Dr. Rick Tague walks through why people gain weight even when they're trying not to. Timing matters: life stage, medications, medical conditions, and stress all play a role. Common culprits include appetite disorders, metabolism shifts from menopause or poor sleep, nutritional deficiencies, and medications like birth control that can add 20 to 100+ pounds.
Chapters
One of the things I do with each and every patient is do an assessment of what has caused their unwanted weight gain. For each of my patients, they never wanted to gain a single extra pound, and yet often they've gained 20 pounds, 40 pounds, 80 pounds, 100 pounds of unwanted weight against their will. And these are typically individuals that are very capable, goal oriented, disciplined people, successful in their careers, successful in their family lives. And yet weight gain has happened regardless of what they've tried on their own. And there's always explanations that make sense once we analyze it with the proper tools, once we do our comprehensive history and understand what stage of life the weight gain occurred during and what medications the person was on, what medical conditions were happening at the same time, what life stresses were occurring. Sometimes it's illnesses, injuries, stress of divorce, or losing a loved one. There's all sorts of factors that contribute to weight gain. There often times are appetite disorders that occur in our patients where they don't know when they're full. They can eat and eat, and yet their brain doesn't give them the right signal of it, telling them automatically when they've had enough and it's time for them to stop eating. So, so people keep eating beyond the point of fullness, and that can trigger weight gain. For many of my patients, there are metabolism disorders that occur. We know that's common in women as they go through menopause. The metabolism slows down, but stress can cause metabolism disorders, sleep disturbances. Nutritional deficiencies are epidemic in America right now. So vitamin deficiencies, mineral deficiencies, even protein deficiency can slow the metabolism down to the point of causing fat gain in the body. We also know that there are certain hormone treatments that occur in women, especially birth control treatments, hormone imbalances that can cause weight gain. There are many medications that cause unwanted weight gain, either by triggering an increase in the appetite, cravings for carbohydrates, or by changing the metabolism and how the body manages calories, and that can end up causing unwanted weight gain.
