Why is it so Hard to Lose Weight?
You’ve tried the diets, the exercise plans. Maybe you’ve signed up for a full weight loss program. Nothing’s working—at least, it’s not working enough. Does losing weight have to be this difficult? No, and you don’t have to do it alone.
At Regain Functional Medicine + Aesthetics, we’ve seen patients who have struggled for years to lose weight finally achieve their goals under the care of our expert providers. At our weight loss clinic in Kansas City, we use functional medicine to achieve practical results that improve your mobility and comfort.
Understanding Weight Gain
When you start gaining unwanted weight, the first thought is usually about calories. Am I eating too much? Am I exercising too little? This is the basic tenet of weight gain—you gain weight if you consume more calories than you burn.
This makes the solution to weight loss seem simple. To lose weight, I should eat less and exercise more. Right? Then why is losing weight so hard?
The thing is, it’s not just the calories you’re up against. Our bodies were built to walk long distances and withstand harsh conditions like food shortages. Nowadays, we live in a world where food is everywhere and all you have to do is drive to get it, but our bodies haven’t caught up.
There are a number of environmental factors that make it difficult for our bodies to get what they need in order to utilize calories in a healthy way. At Regain, our weight loss clinic in Kansas City, the first step to losing weight is learning what is causing your weight gain.
Stress
Our bodies are designed to react to danger by protecting ourselves. Getting enough calories is essential to our survival, so when threatened, our bodies naturally prioritize finding something to eat. The problem is that we’re not great at differentiating between the danger of being confronted by a wild boar and being confronted by our boss.
Both of these scenarios might make you want to go home and inhale a bag of cheese puffs. Eating a bag of cheese puffs would help you to regain vital calories after outrunning a wild boar, but they don’t help your body a whole lot when all you can do is drive home and crawl back into bed.
To maintain a healthy weight, it is important to keep your eating habits regular. Our lives are busy. It may not seem like such a big deal to skip breakfast some days or grab dinner to eat on the way to your kid’s soccer game. However, inconsistent mealtimes can have an adverse effect on how your body processes your caloric intake.
Routine mealtimes are essential for maintaining a healthy weight.
Sleep
Sleep is something most of us struggle to get enough of. We know that sleep is good for us, but it’s not something we prioritize enough when trying to lose weight.
Getting a good night’s sleep gives you a healthy appetite and helps you feel full after eating. That’s because a lack of sleep disrupts the hormones that control hunger and appetite. If you aren’t getting enough sleep, you’re bound to be hungrier and eat more, even though you aren’t doing anything to burn those calories.
Movement
Far fewer people struggled with weight gain only 50 years ago. What’s changed? Well, our jobs have become more sedentary, transportation has become more car-dependent, and we don’t have to travel far to get the things we need (when you buy stuff online, you don’t have to move at all!).
It may seem that something like walking to get groceries or going door to door to conduct business rather than working from a desk would hardly count as exercise. However, the convenience that comes with modern technology means movement is no longer such a necessity.
When you don’t have to walk around to five different stores to run your errands, why would you? The problem is, we’re eating the same or more than we used to, but we’re moving around a lot less.
At our weight loss clinic in Kansas City, our custom weight loss plans help you make regular movement part of your life.
When people suggest habits for weight loss like “take the stairs,” or “bike to work,” it doesn’t mean that any one of these actions will make you shed the weight. The truth behind these suggestions is that when you incorporate movement as a part of your life, maintaining your weight becomes a natural part of your routine.
What Actually Works
With our weight loss program at Regain, we create a customized weight loss plan for each of our patients. No two bodies are alike.
Something as complicated as weight loss requires a personalized approach. Within our customized plans, we have several different treatments we use to help our patients lose weight and keep it off.
Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT)
One cause of weight gain that is often overlooked and undertreated is hormone imbalance. A proper balance of hormones is something we often take for granted until we start to get older. As we age, hormone levels can change dramatically.
For women, estrogen and progesterone levels start to decrease during and after menopause. Men experience a decrease in
testosterone levels around the same time. A decrease in these hormone levels slows down the metabolism, causing unexpected (and sometimes rapid) weight gain.
If you have been suffering from a hormone imbalance, you will find that hormone replacement therapy will have you feeling better in more ways than one. At our weight loss clinic in Kansas City, we also use HRT to treat low libido, poor sleep, loss of muscle tone, hair thinning, mood changes, and a variety of other uncomfortable symptoms that you may have written off as just signs of age.
Semaglutide
If your weight is preventing you from properly enjoying your life, and nothing has been helping you get rid of it, semaglutide might be able to help. Semaglutide is an injectable that mimics hormones produced in your gut. When you eat, these hormones send signals to your body and brain to produce insulin and suppress your appetite, telling you when you are full.
If you have been struggling with your weight for a while, your body might need some help regulating what it needs versus what it wants. Semaglutide can help you feel full and nourished by the food you eat. Food is fuel. Semaglutide can help your body make the most of the nutrients you consume.
Phentermine
Phentermine is another weight loss medication and is one of our most popular treatments for weight loss. Like Semaglutide, Phentermine is an appetite suppressant. However, instead of targeting the hormones in your gut, Phentermine works on the chemicals in your brain related to appetite.
Phentermine blocks the reuptake of chemicals like norepinephrine, serotonin and dopamine. This encourages the proliferation of these chemicals which promote feelings of being satiated.
Even when it’s a mental challenge, it’s physical
Semaglutide and Phentermine are the leading drugs approved for medical weight loss. Their success is owed to their ability to combat the mental hurdles to losing weight with a physical solution.
When you are struggling to lose weight, it is easy to get bogged down with feelings of inadequacy. At times, it may feel that what you lack is the sheer will power to control your cravings or stick to a new diet.
With weight loss, it is important to remember that the challenges you may consider to be mental challenges are also rooted in physical realities. It’s not just that you have grown accustomed to certain eating habits; on a chemical level, your body has physically ingrained these habits.
So if you are struggling to make changes to your diet and eating habits, don’t beat yourself up. Semaglutide and Phentermine can help you tackle these challenges on a physical level. Your practitioners at our weight loss clinic in Kansas City will set you up with the medical weight loss option that is best for you.
Your Custom Weight Loss Plan
Weight loss is unique to every person, and that is part of what makes it so difficult. There’s also a whole lot that goes into the process of losing weight. Despite what thousands of weight loss programs and companies try to persuade you, there is no single weight loss solution that works for everyone. There is no single weight loss solution that works for anyone.
Losing weight is hard work; there’s no way around it. We set our patients up for success in their weight loss efforts because each person gets a unique treatment plan. When we create your weight loss plan, we combine the treatments we know will be most beneficial to you and your body.
And our weight loss plans don’t stop there. At Regain, our weight loss clinic in Kansas City, we’re serious about getting that weight gone for good. That’s why we offer maintenance programs to ensure you don’t gain back any weight after the end of your treatment.
Taking weight loss seriously requires long-term solutions. Unlike other weight loss clinics, we are committed to giving you long lasting results even after you finish your treatment with us. In addition to your treatments, we will work with you to create a diet and exercise plan, helping you to maintain your weight in the long run.
