Weight Loss Isn't Working — Your Brain Is Blocking It

0:00Have you ever felt like your body is fighting against you? You're eating clean, you're exercising, you're counting every single calorie, but the scale still won't budge. But if the problem isn't your discipline, what if your brain is widely put your body into survival mode? Today we're uncovering why lasting weight loss may have nothing to do with full power. Welcome back to the show, everyone. If you've ever looked at someone and thought, I'm doing everything that they're doing. Why isn't it working for me? Then this episode is for you. Millions of people struggle with weight gain. They count calories, they cut carbs, they spend hours in the gym, and still can't lose weight. Eventually, many began blaming themselves. But what if it's not a motivation problem? What if your brain is actually protecting your current weight? Back again, joining us is Deborah Amerigopolis. She's a board-certified Falmy Nurse Practitioner, founder of Genesis Health Products, creator of Genesis Gold and Sacred Seven,

1:02author of the hypothalamus handbook, and she is internationally known as the Hormone Queen. For more than 30 years, Deborah has helped patients uncover the hidden root causes behind hormone imbalance, metabolic dysfunction, and treatment-resistant weight gain. So today she's going to explain why your hypothalamus not your well power may be the biggest factor determining whether you lose weight or you keep gaining it. Deborah, welcome back to the show. I'm super excited. This is another amazing topic. Last time we talked about menopause, Perry menopause. And this time we're talking about weight and women especially struggle with this as they get into midlife. It's a big, big problem. It really is. Thank you for having me, Lisa. Yes, weight issues that creeping weight inability to maintain your youthful weight. Maybe you have maintained your weight, but you're noticing you're pinching fat around your metal that you didn't see.

2:02And God forbid your weight stays the same, but you're widening out. That means you're losing muscle mass and bone mass and replacing it with body fat. It's a big issue. It's not only unsightly for you that you feel like, oh, I don't love the way I look now. It's also not good for your health. When you lose lean body mass and muscle mass and bone mass, when you lose that, you're not as metabolically active. And so you end up putting on more body fat usually around your middle and from the middle all the way up to the armpits and a lot of my menopausal midlife women will say, what is this back fat I'm getting? That's it. Your bra never pinched you like that. Well, it's because you have extra padding all through your torso, like a bear trying to hibernate for the winter. Yeah. And we've all heard the phrase, coaches all the time say, eat less and move more, but that simply doesn't work. Why is that the case? Because your hypothalamus,

3:04which we've discussed in the previous episodes, is the controller of your metabolism and your weight set point, along with all of your hormones, your neurochemistry, it controls everything. But it will defend your weight set point. That is what it feels is your safe weight against all odds, especially when you're dieting for a long period of time. It sees you as nutritionally deficit in. When you're constantly yo-yoing, trying to yo-yo with your weight, it's going to bring you right back up to that weight set point again. It's trying to defend that weight set point until it feels safe, until it gets everything that it needs to coordinate your survival and help you to thrive It'll hold on to the weight that you were stable at the longest, even if that weight isn't a healthy weight for you. So can you talk more about that? So how does your hypothalamus decide what weight your body wants to defend? So what happens is that your hypothalamus sets at the weight that you were safe at one point.

4:06But if you slowly crept up over the years, or in the middle years, you're slowly creeping up and you're under a lot of stress and your hormones are plummeting. And your gut's out of balance, and you have a lot of inflammation. It has to deal with all of those other things that really, really deal with your survival. Gotta get the inflammation out, get your hormones back into balance, calm down the gut, control the nervous system. So it's going to hold on to that weight set point. Remember the hypothalamus controls your hunger, your satiety, how it wins your sati-ing, when you've had enough, your sense of fullness. It controls basically your insulin sensitivity. It's what is sensitive to the hormones like grayling your hunger hormone, or leptin, your fat storage hunger hormone. All of those messages are coming through the hypothalamus. And while, you know, in the most recent years, you've been looking at GLP1's to control hunger and satiety, that is really just one button in the hypothalamus that needs to be pushed in order to control your metabolism, the hormones that control your metabolism,

5:08as well as that weight set point. So if your hypothalamus isn't supported, while you're losing weight, it just feels safe. It's not getting the new transit needs. It's not living in the circadian rhythm that is natural for it. What will happen is it'll just defend the old weight set point that you were born before. And every dieter knows this, every woman who's ever tried to lose weight knows that she'll lose five pounds and gain seven pounds. Ten pounds and gain 12 pounds. You know, she's constantly putting it back on because she's has not been able to really, really support her hypothalamus in a way that it will accept a lower caloric intake, a higher caloric expenditure, more activity, a little less food. If it's dealing with a dream, all set are functioning normally, ovaries that are giving up, thyroid, that's not functioning normally, a gut that's not functioning normally, chronic inflammation everywhere, toxicity. It's going to say, wait, we can't lose this weight right now because we've got to deal with some other things first.

6:10Yeah, I hear other women talk about this and I'm actually going through this right now, where I had mentioned before that I just went on some, like HRT for my hormones, where I wake up in the morning, my cortisol seems to be really, really high. So I feel like I'm in like a fight or flight for no reason. And then as my day goes on by three o'clock, I'm slowly starting to feel like I can conquer the world. But during the day, I really have no hunger. It's like, I don't feel like I need to eat by 8 p.m. on the other hand, all of a sudden, I'm like, oh my gosh, I need to eat all of the things. Do you know why that happens? Well, when your cortisol levels high, which happens when you're under chronic stress or when you're going through periodinopause, like you are at least that, your cortisol level tends to be a little bit higher. It's not recognizing the fact that your estrogen and your progesterone levels are lowering. It's not appreciating a lower progesterone level. Adrenals are in panic mode. So more cortisol is produced to release more stored sugars

7:12so that you can run the system. And what happens is you don't feel hungry because you got all this sugar floating around your bloodstream from your storage. It's not that you beat it. And then by the end of the day, you've run out of storage. And now you've got to refill the pantry again. You've got to refill all that sugar storage. So you eat, eat, eat right when you should be going to sleep. So then you keep your pipe with almas up because now it's got to digest your food. Orca straight, the digestion absorption. It can't deal with cleaning out your inflammation. So your cortisol level stays high during the night time and you wake up all jacked up with high on cortisol. And no hunger. Right. Yeah, absolutely. And I mean that I hear from a lot of women that are in their mid-40s that feel like they could eat everything at night time when their body feels good. It's the worst time for them to eat. It's the worst time to eat. If I, for all of my overweight patients, the very first thing I ask them to do is stop eating after dark.

8:12I don't want you to get calories. I'm not going to tell you what to eat. We'll get you on some hypophilomic nutraceutical support with the Genesis Gold. And I just want you to stop eating after dark. Do that for me. Try that. And it's hard at first. But it's pretty amazing what happens when you do that one thing. I just had a patient come in like that, struggling with her weight for a long time. And she has quite a bit of weight to lose. Most of it's kind of emotional. She's an emotional eater. But she tend to eat mostly at night. Like most people who are overweight, they save all their calories tonight at night time because they're not hungry in the morning. And so I told her that one thing. I'm like, we're going to do this one thing. You're just not going to eat after 5 p.m. Now, it's summertime. So 5 p.m. it was still light. So I told her 5 p.m. specifically because there was a really good study on mid-40s. And what it looked at, the timing of eating. And they had the middle age people just stop eating after 5 plus the control group ate whenever. The ones who stopped eating after 5, not only lost weight,

9:12but all of their inflammatory markers went down. Other chronic disease markers went down. You know, it took a while, but everything was coming down. Well, this I gave that study to the patient. She said, okay, I'm going to try it. Comes back a month later. She lost 15 pounds. Wow. You had a 15 pounds weight to lose. Not so 15 pounds was just a little bit that she needed to lose. But she'd never seen that kind of weight loss with just one change in her dietary fat. Yeah. I think it's like really confusing right now because you go on social media or wherever. And there's all these fads going on right now. There's also a lot of people talking about fasting. And so you're they're not eating until like 1 or 2 p.m. the next day on purpose. And so I think it just gets really confusing. I think people just don't know what to do. It is confusing because the whole intermittent fasting has been a big thing. And yes, for the blood work and the initial like short term, we do see changes in blood sugar. We'll see people lose some weight.

10:14Their guts may be a little bit better. But for the long term, for the hypothalamus health, if you're not eating in a circadian circadian clock, it's going to defend that old weight set point. So they bounce right back up to weight when they start eating again, you know, in a larger window. So I have been telling my patients for over 30 years, it's circadian fasting, not intermittent fasting. You eat during the daytime, you don't eat after dark. If you could do that one thing, the hypothalamus will be happy. It'll go into nocturnal mode, albeit digesting late at night. So it's not going to interfere with your sleep. Your metabolism will be higher because you'll wake up hungry, which is a really good thing. You should wake up hungry like a little kid wanting her cereal, right, right, first thing in the morning. That's a healthy metabolism. That means your insulin and blood sugar levels are nice and low when you woke up and your hypothalamus woke up and said, oh my gosh, I need some, I need some blood sugar. So it puts out dopamine to wake up your whole system, turn that prolactin down,

11:15tells the adrenal glands to put out cortisol to release stored sugar, and then you break your fast. You have breakfast, okay? And once your fast is broken, it's going to take a while to get those nutrients in, but your cortisol rescued your hypothalamus in that moment because the hypothalamus said, I need some help here. And you have a little sugar going on. If you don't break your fast and you're in that slow metabolic mode, what you want is a high metabolic mode, first thing in the morning. So by waking up hungry and having breakfast, you don't want to bother me. Is that why so many women, especially, are so tired in the morning and can't get out of bed? If they're eating late at night, is that the cause of that? That is partially because they produced prolactin much later at night than they should have. It has an eight hour window. And so they're still on prolactin first thing in the morning when they should not be. And that's actually slowing their metabolism down. It's blocking their hormone levels, their hormones can't get into the cells. They feel like they're sleepwalking.

12:16That's the person who needs caffeine. What first thing in the morning when she wakes up, she has to have it. Because she can't stimulate her own dopamine production, her own adrenaline, her own cortisol without that. Interesting. I'm you're calling me out here. That's so me. So there's a concept that I would love for you to explain to the audience. It is leptin resistance. Can you explain that in simple terms? Yes. So leptin is a hormone produced by your fat cell. And it tells your hypothalamus that the fat cells neither need more fat. You need to store more fat or it's full enough. You have enough. Your fat cells are full enough. So you're born with so many fat cells. Okay. So the difference between a thin person and a hardy person, they have the same amount of fat cells. It's just how big those fat cells are. So your leptin is produced from the fat cells to say, hey, we got enough in here. We've got enough storage.

13:16Don't worry. We can run a marathon. You can run on the on the spat here. If you're constantly overeating, if you're constantly over nourishing yourself, you're just a heavy eater, you're constantly overeating, the leptin signals, even though those fat cells are full, get louder and the starts becoming resistance to the leptin signals, just like insulin resistance. It's kind of like it's just so loud. It closes its ears. It's no longer hearing that leptin signal. So you keep up that whole hunger cascade. I'm still hungry, even though my fat cells are full in that. Leptin resistance is at the root, and it's a hypothalamic issue of really morbidly obese people. People have very, very high weights and they can't seem to get it down. It's because they are leptin resistant. So their brain thinks they're starving, even though they have plenty of body fat? Exactly. Because they're not hearing the message. The hypothalamus is not hearing the leptin message, and it keeps telling the person,

14:17you need to eat more. And so more grayland is produced, which is the hunger hormone, and they're very sensitive to grayland, but not sensitive to leptin. They're hungry, hungry, hungry, but they can't seem to know when they've had enough that the pantry's... Yeah, that must be incredibly frustrating. Yes. Unconfusing. I mean, if you're eating a lot of food and you still feel like you can eat more, I know we've all been there, but if that happens all the time, that must feel really, really frustrating for people. It can be very stressful for people to walk. One of the things you'll see to you is people will, after they eat, they'll have a feeling that they have to have sugar. They just eat, but they have to have sugar. They have to have a sweet. They have to have dessert. And that's usually their adrenal glands. They just haven't gotten enough. Like they just haven't gotten that reserved. You're leptin resistant. You're not letting... You're not releasing the fat to use for energy. We've run out of glycogen stores. And so the body's saying,

15:18I need some sugar now, because I don't have time for you to absorb this protein in fat. So that's part of what happens with that leptin resistance is you create sugars after you eat, even though you've had a full meal, because your body needs the sugar right now. It should be getting it from your sugars. But you've run out of that. Yeah, it's interesting how our society has dessert after meals, even though it's so bad for us. Casual dessert is not going to hurt you. But if you have to have it, because you don't feel like you've eaten and you can't function, then that usually means something's wrong in the HPA axis. That had the phlegmic pituitary adrenal axis. And you may be developing insulin resistance and leptin resistance. Interesting. So I want to talk about something else. So stress, poor sleep, and hormones. You describe the cortisol insulin thyroid triad. Can you explain how all these systems work together? So the hypofamus produces a big master hormone called POMC, pro-opiumolana core. And when it breaks down,

16:20it becomes cortical releasing factor to tell the pituitary gland to stimulate the adrenal stegritus cortisol. It becomes thyroid releasing factor to tell the pituitary gland to stimulate the thyroid to release thyroid hormones. It becomes glucose factor, which actually tells the pancreas to release insulin and tells the liver how much glycogen it needs to store. So you get this triad of the three main organs that are part of your ability to store fat or not, controlling your metabolism, your adrenals, your thyroid, and your pancreas's insulin production. All controlled by the hypofamus, when it becomes out of balance, any one of those three, but when they're all three out of balance, you, it'll lead to obesity. Because your metabolism just slows down. Can someone's thyroid look completely normal in lab results and they can still struggle to lose weight? Absolutely. So what I see a lot is somebody who is overweight

17:21and they have hypofyroid symptoms. Maybe they're kind of cold all the time. Maybe they're having hair, they're actually losing hair, their constipate is, their guts kind of slow. They're just tired. They just don't have much energy. If they keep moving, they're good, but if they sit down, they feel like they're going to have a tick and anap. Okay, that's typical of low thyroid function. But you look at their hormone levels and they're making thyroid hormone, maybe low end normal, but they're making it. But if you look at their TSH, thyroid stimulating hormone, that's also low. Both of them are at the low end of normal. That is a problem with the hypofamus pituitary thyroid axis. The communication is of working. That thyroid hormone should be going to the hypofamus to tell the pituitary gland whether to make more or not. So thyroid hormones high, the pituitary gland will be told to put out more, less TSH, if thyroid hormones low, the pituitary gland will be told to put out more TSH. So it's like a sea saw, right? We don't see that. We see both on the low end of normal.

18:22Very typical in my patients who feel like it's their, their body temperature is low, feels like it's their thyroid, but it's not showing on labs. That's a hypochlamic issue. That's the hypochlamic problem. It's not that their thyroid can't produce the hormones. It's that the hormones aren't being received by the hypochlamus. It's not reading it properly. And what about chronic stress? How does chronic stress affect our metabolism? So when you're under chronic stress, your body, it's particularly your hypothelous orchestrating your body. It's trying to get away from danger. Even if the stressor isn't a real danger, like a tiger chasing you. If it's financial stress or emotional stressors, you know, relationship stress, whatever you're going through, and you're perceiving it as a stressor, your hypothelous is reacting just as if a tiger's chasing you. The idea behind fight or flight is that you release enough cortisol to fuel the fight or flight. So you can do that sugar so you can get away from the danger, right? But if you're in chronic stress, you're chronically firing at HPA access, the hypochlamic, the curitirial adrenal access

19:24with that chronic stress. You eventually get kind of resistant to insulin because we no longer need sugar anymore. And the insulin resistance starts in the hypothelous and it says, why do we have so much sugar here? I don't need all that. So it becomes resistant to insulin. So we don't get any more into the hypothelous. You get peripheral into the lens resistance. Your body's not taking anything anymore. That will lead to you now taking all that extra sugar to the liver, repatting it as a triglyceride, a triple sugar, and storing it in your fat cells. Interesting, that makes sense. In terms of what we're doing to make this essentially worse, what are some everyday habits that people are doing that is quietly making this worse? That's a really good question. But first of all, eating after dark is making it worse. We just talked about that. Second is saving your high activity and stressful things like intense exercise and stress later in the day and at night

20:24so that your hypothelous step will go into nocturnal mode and it's still in that hyped up stress mode. You're still being chased by the tiger. Okay. Are people who go to the gym afterward? Exactly. It's much better for your metabolism to eat earlier, exercise earlier. Then you have a high metabolism for like 24 hours. But when you exercise late, it gives you a cortisol spike which interferes with your nocturnal hormones. Your hypothelmosis are going to settle down. You're not going to make as much melatonin. And so you never go into that rest mode and there's this constant inflammation that's going on because you're not rest. Your body's not settling down. Okay. And so you end up having cellular effects, tissue effects. It affects your glands, it affects your brain. So that high stress is really damaging to your body. Eventually, the hypothelmosis, I can't handle all of this inflammation. So when you start to diet, I've been to cut my calories. I'm going to exercise more. It's like you are so inflamed. We cannot afford for you to cut the calories

21:26or exercise more. So we're going to hold on, we're going to resist you. We're going to, it's like you're climbing up a mountain. Hypothelmosis, we're not going to let you lose that because we do not have time to detox. Everything coming out of your fat cells and also deal with all the inflammation that's happening because you've been under so much stress. We got to deal with the stress first. So when you do things out of that circadian rhythm, you know, you're eating at night and you're not sleeping, you're exercising too late. That is a setup for becoming, and if not overweight, chronic diseases, like heart disease, stroke, metabolic conditions, diabetes. So if you guys are there and listening to this and you're like, this is so me, I challenge you to go to Deborah's website. She has created a free hypothelmosis reset bundle that explains how the body's master control center affects your metabolism, hormone stress response and overall health. And so you're going to find that link in today's show notes.

22:26So please check that out. So Deborah, this is a big one. I know you mentioned it, but I want to talk about GLP1 medications because so many people are asking about them. You make an interesting distinction. You don't necessarily say they're wrong. You say they don't solve the whole problem. Can you explain that for the audience, please? So the GLP1 receptor site agonist, so they actually plug into the receptor site of GLP1, gluten-like peptide in the gut and at the hypothelamic level. In the gut, what that does is it slows your gastric motility. So everything kind of, you're going to feel full if things aren't moving through at the same rate. In your hypothelmos, it makes you feel like you're satiated. So it suppresses your hunger somewhat. But that is only one button in that one receptor site, one hormone that the hypothelmos receives that helps to control your metabolism. So just because you're not hungry anymore doesn't mean that you're metabolically safe to lose the weight.

23:30So typically people on GLP1s, they lose weight, but what they lose is muscle. They lose a lot of muscle. And when you lose lean body mass, in some studies show up to 40% of the weight loss is lean body mass muscle and some bone. You become less metabolically active. So when you stock the GLP1 and you go back to your normal diet, your normal intake, you gain back that much more fat. You, that's why the yo-yoing weight, okay? Now you've got so much more fat in those fat cells and the hypothelmos is like trying to hold on to whatever weight set point it felt safe at. It didn't feel safe when you were destroying your own muscles to lose that weight. You were using that protein. So that lean body mass loss is a huge issue. But you know, you've got your left and resistance, you've got your insulin resistance, you've got your GLP1. We know that the hypothelmos controls the metabolism through the thyroid, it controls mitochondrial energy output through the thyroid.

24:31It controls so many aspects of detoxification that when you're only pushing one button, you're not really controlling the whole thing, okay? And by not controlling the whole metabolic layout that you're going to gain that weight back again. It'd be very difficult to get the GLP1s off. When I have my patients who have already supported their hypothelmos with my nutraceutical genesis skull, go on to GLP1s, they are much more successful because their weight set point naturally drops as they're losing weight. Now they still have to eat lots of protein. They still have to do the weight resistance exercise. They still have to eat within a circadian window of during the daylight, but they will be able to maintain their weight set point. If they do just the GLP1s and they're not supported by their hypothelmos, their hypothelmos doesn't get that nutraceutical support, they will gain it back. It's very difficult. So what do GLP1 medications do well? They tell your body you're not hungry anymore. And when you're not hungry anymore, you eat less. And that helps to reduce insulin resistance

25:31because you're just taking in less calories. So that is actually good. So it helps people over the hump of, I can't even begin to stop eating. So those people who are like so hungry, they have hyperphasia, they're eating all the time, they're mostly eating, it really helps. And we've seen it help people like who have addictive eating behaviors or even alcoholism. It does help to push that button, but that's just one button. So it's a tool in the toolbox, but it's not the only tool. And if the hypothelmos is supported, you're not gonna see long-term weight loss. You're gonna see, you'll see weight loss, but you'll have less germ muscle. You'll have lost bone. You want fat loss. You want to lose your fat, that all that fat in those cells. That's what you're going for. So being smaller doesn't necessarily mean that you're healthier. Right, absolutely. And as we get older, we lose that bone mass and muscle mass as it is. So we have to continue doing that. So it won't address the main root that the GLB wants.

26:31Yeah, so the GLB, I want to say, it's just pushing the one button, but it's not addressing the whole issue. One way to look at it is, if you think of your body as like a computer, okay, that's the hard drive. And you think of all of your hormones and GLB ones are like software programs. The hypothelmos is the operating systems. So just changing one software program by introducing GLB-1 receptors like Agnes, the shot, or, you know, so kind of compound, that's just one software. If the operating systems is functioning properly, you're not gonna get a lasting effect and get this body, this hard drive. That makes sense. Yeah, and then that makes sense that the weight would come back then after people stop taking them. Because they're not, again, they're not addressing the root problem. It is definitely in an aid and I'm not against them. I just think that it needs to be in a holistic picture. And a holistic picture isn't just exercise and protein. It's also hypothelomic support. You gotta do it all because you're gonna gain it. Yeah. Especially my middle age women,

27:32you know, I'll talk with them and they'll say, you know, I just haven't been at my ideal weight forever and they'll be like, no, no, wait, and they name a weight from their college years. I'm like, did you know that you gain a big percentage of your bone mass after your 20s into your early 30s? So you haven't reached top bone mass until you're in your early 30s. So that weight then is actually more your ideal weight than what you were on your teens and 20s. And they're trying to go back to 20 years old instead of 32 or 33. Now, if they lose that weight, they're trying to go back to that weight. I almost always see they've lost bone mass and they lost muscle mass. And I can still pinch that. They're like, why do I stop a belly? Because you didn't lose fat. You lost muscle and bone. Same thing happens in bigger picture with somebody who's overweight. We don't want them losing muscle. We want the, or bone. We want them losing fat. So I'm much more into measuring body composition than going by the scale. The scale doesn't tell me what I need to know.

28:32Your body composition tells me much more when I need to. Absolutely. Yeah, I love that. So Debra, you brought another patient's story with you today. Do you want to talk about it? Yeah. So I had a patient who came to me and she was in her mid 40s. Again, like a parent and a puzzle patient. She was overweight. And her main reason she came to see me is she wanted to lose weight so she could get a job promotion. And that was great. And she was a good like 30, 40 pounds overweight. She was significantly overweight. But she was whole, you know, she held it pretty well. So she didn't look really good that she felt like in her suits and things. So she really wanted to get this job from a shadow lose this weight. Now she was super active. She was an active cyclist long distance. And it wasn't that she wasn't exercising. And she was also had followed all kinds of diets. You know, she tried keto and paleo and she tried intermittent fasting and everything worked for a little while. And then she'd yo-yo right back up. So I explained to her that without that hypoplamic support, we were not going to be able to set her weight set point at that lower point, okay?

29:33That she needed so that she actually saw that her body was sculpting down to the size she wanted to be. Now she had an issue because none of my patients are easy. She also had a prolactinoma. She had a tumor on her pituitary gland that produced too much prolactin. And remember earlier in the show, I told you that prolactin blocked your hormone receptors. So yeah. We, she was on a prolactin, you know, shrink a tumor, shrinking drug. But again, it wasn't looking at the whole picture. So we, we gave her hypoplamic support. And part of her issue too, as most women know, when they go through period to period, it's get really irregular. And sometimes they get really heavy. Curse was so healthy because that high prolactin level that she was hemorrhaging. So she was like losing days out of the week where she couldn't work or exercise or anything. She couldn't even leave the house because she was having such heavy bleeding. And she was a knee-mick. So all we did, we did not change her drug. We just added the hypoplamic support. Okay.

30:33They were a little progesterone to kind of calm her periods down a little bit. And in seven months, she lost 30 pounds. Wow. And then that, if you see, you wouldn't believe that that's all she lost because she sent me a picture. And it's her nice trim self with the giant pair of pants that look like they're three times her size this one. That's what she was in before starting this. Okay. She's been able to maintain that weight loss. It's been 10 years. And she's well into menopause at this point. Okay. She's incredible. She's already exercising. She was eating well, but we finally reset the hypoplamic weight set point. But the biggest thing she noticed before she even started losing the weight is her periods became lighter. And she was able to exercise all week long and she could do the things she loved to do. She wasn't hemorrhaging anymore. She was like, I can't believe what's happening because your hypothalamus controls your menstrual cycle. It controls a lot of things. So when somebody's coming in with their weight issue, I like to look at everything. What's your channels are doing? What are their ovaries doing? What's there? Is there thyroid doing? Is there that absorbing nutrients?

31:35What else is going on? We're not just gonna focus on the weight piece. Okay. I know that's the most important thing for them, but that's not the only thing that may be going on. And I may be the only one. So that's why they come. Yeah, absolutely. It's so important to look at the whole picture because sometimes you don't know what's causing it. So you have to do that. Otherwise, you're treating something that might not be the cause. I'm curious as to ways that can people really support their hypothalamus without their nutraceutical support? There are, I actually have five pillars that I recommend to support your hypothalamus. The nutraceutical support is one of them. Another pillar is basically sleep. Trying to get deep sleep in the dark, get off your screens after dusk, eat at least three to four hours before you go to bed. Getting that deep sleep every night is really good for your hypothalamus. It allows it to heal. It allows it to do its job properly and really can orchestrate that whole not-turnal hormonal. So that's really important. Activity, moving, exercising your intense exercise early

32:38in the day, early in the morning, preferably. So one exercise class in the morning, one run or jog or fast bike ride in the morning won't be enough if you're sitting on your bottom all day long. You got to get up and move around. Your hypothalamus will set your weight set point and your metabolism lower if you don't move. Okay? So you need to move around. Get up every hour and move around. And then what you're eating is really important. A plant-based diet with enough protein, especially if you're losing weight, it's more than you think. And sometimes it's hard to get that much protein in. So when you're actively losing weight, especially people on GLP ones, they need to eat quite a bit of protein. They're talking about 1.2 to 1.6 grams per kilogram of body weight. That is a lot of protein. So how much would that, if someone was, let's make it easy number, like 150 pounds, how much protein would they need? They would need minimum, about 175 minimum grams of protein.

33:39That is a lot. So look at your hand. So what does that look like in a day? Yeah, so look at your hand. The palm of your hand, if it was chicken or fish or meat, would be about 20 to 25 grams of protein and that much chicken fish or meat, three and a half to four ounces. So you were talking about 16 ounces of meat, talking a few eggs, we're talking dairy products, we're talking nuts and seeds, you probably won't be able to get that much in. You're gonna probably have to use a protein supplement like way protein or something to try to boost that protein in. Nobody can start that high. It's hard to do. We literally don't even make that much stomach acid to start with. So I usually have them like half that and get to there and then add another 50% and get to there and then another like slowly get that up because it is difficult. Middle age women, even if you're not trying to lose weight, you need to eat a significant amount of protein as well. I like to go not by body weight but by lean body mass.

34:39So you may be 150 pounds, but if you're only a hundred pounds of lean body mass, that means you've got 50 pounds of water and fat or since you're 125 pounds and a hundred pounds of lean body mass, you look a lot leaner, right? Because you got mostly lean body. Yeah, absolutely. So it really is about what your lean body masses and your lean body mass minimum needs a half gram to three quarters gram per pound of lean body mass minimum, 50 to 75 grams every single day. Not too hard to do, but then if I'm trying to lose weight on top of that, I don't up my protein. I'm gonna eat away my lean body mass to get that protein to actually, that becomes the protein instead of eating the chicken or the fish. Does that mean? It was on the trend of intermittent fasting and I noticed that when I would wake up and have like eggs and quinoa and some vegetables or whatever I was having in the morning, on my anxiety started going down and so that made me stopped in my tracks and I was like, okay, this is interesting. Sorry, I dug deeper into it.

35:40And yeah, women do need a lot of protein. More than we know. More than we realize, more than we realize, and we need to just make sure that every meal, I tell my patients, every meal, make sure you have a little bit of protein. Even if that's like a handful of nuts, then you're having a snack. Don't just, the fruit's great, but have some nuts with it or not but it or something. Have a little protein every single time you eat. It satiates you. It provides your body with the extra protein that you're not getting and because you're probably not taking in enough and it stabilizes your blood sugar. So you don't get that anxiety little spikes like looking for sugar. Protein takes longer to break down to actually become fuel and your body's not gonna use protein for fuel first. It wants carbs first for fuel. So it takes longer in that slowing down of the whole process of digestion helps to stabilize the blood sugar as well. It's one of the ways that the JLP ones work because they slow down, they slow down gastric motility. Yeah, that makes sense. What do you, what do you wanna say to the person out there who's listening and might feel defeated?

36:40Well, I would say the first thing you need to do is learn more about your body and especially about how this hypothalamus of yours is little gland in your brain is controlling everything and understand that it's not your fault. You've tried everything but you haven't addressed the upstream issue. You've been treating downstream things your providers have been treating all the downstream symptoms and know that there is a way out. You just need support, but it does take time. When my patients who start taking the genesis goal really, you know, really commit to it and they're taking it every day and they're consistent. I tell them, you know, you need to give it at least 90 days to really see the big effects. You'll feel more energy, you'll sleep better right away. You're gonna feel the differences but the effects are gonna stick. Your hypothalamus in these at least 90 days of support because it takes that long to change the communication to actually shift that between the hypothalamus, the pituitary and the lower end of crinkle. So you're like trying, it's like teaching music or something, you know, you're not gonna get it the first time off it takes practice, practice, practice for you before

37:40you can finally play that, play that song. And yeah, it's funny, you know, we spend like 20 years of our life kind of not looking after ourselves, but then we want to be healed in like a week. Exactly. You know, and you know, it's part of what's out there, you know, everything wants a fast fix. But we got here, we usually got here to this point of our unwellness through months to years of behaviors, choices, toxic exposures, belief systems. That's another pillar that you got nutrition, you got sleep, you got activity, you got nutraceutical support, the other pillars, your mindset. So if you are the kind of person that looks at things as like the glass is half empty, you're more likely to see what everything that's going wrong in your body instead of what's going right. And your body believes that and it'll, it takes that as an instruction. It's not looking at the tone, it's looking at literally what you're looking at. So this isn't correct, okay. So it's, you need to be your best cheerleader.

38:43You need to be the one to look for what's going well. Get rid of the, I like to change the F word fat into fit. How fit am I? Fat am I? Change the language. Do I feel fit enough? What does fit mean? It's not just a look. It's how you feel, do I have the energy I need? Can I get off the ground? Can I lift what my 20 pound do with this fight? I love that, I love that. Mine sets a huge deal. Definitely what we believe about ourselves for sure. Lastly, what gives you hope after treating patients for over 30 years? What gives you hope for the future of metabolic health? Well, my hope is that I see so many people, patients, readers, customers who want to learn more. They really are hungry for more information about how their body works. And they want to be the best drivers of their body. So that, that gives me a lot of hope. They're not willing to hand over their metabolic destiny, their health to somebody else.

39:44They want to learn. And which means they might more likely want to be a partner with a provider who's going to actually help them learn more and help guide them through their healing process. So they take on, they have much more accountability. They realize, well, I didn't make the best few choice or I really should have turned off my lights, sir. They start noticing the things that they've learned that they need to establish in their lifestyle and they start making that change. And I see that. I mean, I can't tell you how many people email me and they'll name somebody in my book. And I've changed all the names of my book because they're patients, to give them anonymous names. I think I'm just like Nancy. I'm like, who is Nancy? Because they see themselves in that pattern and they realize that they could change. And maybe I need to do this in the other thing. So. That's exciting. I love that. There's always a solution. Always there's a solution. There's always an answer if you're willing to look for it and then implement it. Absolutely.

40:44Well, this has been an incredibly fascinating conversation before we go. Do you have anything else to add? And also if you could tell people where to find more information about what you do, that would be really helpful. So you can find more information about me and my products at genesisgold.com. My free gift here to your listeners is at the hormonequeen.com backslashadvisor. And that's the hypothalamus reset bundle, which is my hypothalamus handbook as an ebook. And also a video tour to take them through those case studies, especially if you're not a reader and you want to watch it. I take you through it so you can see your pattern and learn more. And then all the gifts, all the tools are within the program. So you can actually have the diets, the exercises, the meditations, that I get to my patients. So it's everything's in there. So you can learn more about your body and you can be the best keeper of this human body that you should be. Amazing. Thanks again for being here today.

41:45Thank you for having me, Lisa. And I want to thank our audience for tuning in as well. I think today's conversation is so freeing because it reminds us that struggling with weight isn't always about laziness or lack of discipline. It's not a broken body. It's simply your body responding to the signals that it's receiving. So when we understand how the hypothalamus regulates hunger, metabolism, stress, and hormones, we stop fighting with our bodies and we stop start working with them. So if today's episode resonated with you, be sure to download Deborah's free hypothalamus reset bundle in the show notes. And you can learn more about her work, Genesis goal, Sacred Seven, and also schedule a root healing consultations through the links below. And you're not going to want to miss the next episode because we're going to be talking about one of the biggest mysteries in modern medicine. Autoimmunity and mystery illness is your brain quietly controlling your immune system. So stay tuned for that. Thanks for tuning in everyone.

42:45Bye for now.