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What you eat and what you do can influence your hormones dramatically. When this happens you can either gain weight or lose weight. Avoid these key areas to make sure you lose weight with your healthy weight loss diet. Don’t take for granted just how powerful hormones like these are in determining your weight loss success.

This one hormone that can cause so many problems is called Cortisol. Excess cortisol will stimulate your appetite and prompt more calories to be stored as fat, so it is very influential in your weight loss plan. These are 2 things you don’t want when trying to follow a healthy weight loss diet.

Cortisol also increases protein breakdown within the muscle, which means a slower metabolism and less calories burned. A key to successful weight loss is keeping your metabolism running at a fast rate so that you are always burning calories.

It decreases glucose utilization and increased insulin resistance, which means the glucose or sugars in your body are not used for energy as much as they should be. Instead they float around and eventually get stored as fat. This is strike two against your healthy weight loss diet and healthy eating plans.

One thing that directly increases cortisol is stress. Stress is the culprit in increasing cortisol levels and resistance to insulin and leptin. Stress can come from work issues, family issues, medical problems and even unhealthy foods. Read the rest of this entry »