How to Boost Your Cardiometabolic Health for Natural Weight Loss

The key to natural and sustainable weight loss has nothing to do with any drug, medication, food combining or magic workout. The key to unlocking your natural, lifelong weight loss lies in every single one of your cells. The key is your cardiometabolic health.

Here’s what we’ll cover today:

• What is cardiometabolic health and why does it matter for weight loss?

• What’s the link between your cardiometabolic health and your hormone balance?

• What can your body tell you right now about your cardiometabolic health status?

• How can you improve your cardiometabolic health now, and unlock your body’s metabolic + fat-burning potential?

Ready? Let’s dive in.

What is cardiometabolic health and why does it matter for weight loss?

The term “cardiometabolic health” refers to the cluster of conditions that affect your likelihood of developing a cardiovascular and/or metabolic disease like diabetes or heart disease. The American College of Cardiology defines cardiometabolic disorders as “…a cluster of interrelated risk factors, primarily hypertension, elevated fasting blood sugar, dyslipidemia, abdominal obesity and elevated triglycerides.”

Big picture: when we have a positive energy balance, we are metabolically healthy and have a lower likelihood of developing cardiovascular disease. That’s because we spend more energy than we take in, which reduces the amount of pressure on our cardiovascular system. But when we take in more energy than we spend, the extra energy is stored as fat, and that fat puts more pressure on our cardiovascular system. The excess energy we take in, aka the excess of food that we eat, is usually in the form of excess carbohydrates and fat, and these translate to higher blood sugar and cholesterol, two well-known risk factors for developing cardiometabolic disease.

We can only lose weight when we have a positive energy balance; that is, when we spend more energy than we take in. So focusing your efforts on improving your cardiometabolic health will also give you the weight loss you’re looking for.

What’s the link between your cardiometabolic health and your hormone balance?

While the link might not be immediately clear, your cardiometabolic health has major effects on your hormone balance. Poor cardiometabolic health knocks your hormones out of balance and keeps you in fat-storing mode. Here’s how:

INSULIN

Insulin: as blood sugar levels rise due to more calories in than calories out, insulin levels rise too. Insulin is a fat—storing hormone, and it’s job is to encourage cells to take up excess blood sugar (high levels of blood sugar are toxic, and your body knows that; your pancreas secretes insulin as a self-protective mechanism). The more insulin that’s available, the further you go into fat-storing mode, because more blood sugar is shuttled into fat cells to be stored as fat.

Here’s the thing: if you chronically have high blood sugar levels, you’ll also have chronically high insulin levels, which over time causes insulin resistance because your cells will stop “listening” to the insulin that’s available, and your body will need to make even more insulin to lower your blood sugar levels. So your baseline insulin levels continue to rise, pushing you even further into fat-storing mode.

When your insulin levels get chronically high, other hormones begin to get out of balance, and we start to see the classic hormone imbalance picture that many women develop. Here’s what else happens:

CORTISOL

Another hallmark of poor cardiometabolic health is high inflammation. Cortisol is an adrenal hormone with massive anti-inflammatory action. In the setting of chronic inflammation, cortisol levels increase to try to quiet the inner heat. But cortisol is also quite cardiometabolically active: its job is to mobilize blood sugar, meaning that high cortisol levels will raise blood sugar.

Cortisol also affects WHERE you gain fat. Its job is to redistribute your fat deposits to your belly for easy access later (remember, cortisol is a stress hormone and its job is to get us the energy we need for fight or flight, quickly. One way it does that is by raising blood sugar levels quickly, and it’ll pull from a quick and easy storage space like your belly fat).

estrogen

Another major player in your cardiometabolic health status is estrogen: estrogen is like Goldilocks; you don’t want too much or too little, because either way your metabolic health suffers.

Too much estrogen causes a functional condition known as estrogen dominance, which promotes weight gain in your belly, butt, hips and thighs, that (like cortisol weight gain) is really difficult to lose. Estrogen dominance is pro-inflammatory, meaning that unbalanced estrogen raises your inflammation which raises your cortisol levels, causing a double-whammy of fat-storing messages to your cells that makes is REALLY difficult to lose weight.

On the flip side, low estrogen levels increase cardiovascular disease, decrease insulin sensitivity, and promote weight gain and obesity. Women often see worsening cholesterol numbers, increasing blood pressure, weight gain, and changes in where they gain body fat as they become postmenopausal.

What can your body tell you right now about your cardiometabolic health status?

Outside of stubborn weight gain (especially belly fat), other ways that poor cardiometabolic health and hormone imbalance manifest are with symptoms like

• Fatigue

• Brain fog

• Depression

• Anxiety

• Trouble sleeping

You may also see issues like:

• Decreased appetite, but with increased cravings for simple carbs and sugar (as your body’s natural energy production pathways get poisoned from high levels of blood sugar, you increasingly rely on external sources of easy energy from carbs like white bread and pasta, and sugar)

• Cold hands and feet, and/or numbness and tingling: blood flow becomes increasingly compromised to your extremities

• Feeling overwhelmed or hopeless about your health and body (this happens as a side effect of mood changes: hormone imbalance and poor cardiometabolic health both promote anxiety and depression, and both of these can make you feel like our health is outside of your control, especially if you started seeing changes rapidly in how you look and feel)

To get a quick sense of how your cardiometabolic health is right now, ask yourself these questions about how you’ve felt over the last month:

1. How has my energy level been over the last month?

2. Do I wake up feeling rested?

3. Do I get a midday energy slump (usually happening sometime after lunch, and often around 2-3 pm)

4. How has my focus and concentration been over the last month?

5. How has my mood been over the last month?

6. Do I feel in control of my health and wellness?

7. Am I having daily cravings for sugar and simple carbs that are extreme, relentless, or refuse to leave me alone until I satisfy them? (This is different than a passing thought about food! A relentless craving takes hold of you, vs. the thought of pasta or cake that comes and goes.)

OK, now we know what you’re dealing with. Now, let’s talk about how to fix it.

How can you improve your cardiometabolic health now, and unlock your body’s metabolic + fat-burning potential?

There is no magic wand here. It’s all about the basics: diet, exercise, sleeping well, and reducing your stress levels.

DIET

Here are my 3 simple rules for a healthy diet:

1. Eat lots of plants and healthy protein: make veggies at least 50% of each plate, then add healthy protein and plant-based fats like nuts, seeds, and olive oil.

2. Avoid highly-processed foods: these are total garbage. TOTAL garbage. Instead, stick with healthy whole foods (a whole food is anything that has grown, flown, swam or ran on planet Earth)

3. Drink plenty of clean, filtered water.

These three tips are enough to transform your body through ample nourishment and reducing inflammation. Plus, a plant-focused diet has lots of fiber to keep you fuller, longer, so you eat less but feel satisfied and energized. So this is how you eat less, but still feel great. The next step is all about using more energy.

Exercise

The second piece to good cardiometabolic health: exercise. Along with a high-plant diet, exercise helps your body rebalance hormones naturally and burn up excess energy first from the food you’ve just eaten, then as the fat that’s stored in your tissues, so you lose weight. Daily movement means daily fat-burning. Inside my weight loss program I recommend a mix of strength or resistance training to build muscle, increase insulin sensitivity, and boost anti-aging sex hormones like testosterone (which is super important for women too!), and low intensity long interval cardio for maximum fat burning over time.

Sleep

Sleep is a healing balm to your hormones. While you’re sleeping your cortisol (a fat-storing hormone) decreases, and growth hormone increases. Growth hormone has a lot of beneficial functions including stimulating muscle and bone growth and burning fat. Sleep is also necessary for us to clear out cellular debris that promotes inflammation, and to allow cells to heal, which reduces your overall inflammatory level. Low levels of inflammation are necessary for good cardiometabolic health; we cannot get into fat-burning mode, or have balanced hormones, if we have high levels of inflammation.

Stress reduction

Stress is another essential factor in your cardiometabolic health. High stress knocks your hormones right out of balance, and it raises your blood pressure and your blood sugar. In fact, it can raise your blood sugar totally independently of what you eat! Inside my weight loss program we use continuous glucose monitors, or CGMs, to see what is actually happening with our sugar levels in real time, and let me tell you that the information is SO eye-opening. As I always say, once you know you can’t go back!

Remember that cortisol, a main stress hormone, has the important job of raising your blood sugar. This is great if you need to fight or flee, but not so good if you’re stressed out because you’re stuck in traffic. Cortisol, along with other stress hormones like adrenaline, raise blood sugar and blood pressure and over time can worsen your cardiometabolic health. This is why you’ve probably heard doctors tell someone you love, or maybe they’ve told you, to reduce your stress levels.

Which can be easier said than done, right? That’s why I’m a huge fan of support and accountability, which are the true secret ingredients to lifelong weight loss. Unless you’re a rare person who is able to shut down your cravings and desires, immediately tame your stress response, and quickly find ways to drift off to sleep peacefully, you may benefit from having support while you reach your weight loss goal.

If you’re ready for lifelong weight loss but you could benefit from some support, let’s chat. Tap the button below and grab a spot on my schedule, and we’ll talk about your options for losing weight for life.

References:

• Brinkman JE, Tariq MA, Leavitt L, et al. Physiology, Growth Hormone. [Updated 2023 May 1]. In: StatPearls [Internet]. Treasure Island (FL): StatPearls Publishing; 2023 Jan-. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK482141/

• Clegg D, Hevener AL, Moreau KL, Morselli E, Criollo A, Van Pelt RE, Vieira-Potter VJ. Sex Hormones and Cardiometabolic Health: Role of Estrogen and Estrogen Receptors. Endocrinology. 2017 May 1;158(5):1095-1105. doi: 10.1210/en.2016-1677. PMID: 28323912; PMCID: PMC6283431.

• Renke G, Kemen E, Scalabrin P, Braz C, Baesso T, Pereira MB. Cardio-Metabolic Health and HRT in Menopause: Novel Insights in Mitochondrial Biogenesis and RAAS. Curr Cardiol Rev. 2023;19(4):e060223213459. doi: 10.2174/1573403X19666230206130205. PMID: 36748220.