Ep. 61 Why You Can’t Burn Fat—And How to Fix the Real Root Cause

Hey friend,

Are you eating clean and still gaining weight?

Does your energy crash mid-day… even after 8 hours of sleep?

Are you feeling frustrated that the old tricks aren’t working anymore?

🎧 In this week’s episode of The Balanced Hormone Solution Podcast, I’m unpacking:

👉 Why insulin resistance—not willpower—is the real fat loss blocker after 35

👉 How stress hormones like cortisol make it even harder to burn fat

👉 The signs your body is stuck in “store” mode—and how to flip the switch

👉 The one simple, free action step you can take today to start healing your metabolism

If the weight won’t budge, this episode will show you the map back to your body.

In health & hormone harmony,

Tracy Erin

Transcript

Speaker 3: 0:09

Welcome to the Balance Hormone Solution Podcast. If you're a woman 35 plus feeling exhausted, struggling to lose weight, and wondering where your libido went, this is for you. I am Tracy Aaron, a functional medicine practitioner who helps women balance their hormones naturally. Without prescriptions, guesswork, or trending Nonsense.'cause here's the truth, your symptoms aren't random. They're signals. And if you know how to listen, you can fix the root cause and start feeling like yourself again. If you're ready for real solutions, let's get to it.

0:49

If the weight won't budge even when you're doing everything right, it's time to talk about the real hormone behind fat loss resistance, and hint, it is not estrogen. I am your host, Tracy Aaron of the Balanced Hormone Solution Podcast, and today we're gonna dive deep into the number one fat loss blocker I see in women insulin resistance. And lemme tell you, it is not just for diabetics. So let's go. If you have ever tried to cut carbs. You've tracked your macros, you push through punishing workouts without seeing the scale move, then this episode is for you because the truth is fat loss over 35 is not about trying harder. It is about healing. Smarter. So I like to say we don't do things difficult. We do things different. And if no one's ever told you that insulin is the queen maker of your metabolism, buckle up because this episode will change the game for you. I wanna share a story about a client. We're just gonna name her. Melissa. She came to me crying. She had gained 18 pounds in six months. I can relate. Maybe you can too. She had done the whole 30, she tried fasting. She was working out five days a week, and still her body felt stuck. So her doctor told her that, well, you're just getting older and it's common to just add some weight around your midsection. But her blood sugar was on a slow creep up. However, her doctor never noticed that because he wasn't using a functional lens to look at her labs, her normals, her numbers were indeed normal. Her energy would crash by 2:00 PM Her sleep was total garbage and her cravings went through the roof. So I don't know if this sounds familiar to you. It definitely does to me, and Melissa did not need another diet. I knew through listening to her story, that she needed to stabilize her blood sugar and she really needed to work on her insulin sensitivity. So that's what I wanna talk about today, is this whole concept of what it means to have insulin resistance. So number one, insulin resistance is what I call the hidden hormone saboteur. And it's not just for diabetics. 88% of Americans have some degree of metabolic dysfunction. That's almost nine out of every 10 people metabolic dysfunction. So this looks like when insulin is high, your body is gonna be in storage mode. It is not in fat burning mode. And these signs. How do you know if this is happening to you? It's things like, do you have belly fat storage? Right. Do you tend to store, uh, extra weight when you gain five to 10 pounds? Where does it go in your body? Is it around your midsection, fatigue after meals, right? Maybe you feel like you just ate too much. There were too many carbs right there, but just pay closer attention. Do you get tired after you eat, or what about intense cravings? You just have to have something. Or my favorite is when you get hangry, you know that we all have this person in our lives where they just need to put a little something in their mouth just to calm right down. Or we all have that friend who can't go anywhere without a little granola bar in their purse or a snack handy, or else they get hangry. Right? So when that insulin is high, because of what we're consuming, uh, well I'll get to this here in a second. Um, we can have high insulin because of the food that we're putting in our mouth. We also can have high insulin because our cortisol is high. I'm jumping the gun. I'm gonna get there though. But when we have high insulin, that chemical messenger, that hormone is telling the body time to store fat, especially around the midsection. And when that is high. It's gonna block your ability to burn fat for fuel fat anywhere on your body for fuel. Okay? And so this is how we can also know that like you can have normal lab. Right, but the functional range is gonna tell a different story. What your doctor's gonna say your blood sugar should be is not the same numbers that I'm going to use. And that's just the difference between conventional medicine is using a general marker of sick people, whereas functional medicine is trying to look at the bigger picture of how we want the body to optimally function, and how far off are we from that? Okay, so number two. That stress and cortisol that I was mentioning a couple seconds ago, well that definitely makes insulin worse. So cortisol and insulin are besties. I want you to think about'em like that. They're gonna rise together and fall together. So when chronic stress happens in your life and your body, you're going to have a situation, an environment where your blood sugar's. Raises and stays high. Okay? And when that stays high, your insulin is going to raise because insulin gets released from your pancreas when the body senses high blood sugar. So the insulin's job is to take that sugar out of the blood and store it away in the body, and hopefully there'll be some physical activity on board so that that stored sugar gets used up right away. But if we don't have any physical activity, hence we live a sedentary lifestyle, then that body, uh, that blood sugar is definitely gonna be stored on the body and insulin continues to get pumped out until it is done. Its job moving the sugar out of the blood. And the thing is, is that your body cannot differentiate between a tiger and traffic stress, right? So all it knows is that you're stressed. We don't know if you're running from that proverbial tiger, or if you're actually in an argument with your spouse, or if something just disappointed you or you're in the middle of traffic. You can also have a pathogenic load or encountered a chemical or a toxin recently, no matter what the stress is, your body's going to react the same way by bumping up cortisol. So what happens here is that morning cortisol spikes are gonna raise that fasting glucose level, right? So the cortisol is going to rise with the sun. This is a natural part of our circadian rhythm, and when that cortisol rises, our glucose is going to naturally rise in the morning. Right. And so the, the poorer we sleep also, the higher the cortisol is going to be, the higher the insulin. And also something else here that we don't often talk about is this concept of over-training. And this adds more stress. Instead of helping, sometimes we just have an amazing workout. We just feel so much better. We've got that endorphin rush and we feel really accomplished. Right. We have to stop and consider if we're need to be in healing mode. Are we doing the right type of exercise that our body can handle to keep us in healing mode? And if we're over training, we're adding far more stress, which is keeping our blood sugar high then is helping us overall. So my last point here is that real fat loss is a safety signal. It's not a punishment. And this is how I wanna paint this picture for you When your body feels safe. It's going to let excess weight go. So that means you don't need more discipline, you just need more rhythm and safety signals. So what that looks like is sustainable fat loss equals balanced blood sugar, strong muscles, nervous system regulation. Okay? So how we can support this in the body is like protein forward meals. When we consume enough protein and fat in each meal, we're gonna stabilize glucose better. Then skipping meals or having a carbohydrate forward meal. Also, my very favorite thing, walking after meals. This improves insulin sensitivity. There is so much research out there that just shows that, you know, a 10 to 15 minute walk after every single meal will help blunt. A blood sugar rise just from, even if you had a whole bowl of pasta or pizza, some carb heavy meal, a walk afterwards will make a huge difference in whether or not we store that meal on our body as body fat, or we utilize it into our muscles. So lifting weights or the more muscle we have on our body, this is gonna improve that glucose disposal and it lowers the insulin. Over time, the more muscle you have on your body, the more insulin sensitive you are going to be. So if there's one habit that I could ask that you would start every single day is that you would just go on a 10 minute walk after your biggest meal. Okay. Look, I'd love for you to walk three times a away, three times a day, once after breakfast, once after lunch, once after dinner. But let's get real. We all have lives. We're all crazy with busy with our schedules and raising a family and, and all of this. So just a 10 minute walk after your biggest meal, this simple shift alone can communicate to your body that you're safe, you're supported. And you're ready to release the weight. So try this. I want you to walk 10 minutes after your biggest meal for one week. Send me a message, send me an email. I wanna know how this is changing your life. So just know that if your body is not releasing weight, okay? If for whatever reason, I want you to know it's not being stubborn, it's being smart, okay? It's protecting you from perceived stress, from unstable blood sugar. From that survival mode that you've been living in. But when we work with your biology and not against it, that's when the magic happens. You don't need another diet, you need a hormone strategy. And this is exactly what I help women do every single day. Women who come to me and say, listen, I really, really, really wanna feel good in my body and I wanna lose a weight, but I've tried everything. And they get on my plan. They start moving through my program and they lose an average of 15 to 25 pounds in the 90 days that we work together. It really is astonishing and the thing that is hard for them from the be get go is to understand that they need to get their body in safety. Before they start to lose the weight, which means they start relaxing that cortisol response, they start eating more and they start choosing foods that are blood sugar friendly and we boost up their insulin sensitivity when all of these things are working together. Plus in the background as a health practitioner, what I'm doing is I'm working on their gut health. I'm working on stabilizing their hormones. I'm fixing their mood and metabolism when they're doing the nutrition and the lifestyle on top of that, boom, we have a magic bullet. For weight loss, a magic bullet for stabilizing mood swings, for improving fatigue and low energy. This is what happens every single day in my program. So if you want more information on that, just check it out in the show notes and you can visit my website, Tracy Erin, ERIN wellness.com. I would love to have you. You are worth this. That's what I need you to know. More than anything, the women who come into the balanced hormone solution realize right off the bat how they've been putting themselves last, and when they join the program, they go, wow, I actually am worth this. I'm worth the work. That's the magic. I absolutely love to watch that transformation, so let me help you go down that journey as well, and I will see you in the next episode.

Speaker: 12:24

That's it for today's episode of the Balanced Hormone Solution Podcast. If this resonated, don't just listen. Do something about it. Make sure to subscribe so you don't miss what's coming next. And if you know another woman who's tired of feeling like a stranger in her own body. Send her this way for more support. Check out the show notes. I've got resources to help you get started. Just remember, your body isn't broken, you just need the right tools. See you next time.