What your body fat distribution reveals

I have a friend who is going through gender reassignment.

My friend was born a little boy whose parents named her George. George grew up in a conservative community so she did what was expected of her, she lived as a man, found herself a wife and they had two children.

She never, though, felt ‘right’ living life as a man although she loves her children with all her heart and soul.

Risking alienation and rejection from her family and community, George became Sheila several years ago. She started the hormone therapy that has changed her body from that of a lean and muscled 30-something male and she is now a soft, curvaceous womanly shape.

Sheila has truly taken on the values of a modern woman – she is, for the first time in her life, worried about her weight. Thanks to her dramatic hormonal shift, Sheila has ended up asking the same questions as what seems like every other woman in the western world. Questions like, ‘Does my bum look big in this?’ and ‘How can I be getting such a belly when I hardly eat anything…?’ and ‘Honestly, I just have to look in a cake shop window to gain three kilos.’

Bless you Sheila. Welcome to the world of being a woman.

Sheila’s experience is fascinating to me because it proves how much our fat distribution is dictated by our hormones. In particular, by our sex hormones because when it comes to fat storage, testosterone and estrogen are two of the biggest drivers.

Put simply, different hormonal imbalances will cause different distribution of body fat. So where you store excess fat on your body can reveal why you’re storing excess fat.

The science bods call this ‘hormonal dynamics’, which refers to the unique dance your hormones are doing in your system and how this impacts things like body fat distribution, mood, motivation, and so on.

IT’S ALL GONE PEAR-SHAPED

What does this mean in simpler terms? Are you a pear or an apple?

Women who store lots of fat on their hips, butts and thighs tend to be estrogen dominant. While women who have a lot of fat on their belly or chest tend to have a metabolic disorder such as high blood sugar levels or high testosterone.

Having a pear-shaped body, aka gynoid, can indicate estrogen dominance but other signs and symptoms of this include PMS, lumps on breasts, thyroid nodules, and breast cancers. As well, estrogen dominance can be linked to haemorrhoids, lung cancer in non-smokers, and prostate cancer.

Unfortunately, estrogen dominance is rapidly on the rise thanks to modern environmental and lifestyle factors.

This means increased exposure to birth control treatments, environmental toxins and pollutions, along with not consuming enough of the fresh fruit and vegetables that counteract the effects of estrogen.

HOW ‘BOUT THEM APPLES

Apple-shaped women who store fat around the belly, chest or back tend to have a metabolic disorder related to sugar issues, high testosterone, high insulin and swinging blood sugar levels.

Being an apple-shape, aka, android, can also be a sign of adrenal fatigue, which is what you get when you live in an ongoing state of low-grade stress. Adrenal fatigue triggers weight-gain around the belly. There’s a great article about that by hormone expert Magdalena Wszelaki.

The problem is that most of us now live in an ongoing state of low level stress. Just getting an email from the boss, or running late and being stuck in rush hour traffic, can have our adrenals spurting out a cocktail of adrenaline, noradrenaline and cortisol – aka the stress hormones.

Typically, women aged 30 to 50 are especially prone to adrenal fatigue. They’re trying to be everything to everyone – the perfect mother, wife, and go-getter career woman, all while living on just 1200 calories a day and getting to the gym.

At some point, the adrenals give up and you can’t get out of bed for three weeks nor can you stop crying. This is burn out. Before you get to that stage, pull back, nurture yourself, nourish yourself, have rest days, meditate, do some yoga… do whatever you need to better manage your stress.

If you’re one of those people who struggle to get out of bed in the morning but get a second wind at about 9pm and then want to stay up late, it can be a sign your adrenals are struggling because your cortisol patterns are out of whack (which is the scientific definition, obvs).

BITTER SWEET HORMONAL SYMPHONY

What can you do about this? If your struggles with excess weight are the result of a hormonal imbalance then you can sort it out by getting your hormones back in balance again.

How? By taking care of yourself in ways that I’m pretty sure you’ve heard before.

Get to bed early and sleep as much as you can. Massively increase the amount of fresh vegetables you’re eating, especially green leaves. ‘Eat a rainbow’, as your grandmother probably said. Keep everything as fresh and organic and natural as you can. When it comes to food, the question to ask before it goes in your mouth is, ‘Did Mother Earth make this?’

Similarly, cut back as much as you can on the processed sugars, caffeine, refined carbs, alcohol, cigarettes… why coffee? It elevates cortisol levels and if you’re apple-shaped or suffering adrenal fatigue, that’s the last thing you want – cortisol equals pot belly. If you can’t manage without coffee, restrict it to before 12 noon.

What else? Love, laugh, lounge, repeat. You might like to meditate for 10 to 20 minutes a day. Write a journal. Do EFT Tapping. Breathing exercises like alternate nostril breathng. Swim. Paint. Sing. Dance. Watch comedy.

For reducing estrogen dominance, Magdalena Wszelaki (yes, she is my hormone guru) recommends rotating your consumption of four types of seeds – linseed, sesame, sunflower and pumpkin. I’m currently experimenting with this. Read about how it works and how to do it here.

Finally, a great tip is eating broccoli sprouts. They’re the ultimate superfood because they’ve got such high amounts of sulforaphane, which is a natural estrogen blocker that also boosts liver detoxing. Studies have shown that sulforaphane actually shrinks cancer tumours.

Sulforaphane also helps the body convert sunlight to Vitamin D (Fun fact: Vitamin D is actually a hormone). When you’re deficient in Vitamin D, you get inflammation, which also can cause estrogen dominance, thyroid issues, adrenal fatigue and weight gain.

The takeaway? Your health and wellness rests on the fine tuning of your hormonal symphony.