Keesha Ewers

What is weight loss resistance? I coined this term from my patients who told me they were doing everything they had always done in terms of eating, exercising, and sleeping…and yet were either gaining weight or unable to remove excess weight. The truth is, your body is a complex system of hormones that are talking to each other, serving as messenger chemicals between one another and between the glands in your endocrine system. What sets those chemicals in motion? Your own perceptions of you in your life. If you feel stressed a hormone cocktail will be released from your brain to your adrenal glands, notifying them to go into the fight, flight, freeze, or faint activation protocol. If you feel unsafe the same hormones will behave in the same way. If you don’t feel yourself good enough or worthy enough…you guessed it…same response. The truth is your body is not designed to be able to continually respond as if you are a zebra with a lion on your tail. Unfortunately, in our day and age, especially amidst the COVID pandemic, we rarely return to the baseline of feeling safe and secure. If this is the case for you, no matter what you do, you will not shed a pound.

Let’s take a tour of the most common hormones responsible for maintaining a healthy body weight, how to test for them and what to do to balance them. I always tell my patients and students to test and don’t guess. We are all different. We have different genetics, levels of toxic burden, stress and past trauma, and gut health (or dysbiosis). These factors all play into the hormones we are going to talk about. Your body’s weight is never just about one thing…there is never one smoking gun. This means there is no one way to get your body to reset and there is no one way that will work for everyone. Your plan must be individualized to your body’s data.

Insulin:

Insulin is a hormone produced by the beta cells of your pancreas. It’s secreted in small amounts throughout the day and in larger amounts after meals. Insulin allows your cells to take in blood sugar for energy or storage, depending on what is needed at the time. Insulin is also the main fat storage hormone in the body. It tells fat cells to store fat and prevents stored fat from being broken down.

When cells are insulin resistant, both blood sugar and insulin levels go up significantly. Chronically elevated insulin levels can lead to obesity and metabolic syndrome. Overeating — especially sugar, refined carbohydrates, and fast food — drives insulin resistance and increases insulin levels.

Leptin:

Leptin is a hormone secreted from fat cells that helps to regulate body weight. It is sometimes referred to as the ‘Fat Controller’. Leptin signals the brain, or specifically, the hypothalamus. Leptin does not affect food intake from meal to meal, but rather acts to alter food intake and control energy expenditure over the long term. Leptin has a more profound effect when weight and hormones fall. This stimulates a huge appetite and increased food intake. Leptin helps us to maintain our normal weight and makes it hard to lose those extra pounds.

Leptin is directly related to the amount of body fat you have. Leptin levels increase when you increase your fat mass and decrease when you reduce your fat mass.

Adiponectin:

Adiponectin is a protein that is secreted by cells within the adipose tissue. Those who are obese and carry a lot of visceral fat have a lower concentration of adiponectin in their blood. Adiponectin plays a role in the negative effects of carrying excess visceral fat, including problems with insulin resistance that can lead to type 2 diabetes if left unchecked. Too little adiponectin and we’re more prone to these conditions.

Adiponectin has an anti-inflammatory effect which helps to reduce chronic inflammation. The more adiponectin you have, the less inflammation and the less likely you are to develop inflammatory conditions such as autoimmunity. Losing weight increases the levels of adiponectin in the blood, and therefore reduces the health risks associated with obesity. Low levels of adiponectin are seen in those with high levels of bad cholesterol and low levels of good cholesterol. Studies have shown that adiponectin also helps to manage weight by controlling the levels of glucose within the body and by breaking down fatty acids. Activating adiponectin and increasing the levels in the blood can help with the management of weight and weight-related disorders.

Ghrelin:

Ghrelin is the ‘hunger hormone’ because it stimulates appetite, increases food intake and promotes fat storage. When given to humans, it can increase food intake by up to 30%.

Ghrelin stimulates the release of growth hormone from the pituitary gland, which breaks down fat tissue and causes the build-up of muscle. Ghrelin also has protective effects on the cardiovascular system and plays a role in the control of insulin release.

Normally, ghrelin levels are highest before eating and lowest about an hour after you’ve had a meal. In overweight and obese people, fasting ghrelin levels are often lower than in people of normal weight. Studies have also shown that after obese people eat a meal, ghrelin only decreases slightly. Because of this, the hypothalamus doesn’t receive as strong of a signal to stop eating, which can lead to overeating.

Cortisol:

Cortisol is a hormone produced by the adrenal glands. It’s known as a “stress hormone” because it’s released when you perceive stress. Like other hormones, it’s vital to survival. However, chronically elevated levels of cortisol can lead to overeating and weight gain. It appears that women who carry excess weight around the middle respond to stress with a greater increase in cortisol. A strict diet can also raise cortisol. In one study, women who consumed a low-calorie diet had higher cortisol levels and reported feeling more stressed than women who ate a normal diet.

Estrogen:

Estrogen is the most important female sex hormone. It’s mainly produced by the ovaries and involved in regulating the female reproductive system. Both very high and low levels of estrogen can lead to weight gain. To maintain fertility during the reproductive years, estrogen starts promoting fat storage at puberty. It also stimulates fat gain in the first half of pregnancy. Obese women often have higher estrogen levels than normal weight women.

How estrogen is metabolized is often more important than the actual levels. During menopause, when estrogen levels drop because less is produced in the ovaries, the site for fat storage shifts from the hips and thighs to visceral fat in the abdomen.

The Thyroid:

There is a complex relationship between thyroid disease, body weight and metabolism. Thyroid hormones regulate metabolism, which is determined by measuring the amount of oxygen used by the body over a specific amount of time. If the measurement is made at rest, it is known as the basal metabolic rate (BMR).

People whose thyroid glands are not working well are found to have low BMRs, and those with overactive thyroid glands had high BMRs. The cause of the weight gain in hypothyroid individuals is complex and is usually not related to excess fat accumulation. Most of the extra weight gained in hypothyroid individuals is due to excess accumulation of salt and water.

Massive weight gain is rarely associated with hypothyroidism. In general, 5-10 pounds of body weight may be attributable to the thyroid, depending on the severity of the hypothyroidism. If weight gain is the only symptom of hypothyroidism that is present, it is less likely that the weight gain is solely due to the thyroid. Thyroid medications rarely result in weight loss.

Test Don’t Guess:

I like to do a laboratory package that includes leptin, adiponectin, a hormone panel, micronutrients, insulin, a HBA1C and insulin level, FS1, and a free T3, T4, TSH, and TPO. This is a good start for checking in on why you are suffering from weight loss resistance. If it’s warranted, I will often also recommend a food sensitivity test, a comprehensive stool analysis (gut bugs impact your weight in a big way), and a urinary adrenal, hormone, and estrogen metabolites test. We then sit down on Zoom together and go through these results to create an individualized plan for helping you attain the body weight your body runs most healthily on. One of the most important factors we cover in our face-to-face time is your relationship with your stress and past trauma and your relationship with food. If those elements are not addressed, I find people do not get to or stay at the weight their body runs best on.

What are Chakras?

Chakra is a Sanskrit word used to denote energy and focal centers used in mystical spiritual and religious traditions from ancient Tantric Hindu and Buddhist meditative practices to modern new age paths. Depending on the tradition, there are practices that offer visualizations for three, four, five, six, seven, and even hundreds and thousands of wheels, cycles, or circles that symbolize the rotation and flow of energy in and around the central and two parallel channels of the body. Different texts and teachings will provide different instructions for chakra work that are replete with mantras, visualizations, and teach methods for manipulating the flow of energy through breath exercises, hand positions or mudras, bandhas or physical positions that lock the energy in place, and working with the elements of space, air, fire, water, and earth. Many of these practices are handed down from teacher to student and will not make sense unless taken in the context of the individual’s path of transformation. In other words, there is no one chakra system, nor is there one way of working with or experiencing the chakras.

Several cultures and healing traditions, including Islamic Sufis, tantric lineages within Hinduism and Tibetan Buddhism, medicine paths of South America and Native North America, utilize systems of chakra mapping. Chakras, or cakkas, in Tibetan Buddhist systems, can mean cycles of rebirth, the spinning wheel of the eight-fold Buddhist path, or as a completion stage practice where subtle winds, or energy, are brought into the central channel in order to realize the luminous nature or clear light of emptiness.

This luminous nature is inherent in each of us but is clouded or obscured by patterns of conditioning that arise in response to early meanings, beliefs and behaviors. These early meanings and beliefs and behaviors become the cause of great suffering in life. They are responsible for your individual perceptions of discontent and pain; physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually. These early patterns are expressed as self-beliefs that you are, “not good enough”, “not smart enough”, “not successful enough”, “not beautiful enough”, “not deserving or worthy”, etc. They lead to cravings and attachments to what you think will make you happy, but find out that the happiness bought through material purchases, people, experiences, and education are fleeting at best.

Chakra Mapping for Healing Trauma

The chakra system that is most familiar to westerners is Hindu in origin and was brought to the West by English author Sir John George Woodroffe, (who wrote under the pseudonym Arthur Avalon), via his book, Serpent Power, which was first published in 1919. Because it is the system most recognized by western practitioners of yoga, meditation and healing traditions in the west, this is the one I will use as the framework for mapping the impact of trauma on the body, mind, heart, and spirit and for providing a pathway to healing and self-mastery. We will use the seven-chakra system, with the colors of the rainbow (these were added after Woodroffe’s work) and locations along the spine that correspond with various organ systems and the nervous systems in your body. The goal of this article, the Autoimmune Brain Summit, and the Healing Trauma Through the Chakra System program is to return you to your luminous nature, to free you from the early patterns that were created that now obscure your clear light and cause you suffering and pain; be that physical disease such as autoimmunity, obesity, or cancer, mental anguish such as depression and anxiety, emotional reactivity such as anger, sadness, or fear, or the spiritual despair that appears when the impermanence of life reveals itself as loss, change, aging and death.

Ultimately, as you are moving through the layers of healing your trauma, I will encourage you to finally relinquish the construct of this chakra system as “the right one”, and to feel into your own energy field, body systems, and mental and emotional states and know the chakras as doorways to your own inner experience of growth and evolution. They are a way of focusing your attention and portals of self-discovery and mastery only.

We can use the chakra system for “tracking” the impact of early patterns that are the result of trauma, neglect, and abandonment by using functional medicine laboratory testing to check the health of the corresponding organ and hormonal systems, bringing awareness to your mental beliefs, checking in on the developmental milestones that are associated with each energy center of the body, and using what I call the seven wheels of wellness to organize your healing. I suggest functional medical testing as we go because we want to continually bring the emotional and mental layers into coherence with the physical body, which is done through communication of the energy body between emotions and body.  When I train integrative medicine health coaches and work with my patients, I tell them that we are doing medical detective work when we are engaged in solving their puzzle of suffering. The laboratory testing I recommend is one more data point that helps to complete the puzzle in your physical layer. What do I mean by the term “physical layer?”

The Five Layers of You

Traditional (also called indigenous or folk) systems of medicine developed within cultures over generations as practices for the assessment, diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual disease, and included the skills and knowledge needed for maintenance of health on all of these levels too. There was no separation of body from mind and spirit. Each being is recognized in the entirety of their wholeness. Examples of these systems of healing are Ayurvedic medicine, Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), acupuncture, Qi Gong, homeopathy, African folk medicine, Bush medicine, herbology, Curandero Faith healing, Iranian Jamu Kambo, Japanese energy healing (Reiki), Mien Shiang, Mongolian Prophetic medicine, Shamanism, Shiatsu, Sri Lankan Hela Wedakama, Thai massage, Tibetan, Yunani, and many more. I’d like to focus on the Ayurvedic system of “layers” and how they interact with the chakra system as a way of creating a clear map for you to follow as you track your own imbalances in order to create healing in the entirety of your being.

Ayurveda is a 5,000-year-old system of healing from India that is the sister science of yoga, jyotish (Vedic astrology) and vastu (how to heal through your environment). This book is not about Ayurveda. However, Ayurvedic medicine provides an elegant and easy-to-use framework for understanding your body and its feedback and how trauma gets lodged into the physical body as disease, impacts genetic expression, creates nervous system reactivity patterns, and causes despair on emotional, mental and spiritual levels. For this reason, I use Ayurveda in my practice. The whole of you is illustrated in the framework of the pancha koshas.

The Pancha Koshas

According to Ayurveda, you are made up of 5 layers, or sheaths. In other words, you are more than just your physical body. These layers are called the pancha koshas, or five sheaths (see figure).

A simplified version of the five layers is:

• The physical body (including organs, cells, genetics, and body systems), or the one we feed, water, and take for walks.
• The energy body, also referred to as chi in Chinese medicine, prana in yoga practice, and the electromagnetic energy field in Western science.
• The emotional and mental body, or the layer of you that perceives, feels, and remembers.
• The wisdom or knowledge body, or the layer of you that discriminates, holds to values, has integrity, and intuits. This and your spiritual layer are known as your “True Self.”
• The bliss body, or your access portal to God, the Divine Spark within and without, universal consciousness.

A simplified version of the five layers is:

Notice in the figure that the physical body is linked to the emotional and mental body by the energy body. In other words, your emotions will trigger your nervous system, which then connects to your physical layers, affecting your genetic expression, digestion, and organ and body systems. It is said in Ayurvedic medicine that you have 72,000 channels that connect your emotional and mental layers to your physical layers via, you guessed it, your chakra system. The chakra system is located along your central channel, which is loosely correlated with your spinal column, and is part of the two channels that run alongside your central channel, creating knots above and below certain chakras along the way. According to Buddhist teachings, the process of physical death (or intense spiritual practices) unties these knots and allows the subtle “winds” or energy that circulate and hold the layers of your consciousness together, to enter the central channel before finally leaving when the process of physical death is complete.

Because the chakra system connects all of the five layers or koshas of you together, it provides a useful mapping tool for tracking the impact of early trauma on your physical body.

The chakra system is the energy body that allows us to take a closer look at how early childhood events can create long-term physical disease, mental, emotional and spiritual despair, and imbalances in the chakra system and in your pancha koshas.

To learn more about healing with chakras, please go here: https://www.drkeesha.com/chakra

To learn more about the Autoimmune Brain Summit, please go here: https://reverseautoimmunesummit.com/