By William Cole, D.C., IFMCPFunctional Medicine Practitioner

Weight loss is a struggle that many people deal with their whole lives, often with little to no success. The problem is getting more serious by the day.

We can see evidence of this rising epidemic through the ever-increasing amount of fad diets claiming to be the magic solution for all our weight loss troubles. Unfortunately, contrary to what conventional medicine may tell you, weight loss is more than just a matter of “calories in, calories out,” and restricting your food intake is not necessarily the key to losing weight. For the majority of people, sustainable weight loss is anything but a simple formula.

Weight gain is way more complex than we think.

Over the years we’ve thought about weight gain as the cause of health problems, but an inability to lose weight is often a symptom of an underlying health problem that has yet to be addressed. In other words, a person’s inability to lose weight could be a side effect of poor health instead of the cause. To put it simply: We must get healthy to lose weight, not lose weight to get healthy.

When it comes to stubborn weight loss, one of the biggest complaints I hear about is the extra fat that shows up quickly around the midsection—and then never wants to leave. This type of fat is known as visceral fat. Unlike subcutaneous fat, which is stored just under the skin and can be found in other areas of the body, visceral fat is located around your midsection all the way inside the abdominal cavity.

Due to its location closer to vital organs of your body, this type of fat greatly increases your risk for serious health problems. Since visceral fat cells are released directly into your blood, they end up making their way into your liver, pancreas, heart, and other vital organs—which is a problem considering these fat cells contain excess triglycerides that end up pumping harmful free fatty acids into cells that are not designed to store fat. It’s vitally important to reduce this type of fat as much as possible.

So how do we go about this? As I mentioned before, losing this type of fat takes more than just eating like a rabbit and restricting how much food you consume. There are a few key things that, when out of whack, can greatly affect how well your body burns fat, specifically visceral fat. One of them is your hormone health.

Why your stress hormone is causing belly fat.

Your hormones are the messengers of your body, sending instructions from one area to the next so your organs can properly perform their necessary functions. Needless to say, when one hormone goes awry, it can inhibit your fat-burning ability. After years of studying and clinical experience, I have seen one hormone imbalance correlated time and time again with a person’s amount of visceral fat: cortisol.

Cortisol is your body’s main stress hormone. It’s released by your adrenal glands and starts out high in the morning to help wake you up and slowly tapers off throughout the day. Your “sleepy time” hormone, melatonin, is inversely proportional to cortisol, starting off low in the morning and increasing in the evening to help you get to sleep. Cortisol imbalances are a common hormone problem that throws off this natural daily rhythm, causing cortisol to be high when it should be low, low when it should be high, or always low, or always high.

Studies have looked at this relationship between cortisol and weight extensively and have found a significant link between cortisol levels and increased weight, specifically that stubborn visceral fat in both men and women. In fact, one study looked at the cortisol levels of 41 women and found that those with high levels of visceral fat had significantly greater cortisol spikes during times of stress as well as for a full hour after the stressful event had passed. Yikes.