diagnosing more sleep apnea, right. Which like can also impact that. It's around the time again, that like stress, stress plays a role into it. And, um, and like, you know, your prostate may also be impacted. And so some of the times like men can also be gaslighted by the medical community being like, Oh no, it's like not your testosterone, right? The one amazing thing is that for a really long time, women were not even offered at HRT because there was a really terribly designed study that came out saying that HRT was unsafe, which what we now have been trying to disprove and undo all the damage that we did with that one.

But for men, testosterone therapy has always been an option. And the great thing is that for men, there hasn't necessarily been as much of that. If you have testosterone, you will get breast cancer. Or if you get testosterone, you will get breast cancer or if you get testosterone, you'll get breast cancer. And so for men, actually, it's a lot easier to diagnose with just blood work and actually to treat. And so if you are a man listening to this conversation being like, I wonder about testosterone issues. Legitimately, unlike women going through perimenopause where the hormones are all over the place, you can just get a testosterone test and have a conversation with your doctor. So the testosterone conversation is actually a little bit easier for men.

Now the changes that we make with our lifestyle apply to both of us. Because we're both, yeah, sexist, or I shouldn't say sexist, people that have ovaries and people that have testes. You know, I know, I know. Sorry, guys. I'm still trying to learn. But, you know, it's still the like strength training, right? Just like strength training improves muscle mass in women, it also does in men. And strength training

is amazing for growth hormone for both sexes, but most especially for men. Eating protein is just as important for both of us. Getting sleep is just as important for both of us. Getting sleep is just as important for both of us. But when it comes push to come to shove, when it comes to that with the reproductive hormones, it may actually be slightly more important for men than it is for women. You know, the darkness in a room, for example, is important for both of us, but it is more important for women, because we know that if you have even the littlest bit of like ambient light at night, that for especially menopausal women, that on its own will impact your weight loss journey, because it impacts your circadian rhythm so negatively. And so, you uh, it's, it's, it's, uh, I think that like the conversation

as like the hormones is different, but the action plan is almost the exact same. So this still applies to you, my male guys. Okay. I love it. Um, thank you. That was brilliant. Um, and I know for everyone watching and listening, it's, it's a lot of information and this is where we're going to break it down. And you know, this was sort of an overview of how hormones play into your sleep and your stress and your metabolism and your mood and how that affects you when you are trying to lose weight. And so we're going to have those deeper conversations. Um, we're going to have Dr. Lincoln back and we'll talk more specifically in terms of those areas. But I think this is so exciting because again, the takeaway is there are so many things that you can do to make a real difference and not only just how you're feeling, how your body's

functioning, but actually help you lose weight as well and keep it off at the end of the day. Totally. And I think that, you know, this is where like you have the foundation and then let's talk action plan. Let's talk about like things that we can do. We're like maximizing things right now. We just need you to understand all of the things that we need to maximize so that then we can put them into, you know, into action. This is just the beginning, you guys. I know there's going to be so many questions that pop up, but this is just the beginning. I love it. I love it it i'm so excited to get into it um dr elinka trejo well i mean people are gonna ask where to find you i the easiest way to find me you can email my office it is info at halton physiotherapy.ca

um and if you just shoot as a note uh and if you ever want to work together and then we'll try to we'll try to figure it out together. OK, amazing. Thank you. Thank you to everyone who is watching. Thank you to everyone who is listening. And Dr. Alinka, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I adore you. And I'm so grateful for the time that you take to share with our listeners and our members, because they really are working really hard to make real change. So just thank you. Thank you. Thank you everyone.

Thank you for having me. New year, new me season is here. And honestly, we're already over it. Enter Felix, the healthcare company helping Canadians take a different approach to weight loss this year. Weight loss is more than just diet and exercise.

It can be about tackling genetics, hormones, metabolism. Felix gets it. They connect you with licensed healthcare practitioners online who'll create a personalized treatment plan that pairs your healthy lifestyle with a little help and a little extra support. Start your visit today at felix.ca. That's F-E-L-I-X dot C-A.