By Brianna Acuesta

These 7 steps could completely change how fast you lose weight.

Losing weight can be a difficult task, even for the most motivated people. Even some who work tirelessly to lose weight by exercising regularly can’t seem to figure out why they aren’t shedding pounds more quickly, and it’s because there’s more to losing weight than working out and strict diets.

Did you know that there are certain hormones that need to be released for optimum weight loss? Your metabolism relies on a healthy dose of T3 and T4 hormones from your thyroid in order to become active in speeding up weight loss. Without these hormones to work with your metabolism, your body is unable to properly break down food.

Hormones like insulin, glucagon, and cortisol are all crucial for sufficient calorie loss as well. If these hormones aren’t functioning properly because of various daily practices you do or don’t engage in, your entire plan for losing weight could be foiled. This is often when people work out often and see little to no results.

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Our current environment is filled with toxins that may damage hormone schedules, such as BPA in plastic bottles and containers. BPA is a xenohormone that disrupts the natural production of several different hormones. Consumer products, such as those for body care, are often filled with parabens and triclosan, which are deposited into your fat cells and make burning fat more difficult than it already is.

Though it’s easy to say that you’ll just stop drinking from plastic bottles and refrain from using commercial beauty products, there are many more steps you can take if you’re really committed to losing that weight. Here are some additional steps you can take:

1. Eat Lots of Protein

Leptin is a hormone that communicates with your brain as you eat and should be considered your best friend if you’re trying to eat less. It’s the hormone that tells your brain that you are full once the amount of calories you’re eating matches the amount you’re burning.

Studies show that eating fatty, processed foods can cause inflammation in your brain and cause it to be less effective at picking up leptin, missing the signal completely. Not only is this bad for your brain, but it also makes overeating very easy. Try eating healthy, organic proteins to help make your brain more sensitive to leptin.

Here are some examples of good protein:

Milk: make sure it’s organic and free from hormones

Fish: be sure that it’s organic and wild-caught, not farmed

Nuts: almonds, pistachios, or nut milks are great options

Beans and legumes

2. Don’t Skip Meals

Skipping meals seems like a sensible option when you’re trying to eat less to lessen your calorie intake, but it actually works the opposite. Research has shown that eating meals regularly, especially breakfast and in good portions, activates your weight loss hormones and increases your metabolism’s efficiency by as much as 10%.

So although skipping meals might seem like an effective short-term solution, it will actually work against you if you do it regularly or on purpose too often.

3. Get Proper Sleep

Leptin, the hormone needed to tell your brain that you’re full, is produced while you sleep. If you get less than 6 hours of sleep every night, there’s a chance that amount of leptin produced is under par and will not effectively communicate with your brain.

Your body actually does this on purpose, because if it produces less leptin, your body will consume more to make up for your lack of sleep and low energy. In the long-term, this could really catch up to you and deter you from losing weight.

4. Lift Weights

When you lift weights, your body produces the hormone testosterone, which not only helps you build muscle but it can assist you in losing weight.

Lifting enough wait to make you feel a bit sore is all you need to properly produce and activate testosterone, so get to work!

5. Breathe

This one almost seems excessive, since breathing is the thing humans probably do the most of in their life, but doing breathing exercises can actually boost the efficiency of weight loss hormone adrenal in your body. Adrenal is an important component in keeping your metabolism strong.

In one study on the subject, researchers had participants breathe through each nostril 27 times, 4 times daily to see what the results were. After the month-long study, the participants had an increase in resting metabolic rate of 37%. That is massive, especially for those whose metabolism is shot from years of terrible eating, and should be taken seriously. Breathing is easy, just incorporate a daily exercise into your life that works for you.

6. Increase Your Oxytocin Levels

Oxytocin is a hormone linked to relaxation and reduced stress. It’s released when humans engage in satisfying and relaxing activities, and it’s great because being stressed causes serious problems for people trying eat healthy. Stress causes terrible habits, such as overeating and eating bad, processed foods.

Some ideas for how to boost your oxytocin levels are interacting with animals and giving at least 8 hugs everyday.

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7. Eat Less Sugar

Sugar is literally addicting, which would be great if it were a superfood, but it’s anything but. The hormone insulin helps your body pull excess sugar from your bloodstream while you’re digesting. When you overwork the insulin in your body over time, the result is you getting diabetes, which is essentially an insulin-sensitivity.

The best way to avoid this and to keep the insulin in your body strong and effective is to cut back on foods that are high in processed sugar. Soda is a huge culprit that needs to be eliminated, as it’s easy to drink a few of these everyday even though it has mounds of processed sugar in it.

These are just a few easy steps to increasing your ability to lose weight to pair with your regular exercise and healthy eating. Just remember that some of your bad habits could be linked to one of these steps and can easily be corrected in ways you might not have known before. If you try these steps, let us know if they work for you!

What are your thoughts on these life changes? Please share, like, and comment on this article!

Top image credit: Life Advancer

This article (7 Surprising Steps For Activating Weight Loss Hormones) via NB is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to the author and TrueActivist.com