Dr. Kent Holtorf is the founder and medical director of the Holtorf Medical Group, which brings individualized cutting-edge medical care directly to its patients. Dr. Kent Holtorf has been widely recognized for his work as an Endocrinologist, and for finding solutions for difficult-to-treat medial issues.
One of Dr. Holtorf’s specialities is weight loss. Weight loss and maintaining one’s ideal weight have become more of a lifestyle rather than an unwanted daily routine. People have become more health-conscious and focused on losing weight. However, according to Dr. Holtorf, leptin resistance, along with too much dieting and exercise can ultimately cause damage to your metabolism and make it difficult to lose weight.
Dr. Holtorf explains how leptin resistance makes it difficult to shed pounds even with the right amount of diet and exercise. Unless the leptin resistance is addressed, which causes lowered metabolism, the feeling of always being hungry, both men and women will have difficulty losing weight regardless of their diet and exercise routines.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUICbxe9sBs[/youtube]Dr. Kent Holtorf:
“Hello, it’s Dr. Kent Holtorf, Medical Director of the Holtorf Medical Group.
The question I get a lot is patients come in a say “I’ve just been dieting and exercising and I cant get this weight off, what can you do?” Well there’s a lot of new interesting studies and research going on with weight loss.
One of them is leptin resistance. What is that? Well, your body will secrete leptin as you gain weight from the fat cells; it should go back and tell the brain “hey, we got enough stored fat”. So the brain then tells the body to increase metabolism, decrease appetite, increase your thyroid and tell the body to start burning fat…
When they found this hormone about 15 years ago, they gave leptin to rats – it would be a new miracle hormone..they all lost weight. But when they gave it to people, especially women, it didn’t work. They said “what is going on?”
What they found is most people, especially women who have difficulty losing weight, have a leptin resistance. So, what happened here is leptin goes up as normally it should, but the brain doesn’t see it- it’s resistant to it, so your brain thinks your body is starving. So what it does, it lowers your metabolism so you burn less calories, it basically stimulates you appetite so you’re always hungry, lowers your thyroid so that lowers you metabolism and tells the body to store fat.
So unless you address that leptin resistance, you’re going to have a very difficult time losing weight. Well how do you diagnose it? Basically a leptin above 12 shows you have leptin resistance. So just much like insulin resistance is high insulin, leptin resistance is the same, showing that your body is not recognizing it.
What also happens when people diet significantly and exercise too much, especially women, the body will send stress and lower your thyroid levels. But what it does is that the standard thyroid test will not pick this up; it will actually, because the TSH is normal- your body will start making a substance called reverse T3 which actually blocks the thyroid receptor to lower your metabolism. So unless a doctor is checking the free T3 reverse and ratio, you wont pick this up.
And especially again the more you diet, it basically it lowers your metabolism by, on average, 25%, and when you go back to normal eating, it doesn’t go back to normal. So when people say I wrecked my metabolism, they have.
And we’ll check everyone’s metabolism we find most people who have been dieting or have difficulty losing weight, have 25% lower metabolism, and so basically you either have to eat 500 calories a day just not to gain weight, then be starving or exercise for an hour/hour and a half, just to stay even. So really, just diet and exercise and all the new fad diets and all these new exercise programs – it’s a losing battle because the more you do, the lower your metabolism. You’ll get a quick burst of metabolism, but it will drop, because the body senses those reduced calories and the stress, especially in women. Men can get away with a lot of exercise – their body is more designed for that, but women especially.. more exercise and more dieting just doesn’t work. So you really need to address those issues.”
The Holtorf Medical Group centers for hormone imbalance, hypothyroidism and fatigue specialize in thyroid disorders, fatigue, chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, Lyme disease, bio-identical hormone replacement for men and women, low libido, weight loss, heart disease, I.V. therapy, Hashimoto’s disease, hypothyroidism and thyroiditis.
For new patient appointments please call 877. 508.1177
For more information on the Holtorf Medical Group please visit www.holtorfmed.com.
