Hormones are the primary reason behind obesity in seniors. Lemon water can help you manage those hormones and trigger weight loss.
By Dawn Flemming
As people age, their metabolism goes down. Seniors are at the risk of developing a whole host of other problems including elevated cortisol due to inflammatory conditions. Many age-related illnesses and slow-downs contribute to weight gain.
People get the typical advice of eating less and exercising more to lose weight. But this is largely a failed approach. Eating less usually results in metabolic slow down thereby nullifying the initial weight loss. This is why people gain their weight back so easily. Exercise, although very good for you, only accounts for a small fraction of your weight loss.
What is important in weight loss is what you consume and how often you consume as they affect your hormones. If the majority of your calories come from sugar and carbs, your body will increase your insulin and your hunger hormones thereby pushing you to eat more. Obesity is primarily a hormonal problem as we will see.
Continuous high insulin leads to insulin resistance. Insulin does not allow your body to burn fat no matter how much you cut your calories by. Worse still is constantly snacking throughout the day; every time you eat you spike insulin, when you spike insulin you are not burning fat.
Do this often enough and you will develop insulin resistance which may lead you to chronic insulin secretion in your body because your body needs to secrete more insulin so as to force your cells to take in the sugar and protein from your food.
So what you consume largely determines your weight. We’ve suggested before that a keto diet and intermittent fasting can help you lose weight. We’ve also suggested how they can lower inflammation.
But there are also specific foods and drinks that can trigger weight loss by managing your hormones. A good example of such foods/drinks is lemon water.
How Does Lemon Water Help Seniors Lose Weight?
Insulin Resistance
The primary culprit in obesity is insulin resistance. Insulin resistance pushes your body to secrete more insulin for longer periods of time. Whenever your body has high insulin, it is not burning fat. In fact, it may do the opposite and store fat. Lemon water may help fight insulin resistance.
Diabetes in Control writes:
A key ingredient found in lemon peels is polyphenols, which plays a major role in minimizing insulin resistance. An increase in insulin resistance leads to less responsiveness from the insulin hormone, resulting in uncontrolled levels of blood sugar.
Those same ingredients also exist in the juice of the lemon itself. A 2015 study concluded that lemon water can help reduce fat in the body by improving insulin resistance.
Lemon water also helps with satiety, meaning that those who consume it tend to eat less thereby contributing to weight loss.
Cortisol
Lemon water, due to its high vitamin C content, can also help reduce cortisol in your body. Cortisol is another hormone that stores fat and slows down fat metabolism.
If lemon water is too strong for you, you may want to consider adding stevia to it in order to sweeten it without all those extra calories.
Dawn Flemming is Director of Business Services at Geriatric In-Home Care in Fresno, California.
