Women Over 40: Blood Sugar Hormones Make You Fat And What To Do About It

By Perry Permann

Are you a women over 40? Your hormone system changes. If you are a woman over 40 and you want to lose weight permanently, an important hormone to look at is insulin. Insulin has a large effect on if you are capable to lose weight permanently- and might make you fat instead. Do you know why?

Insulin is released by the pancreas- an organ playing a major part in digestion and regulating blood sugar. There are many hormones raising your blood sugar, including glucagon, adrenalin and growth hormones. Numerous health risks, such as diabetes are correlated with high blood sugar. So we have numerous hormones raising your blood sugar level, and increasing health dangers.

But: There is only one hormone aiding you to decrease blood sugar, and that's insulin. Insulin scales down blood sugar levels. Hence it is essential to balance your blood sugar.

After eating, sugar is getting into the blood stream- for example as a result of digesting starchy foods. To deliver energy to your body, this blood sugar needs to go into the cells of your body. Insuline facilitates this process: Sugar goes from the blood into the cells where it can be burned.

Insulin has more tasks to do. It assists to get fatty acids from the blood into the fat cells where they are stored. Insulin prevents your body from burning fat as well. So, insulin is a major player in the old orchestra of players raising fat storage- very useful for our ancestors who were vulnerable by starvation all the time, but causing too much fat on our bodies nowadays.

Too much insulin contributes to belly fat, being overweight and diabetes, disorder in fat metabolism, heart attacks and strokes.

In women over 40 the endocrine system can be disturbed much easier compared to women in their twenties. If you are a women over 40, you need to look at your insulin level. Two crucial mistakes in eating lead to too much insulin:

* High glycemic index (GI). The easier sugar contained in food gets in the blood, the faster and higher the insulin level grows. The gycemic index (GI) measures how easy sugar from digestion gets in the blood. Cakes, most sweets, white bread and rice or sweet fruits are common foods with a high GI. Broadly speaking, the GI rises with the amount of processing for food. So natural foods have a comparably low GI, whereas extremely processed foods often have a high GI. Avoid foods containing syrup, fructose, saccharose etc.

* Eating artificial sweeteners fools your brain into thinking sugar has got in the blood stream. The insulin level grows, and, as you know by now, you will burn less fat because of that. That's one of the reasons diet sodas do not contribute to losing weight permanently in a healthy way.

If you eat too much fat and have a high insulin level, the fat gets right into fat cells- what you want to avoid to lose weight permanently over 40.

Are you a woman over 40? I've created a free, personalized program for women over 40 who want to lose weight permanently. How would you like to get excellent, lasting weight loss results- be attractive, healthy, energetic, youthful? This program adjusts to your specific situation and keeps you motivated while you enjoy healthy eating and exercise.