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Jan. 16, 2026

The 7 Weight Loss Hormones For Men That Control Fat Loss, Cravings, and Hunger (& How to Influence Them) - 47

Show Notes
Transcript

Are Your Hormones Failing You With Your Health, Fat Loss, and Dealing With Chronic Illness?

If fat loss has started to feel harder than it used to, it’s not because you suddenly lost discipline.

Your hormones can turn hunger up, cravings up, energy down, and make progress feel unpredictable. And most men never learn how this actually works, so they end up white-knuckling another diet, stuck in the same loop.

In this episode, Coach Brian breaks down the real fat loss equation: calories still matter, but hormones influence both sides of the equation, how much you eat and how much you burn.

You’ll learn the 7 hormones that most directly impact fat loss, hunger, cravings, energy, and where your body stores fat:

GLP-1 (appetite control and fullness signaling)
Cortisol (stress, belly fat, cravings, and energy)
Thyroid (metabolism changes during weight loss)
Leptin (fullness and why hunger rises after you lose weight)
Ghrelin (hunger signals and why you feel starving)
Insulin (blood sugar, visceral fat, and fat storage)
Testosterone and Estrogen (body composition, energy, and fat distribution)

Coach Brian also shares a real client story about Victor, who needed to lose 43 pounds, lost 21, then hit a four-month stall that wrecked his mental state, made him feel like he was starving all the time, and started bleeding into his work and home life. The breakthrough wasn’t more motivation. It was understanding what his body was doing and fixing the basics that control hunger and stress signals.

If you’re a man over 40 and you want fat loss to feel predictable again, this episode will give you clarity and a practical path forward.

If your doctor said “watch your numbers” but gave you no plan to improve them, this is for you...

Understand your blood work in plain English.

A1C, cholesterol, blood pressure, triglycerides, and what actually moves them.

This scorecard breaks down blood markers, plus the habits that drive them.

Download it here:

https://brianparana.short.gy/improveyourbloodpanels

Want help applying this to your own health, weight, energy, or lab numbers?

Coach Brian Parana offers Health Hot Seat coaching segments for men who want a clear next step with nutrition, fitness, weight loss, blood pressure, cholesterol, A1C, or daily consistency.

Learn more about The Call To Rise, a 100-day coaching program for driven men over 40 who want to lose weight, improve their health, and rebuild confidence:

www.thecalltorise.com

To connect with Coach Brian:
brian@brianparana.com

Disclaimer: This podcast is for education and coaching support only. It is not medical advice. Always work with your physician before changing medication, treatment, or medical care.

Your hormones are working against you every single day. They crank up hunger. They kill your energy. They make fat loss feel like you're pushing a boulder uphill. Until you understand what's actually happening inside your body, you're going to keep white knuckling your way through another failed diet. Wondering why discipline or motivation or willpower just isn't enough.
I'm eating healthy and clean but still not making real impact. Today, episode 47, Driven for Health. I'm walking you through seven hormones that control fat loss, hunger, and total energy. More importantly, I'm showing you what to do with them so you can stop fighting yourself and start making actual real progress that actually sticks and doesn't stick body fat to your belly.
We isn't going to say blame your thyroid today or your pancreas is broken or any of that type of things. We're just going to get into the actual foundational understanding of what we need to do, explain these seven hormones, and you have actionable insights to take with you to help in your fat loss journey, your health journey, your chronic illness journey.
The foundation still calories matter. CICO, calories in, calories out. Before we dive into the hormones, we need to do something about getting it straight. when calories matter. Okay, super important in this whole process. When men are in a real calorie deficit, like really low, 1500 or even 1,400. I've seen some guys try and do 1200 calories, it's insane for a an adult male, they're going to lose weight, okay, almost every time.
Then when someone says to me, they they reach out, Brian goes, Ryan, I can't lose weight anymore. start going through what some of the issues are. They're like, I don't know what's going on. I've been in this calorie deficit. I've lost 40 pounds. I still have 35 more to go and saying, my health blood panels are improving, but not to the point where I'm scot-free and off meds or something in that situation.
And they don't know what's going on. The real issue is their calories are really low. It's this isn't nothing. Oh, my thyroid's broken. That's not it. we are in a significant deficit on that situation or the other and their metabolism slowed down and adapted or the other situation is that they're actually not as honest or truthful around it.
I I don't want to claim the percentage off the top of my head, but there's a large percentage of people that overconume calories more than they account for. They say, "Hey, I am going to be eating this much calories and I am in a calorie deficit, but when we actually add it up that they are off. Portion controls are off.
Calorie intake is off. They didn't track this or that or they're not as accurate. Every once in a while, I'll do an actual audit with people. Hey, if you haven't been making progress, we need to get back to sending pictures on top of tracking your food and really double down on making sure we're in an actual real deficit.
Let's define how do you know if you're in a real calorie deficit? If you're if you're a real deficit isn't eating calories most of the days. It's eating calories across every single day and not having say a weekend blowout. You do great clean eating Monday through Thursday or maybe even Friday, but Saturday and Sunday or Friday, Saturday, Sunday could literally erase your whole game plan uh and effort for days of effort.
I've even had clients measure themselves on Friday instead of Monday or Saturday morning to help them stay on track with the the the effort, the energy and the impact of this process of making sure that we are staying in on so that we will literally see a scale weight loss on Friday and then they regain the weight by Monday.
And this is a problem, especially if I talk to a client on Mondays or Tuesdays, they're like, "Oh, I'm not losing weight." Well, what's going happen? What's happening over the weekend? Are you actually losing weight through the week? Soon as we figure that out, then we can start to understand, okay, their habits and behaviors are the bigger challenge here.
But here's where it gets interesting, okay? Hormones don't make weight loss impossible, but they [snorts] can make it harder if you are working against them. They can crank up hunger, increase cravings, drop your energy down, you feel slow and want to take naps all the time. They mess with your sleep.
Who's woken up in the middle of night, can't go back to sleep, or even have trouble going to sleep? That's those are sometimes hormonal issues. They reduce how much you move without you even realizing that you're doing it. When you're in a large calorie deficit for a long time, your niche, your non exercise activity thermogenesis, which I go over that in the nutrition pyramid in episodes 5 through 11, you can go go through it.
Neat is a very powerful thing. That's me. I'm standing right now as I record this and I'm fidgeting and I'm burning all these extra calories. But you literally slow down. Your body will stop you from actually burning calories when you are either against it with calories for a long time or your hormones. Yes, calories in versus calories out matter a lot, but it's not always that simple.
And the real say weight loss goal or improving your blood panel goal is calories plus hormones plus behavior consistency equals weight loss. Because I like to start off with this simple formula. I move this much say working out in a week and general overall average activity in the day and the week plus I eat this much.
How many calories and say macros that you ate equals what my body does. That honestly is the only way to actually truly figure out where your calorie ranges are. Am I in a calorie deficit? Am I in a calorie surplus? Or you step on the scale and it will show you the last week or two's effort on where you're at. When you ignore hormones, fat loss can be really challenging, especially if the behaviors aren't consistent with actual real science back strategies implemented into your everyday life.
You can eat very little food and starve and and be miserable. It can be confusing because you go to YouTube and Google and you get all these conflicting ideas on what you should or shouldn't do and ultimately unstable and sustainable. I I think of it like this a favorite saying you would heard Brianisms on episode 30 but what we do in two weeks we do in two months we do in two years.
That's the habit and behavior process that we need to work through. I'm not going to validate I'm not trying to validate why you can't lose weight. I'm just offering a better insight on your hormones, how they show up in your body, what's really happening, what their reasonings are. Once you can understand those, then you can have a better leverage on it because hormones can't override physics.
And what they do is influence both sides of the calorie equation. calories consumed, meaning your appetite, cravings, satiation, your impulse control and calories burned, your metabolism, non exercise activity, your training performance and recovery. That's the game that you're trying to play with all those layers of of understanding.
If you're not, maybe all of that stuff, wow, I don't even have an idea what that looks like. Well, then we can just say it layers to an onion. Maybe you're only on the first layer and you just have to become more calorie aware. Where someone who's been tracking for a long time, understands macros, can get a little bit deeper into more strategic carbohydrate timing, calorie timing, sequencing, and different things like that. All right, let's get to it.
Hormones matter 100%. And I hope that you understand how they impact you here. how to know if you have a hormone problem. Here's the thing. You can get blood work done and see actual numbers and then you will have a lot better idea on what it is. You can't just throw out, oh, my hormones must be off.
They must not be balanced. You need scientific proof, blood panel results to help you understand if they are off or not. Get labs done, guys, in your 40s and 50s. Get labs done regularly, at least ideally once a year, so you can monitor these with your doctor. Again, none of this is advice. You should you should see a medical professional.
Just going to throw that out there. But you want to get thyroid, testosterone, cortisol, insulin markers, cholesterol, A1C. Knowing those numbers can give you more of an empowered path of what you need to do. As I walk through these seven hormones, ask yourself, am I experiencing any of these issues? Because your body is already telling you the truth of the matter.
You just need to listen. Let's get into it. Hormone number one, GLP1. It's your appetite control system. GLP1 stands for glucagon like peptide one. It's your body's appetite control [clears throat] center. That's what GLP1s are, right? It's a peptide and these medications like ampic, wakovi, mjaro, they all stimulate that that that the GLP-1 to help manage your hunger.
It tells the GLP1 is made in your gut. Think of it like brakes on your appetite. Not the gas pedal, but the brakes. It's going to slow down the the the hunger, the feeling. It tells your brain when you've had enough to eat. When GOP1 is working well, you feel full and satiated. When it's not, you're hungry all day. You just can't seem to put enough food in your mouth.
And that becomes a problem because you overeat then high calories ultrarocessed foods that multiply calories inside your body in your waistline. GOP1 is like the delivered notification on a text message to your brain. When you eat slow, your brain receives the message, we're good. Food has been delivered. When you inhale your food, the message shows up late and you've already overeaten calories.
That's the challenge. Just literally if you slowed down, guys, and ate and it took 20 minutes, which who has 20 minutes? Me. That's a challenge. But when you slow down, you literally can help naturally have the GLP1 in your stomach stimulate and say, "Hey, I'm full." because it takes about 20 minutes to feel that that indigestion and the fillingness and the signals go from your stomach to your brain saying we're good.
If you strategically place with lots of protein and vegetables, then you can fill up on lower calorie foods, which is the hack for managing hunger, cravings, calories, blood sugars, and feeling content with your foods. your your stomach. It slows down digestion and your stomach will actually hold on to food longer and it decreases the hunger and the the actual control release of the blood sugar into your bloodstream, keeping your blood sugar rises more stable and not this blood sugar roller coaster and a release of insulin naturally. How do you manage
GLP1? Well, with hydration, we can. If you're not drinking enough water, I I love guys drinking at least 100 ounces of water. You're you're going to struggle with hunger. Literally, you're just not keeping a very free strategy that's cheap, free, and you just keeps you hydrated and feeling better to fill up your stomach and your body.
The baseline for guys, I always say, is 100 ounces. Certainly, you could go lower with a little bit of water or uh water and coffee, tea without a lot of calories works just fine, too. I If you're not a water guy, that's that's okay. But it does help with your energy and your overall health. And water to the body is like oil to a car.
What happens when there's not enough oil in a car? it creates friction and the engine may seize on you in that situation. Same thing with your body and even say digestion slows significantly and leading to constipation and backup. Who wants that? When I start feeling hungry, well, well, number one, I've I'm drinking from my my mug here, my my logoed mug for driven for health.
And then that helps me stay full throughout the day and hydrated. I I usually try and get water in before I start drinking coffee. I love my coffee hack. I have my water next to my coffee cup. I chug my water, sip my coffee, and then by the time I'm done with my coffee, I've drinking 20 ounces of water and I'm 30 plus ounces of fluid in me.
And it keeps me full longer. I'm checking off my hydration box without having to actually feel that I'm doing it. Protein naturally boosts GLP-1 and it will help keep you full longer. We've gone over that nauseium. Episode six goes over macronutrients, protein, and all. Fiber is another way to do it. Fiber adds volume to your stomach and slows down digestion in a good way, providing macronutri micronutrients, vitamins, and minerals to be delivered in your intestines and help your body stay healthy. I'm a big fan of at least
25 grams for guys. I even if we're in a fat loss phase, I'll push you toward 30. In a future episode, we'll break down fiber in a little bit more detail, soluble, insoluble, how to get them, what foods are grand slams, and what foods aren't that you might think they're we already mentioned it. Another natural way to manage GP1 in your stomach is eat slower.
We just talked about that most guys eat way too much, way too fast. This is the next one would be fermented foods. Greek yogurt, cottage cheese. They help support gut health, microbiome, and that's really good. A protein source, too. Regular exercise, sleep, right? Those can help naturally regulate and improve the GOP1 function, and they should be non-negotiables for you regardless.
Exercise pyramid goes strength pyramid goes on episode 17 to 23 I believe. There's a lot of things I talked about on those episodes about exercise that strikes your fancy. Jump in. I do want to take a a moment here to share a story from a client Victor. Victor came to me and he was struggling. He needed to lose 43 total pounds.
He was down 21 and got stuck. Not stuck for like four months stuck. That's that's a long time to be feeling like you're doing all the things. You're you're working out. You're drinking your water. You're tracking your food. You're doing all this stuff. And the scales just literally not moving. Pictures aren't moving.
Clothes are still feeling the same. That becomes very frustrating. And often times people will quit. Now, kudos for Victor for not quitting and actually buckling down and showing up. And he wanted to he came to me said, "I swear I'm didn't do anything differently than I have been. I'm not sure why things are going.
" Ultimately, that's my job to figure out why things are the way they are. So, the the weight loss was dropping. It was at first the weight did drop and he felt like he had control again but then he hit that stall and it messed with him. What we had to look about was into jumping into his day-to-day actions of what he was doing. problem was he was doing fat loss in a way that made his hormones turn the volume up on hunger and cravings and the volume down on energy and his patients once we're able to educate him on leptin and grein and the ge the insulin and
using it appropriately with food and have the the basic strategies cemented into his day-to-day the core four of water nutrition fitness and sleep he is able to be really successful there. A hormone number two is cortisol. This is your stress responder. Cortisol, everyone's heard of it, the cortisol belly.
Cortisol is your body's stress hormone, fight or flight. Most men live their entire lives constantly in that fight or flight. Oftentimes I'll have a guy show up and I say, "Hey, are you living in a stress response and you just don't even know it? You're just maxed out cortisol and your adrenals are blown because of this fight or flight with work, with home, with crazy schedule, lack of sleep, no good nutrition.
Is that what you're dealing with?" And sometimes they say, "Holy cow, this is the I identify with that." All those things impact on your cortisol. High cortisol causes weight gain. We know this, especially in your belly. And visceral fat. Visceral fat is the stuff that gets around your organs and is actually very dangerous.
Whereas subcutaneous fat is the jiggly stuff that's closer to the skin that you usually can push and feel like the Pillsbury Doughboy. In a sense, the dangerous side of this, it makes you crave sugar and fatty foods all while killing your energy and not wanting to move as much. A simple analogy, cortisol is a smoke alarm.
It's it's useful when there's a real fire, but if the alarm is going off all day every day, you can't relax. You can't focus. and you start to make decisions and choices that move you in the wrong direction. Say stress relief, eating high calorie foods at night when you're wiped out and have no resourcefulness to say no. The indirect impact here on cortisol doesn't directly stop fat loss.
It indirectly impacts your calories consumed and calories burned. The more stress you have, the more cravings you will naturally have and the more hunger will go up. The more stress you have, the less energy you have to make sound decisions or move your body. And yes, you move less. But when you decrease cortisol and when I when you want to decrease cortisol, then you're actually able to get to the inverse.
So when you have high cortisol your desire to move becomes less your desire to manage stress becomes less and the vice versa the direct in the indirect impact is that when it decreases and you have this newfound energy and motivation that's the game you want to play. How do we manage cortisol? Well, sleep. Of course, 7 plus hours is a solid amount.
And most guys are running on five, four, six, and wondering why they can't lose weight. There are significant amount of studies on sleep under six hours that show that you will have trouble and challenges losing weight. All right, managing caffeine will help that. 400 milligrams in a day is the most that a human body can tolerate.
And if you're having four cups of coffee or something or an energy drink, a monster with 300, you're already mostly there and we want to manage that. Other ways to help manage cortisol, walking outside, getting some fresh air, getting sunlight, having a windown routine. At night, I I play seduku. It helps me quiet my brain and get it to focus on numbers and not think of anything else, and I fall asleep pretty darn fast.
The kicker and the the real problem here is you manage high stress for a season or a few months but then it keeps just turning into a lifestyle. You never undo the stress. You have a stressful time at work but then it just the habits and [clears throat] behaviors and patterns go into normal life even if season of stress is lower. All right.
Hormone number three is thyroid. Thyroid is your metabolism thermostat. Thyroid controls your metabolism. And think about it like the thermostat in your house is a simple analogy. If the thermostat is turned down, everything runs slower. It's colder. You don't want to move much. And when it's hotter and turned up, everything processes more.
The body burns and you have energy and you want to go outside and do things when it's hotter. Your thyroid tells your cells how fast to work. When your thyroid is out of balance, it definitely affects your weight, your metabolism, your mood, energy, how you come across your partner, your kids, your co-workers. Here's what most people don't understand with thyroid.
Your thyroid slows down as you lose weight, that's that's normal. If you lose 20 to 30 pounds in a fat loss phase, your thyroid will slow down and your metabolism will slow down because you are literally lighter and you need less calories to operate. The biology isn't the issue here. A say a 300lb man, his body is working extremely hard to do basic function.
So his metabolism has to be higher. And as he loses weight, his body doesn't have to work so hard and it slows down. His energy needs decrease. We can't keep necessarily always the same amount of calories as we go in a fat loss phase. Say every 10 pounds you might need to do a calorie readjustment to align with your metabolism.
So, and that's is super important. And you also can't always just be in a fat loss phase, guys. you usually three to four months of time is a good time or season to be in a fat loss phase and then we need to cycle into a maintenance phase through I'm a big fan of reverse dieting although studies show that you can just go right back to maintenance.
I think for a lot of guys that jumping to a maintenance level calories can potentially cause a little bit of weight gain on the scale and they start freaking out and it's just not helpful. How do we manage thyroid? Well, regular exercise, sleep, iodine rich foods, seafood and dairy are super helpful to provide those raw materials.
Eating healthier, more nutrient-dense foods. Having selenium intake from eggs, fish, Brazilian nuts, just a handful of Brazilian nuts can check the box if a couple times a a week. It will help check that box there. Obviously managing stress, meditation, prayer, yoga, deep breaths with breath work, journaling, things like that.
We have we have uh hormone number four. So we just keep chugging through here. Leptin, your fullness hormone. Leptin is your fullness hormone. And and here's how I like to remember it so you can remember it too. You have leptin and ghrein. Leptin equals fool. Okay, fool has two L's in it. And and leptin starts with an L.
Full leptin is fool because I would get this confused earlier on. Leptin is starts with an L and full and it leptin is made in your fat cells and it is a fuel gauge. Keep going with some analogy so you guys can understand this. When it works right, it tells your brain, "We've got enough storage, stored energy. We have storage. We have excess calories.
We're good. We don't need to eat more." It it should help you feel less hungry and be able to burn more energy, but sometimes it gets jammed up. It gets overloaded when you have too much body fat and you're and you eat past that fullness all the time. So you block that signal and you don't recognize that bullness feeling.
Mike episode he was episode 43 talked about how his playbook was eat till 80% full and that did wild wonders for him. So that was a huge thing. What causes limp resistance? Something to pay attention to. If the the gauge gets stuck and it keeps saying that there's no energy there then that overeating frequency has to stop.
We have to find other lower calorie strategies instead of high calorie dense foods. Okay. When we manage leptin with less sugar and less junk food, we clean up the diet and have the protocol of a protein first meal, that really helps. Getting more sleep impacts leptin positively. Improving your blood markers, lowering your body fat percentage will improve leptin.
Having antioxidant rich foods, lots of decolorful foods helps with leptin. Getting your exercise, eating adequate amounts of protein help with leptin. Grein is the opposite. Grein, grein is the bad guy is it's the hunger hormone. Okay, how you can remember grein grein equals grumble. Leptin is full. Grein is grumble.
Your stomach grumbles when you when your ghrein is up. This is the hormone that gets produced in your stomach says we need food and you start your stomach starts to growl and the ghrelin is up right now and we have to do some sort of a pattern interrupt and not just stuff food in our face. Here's the the part most guys need and are challenged with.
Grein is like a scheduled alarm clock. If you always eat at certain times, then your body learns these times and starts ringing the bell like Pavlov's dog before the meal even shows up and you start feeling this desire to eat food and that ends up being why you end up eating in the first place. It's got nothing to do with fullness but just the timing of this.
Okay, it's a pattern that you have to be conscious of. And when you are in a fat loss phase, ghrein often gets louder. Stomach grumbles because your body is trying to protect you from actually losing weight. Think of a starvation, a famine, right? The body doesn't like that. Okay. When a some mental frameworks to help with this is when my stomach is hungry, that means ghrein is up. It's sending a signal.
It's not a command. Okay. We can it's just saying hey that's up. We when you pattern interrupt this could make a huge impact on the choices that you make once you recognize hunger is up. Okay? We don't want hunger up. You just want to know that it's a hormone signal and you're you're not going to die. No, no one's starved.
Anyone that I've worked with has always had plenty of access to food and not getting overly hungry and all. And so you want to make sure that you are controlling that signal and being prepared and planned out ahead. Protein at meals, fiber, sleep, avoid processed foods, you get the gist. Insulin is your blood sugar manager.
Insulin, everyone's heard of this, right? and your insulin is off and it struggles to keep up with the say the blood sugar production that you're eating in your b in your mouth, then you get type two diabetes. When your A1C goes up, you get type two diabetes. when your blood sugar levels are up.
And you can check out my improve your blood panel scorecard and I referenced that in the last episode in 46 and I'll I'll leave it in the show notes here on how to manage your your hormones a lot better and improve your blood panels to help you understand these things. That's why I'm doing this episode in the first place. Insulin is made in your pancreas.
Think of insulin as a key. Its job is to unlock the door and move your sugar from your blood into your muscle and livers, your liver cells to be used as energy. Okay? Insulin goes up that way and then it helps you manage those hunger levels there as you would need. Okay. What happens is that if you're constantly banging on the the pancreas to release more insulin because there's always excessive amounts of blood sugar level, then you end up getting insulin sensitive and having insulin resistance.
That's when you keep pushing more insulin out. It's it's like the lock is rusty and you can't get the key in. It's it still will turn, but you got to keep a lot of effort and get a lot more insulin released. So instead of say releasing five units of insulin, you have to release seven and then eight and then nine over a series of months or years.
Then your body is making literally just working harder to produce how you manage this. Okay, this is a problem. How you manage insulin by start eating in a calorie deficit. Losing body fat improves insulin sensitivity. It drops your A1C. It drops your fasting blood sugar levels in the morning or even the the ups and the downs of peaks and the valleys throughout the course of the day as well.
When you manage your food, eating less sugar, less processed foods would be the first thing. I recently had a guy join my program. He's down 11 pounds literally by just stopping drinking soda. This is one of those lowhanging fruit. Hey, can we swap it out for zero calorie sweetened beverages and water and then balance that out and he's down 11 pounds? This is Rosco.
Uh, it's incredible that because he's not banging on his blood sugar levels going through the roof. Something else that we can help is managing healthy fats. And I do like to make sure people are aware of their fat levels and controlling it and not overeing their fat levels because fat multiplies calories.
It's nine calories per gram of fat and four calories per gram of protein and carbs. And episode five I go over that in more detail. But having healthy fats and is a say 30% of your overall calorie intake of the day is excellent. olive oil, avocado, uh, nuts, seeds are going to be the main ones that you want. Of course, fiber.
We went over that. Fiber slows down the the ramping up of carbohydrates and blood sugar release in the blood vessel and in in the bless blood itself and getting the fiber. Regular exercise helps blunt blood sugar peaks because you're using the blood sugar that you just put into your mouth and you're going to use it to walk and move your body or work out.
That would be the best time to be able to manage that there. Okay, you eat sugary foods around workouts and then you use that sugar to help fuel exercise, activity, and energy. Hormone seven and we'll wrap up here. Estrogen and testosterone, right? The male female hormones, the sex hormones.
And and we just want to have make sure that we have the right amount of both. This isn't something you can guess on. You literally have to get tested for it. Men and women need both testosterone and estrogen just in the right balance because it affects your body weight. It's a mess and you how your body stores fat. Uh when these hormones are out of balance, the losing weight is a lot harder.
And for men, testosterone makes weight fat loss feel impossible. It's like you're dragging a sled or again going back to the reference earlier, pushing a boulder uphill. Not because fat loss is a huge challenge if you are in a calorie deficit, but because your energy drops. You have no gusto, no mojo to go to the gym and work out.
your energy drops, training drops, your ability to work out and gain muscle mass, and especially if we're in our 40s and 50s, you're already struggling with that. [snorts] You're doing everything right, but your your testosterone is 200. You need to get that up. And we want to do it through actually doctor, not the test boosters or something.
Those things are garbage. All right? Just don't do it. I do an episode on supplements and that's on episode probably around nine or 11 on supplements, but you don't want to use those garbage things because they're a waste of money. How can we do it naturally with boosting it? Well, vitamin D, anti-inflammatory foods, eating protein, having enough calories, lifting weights, managing stress, keeping your body fat low, and this is the game change.
The big picture here, what you need to understand, taking away from all seven of these hormones, actually eight if you want to count testosterone and estrogen, but here's what you need to understand. All the hormones work together. It's not like, oh, my insulin is off and I'm doomed. You know, you're you're not doomed. By changing your lifestyle, changing all these core four, sleep, hydration, nutrition, and fitness or movement, then you can have a lot more say on how you look and feel.
And if you do get blood work, you may need to get some interventions there, but the doctor will be able to help you manage those if they are accep general care physician or you go to a specialist that manages these labs better. Okay, that's where these fundamentals move the needle. What's the action plan? Well, I hope you learned a lot in this episode.
I hope you identified some of these things. learn say leptin and ghrein. Leptin is feeling full. We want that. Grein is feeling hungry. We don't want that. So, we want to use food strategies to help us stay full or drink water. If you just went to the doctor and you didn't get a clear, you got the packet pamphlet that says, "Hey, eat this food, don't eat that, or stop eating carbs and working out or eat better and and go exercise.
" And you want a little more clarity. Well, I'll have a a an offer you can get the improve your blood panels scorecard. It'll go over everything that you need from what you're eating to get it'll give you a a fast and easy protocol to be able to start up and pick up with. And then you'll get some emails that have nutrition advice, a little exercise advice and stuff to quick wins in the next three days to start seeing and feeling a little better response in your body.
So, you can check that out in the show notes. I want to thank you so much. I hope that this helps you learn a bit more on managing your overall health, your fat loss journey, your chronic issue, illness issues that you might have and you can be able to manage those all these variables here. Again, this isn't medical advice. These are just practical tools to help you and see how your body responds in a way that helps you be successful here.
If your labs are trending in the wrong direction, you literally need to do something about it because you will get put on medicine and you ultimately one med leads to more and you have significant more problems to try and get off of them. Okay? And we do not want medicine. We don't want risk of heart disease because it's a killer of men.
Cardiovascular disease, heart attack, stroke, and diabetes is on the rise more than ever because of the foods that you eat and the lifestyle that you live. Well, thank you so much. I appreciate your time today. Comment below. Let me know how this is going. Share this with an is a friend that wants to start talking about testosterone or insulin and hopefully they will learn something too.
Over and out. Off we go.