How a Blood Test Can Be the Secret to Weight Loss

Eating a balanced diet and getting regular exercise are important for good health and weight management. But they’re not the only factors that influence your ability to achieve and maintain a healthy weight.

We know how frustrating it is when you’re struggling to reach your weight goal despite putting in all your effort. Weight loss is hard, and sometimes your body throws in obstacles that make it even harder. 

At Legacy Pain and Regenerative Medicine, our chiropractic physician, Dr. Trace Alexander, takes a whole-person approach to weight loss, looking for and addressing all the factors that influence your weight, like underlying health issues. 

Here, we want to talk about blood tests that can provide insight into your weight-loss struggles and how we address it. 

Factors that influence weight

Despite what you may believe, your weight (and ability to lose weight) isn’t completely in your control. Yes, you have control over what you eat and the lifestyle habits that affect your weight and health, like sleep and exercise, but these are only some of the factors that influence your weight.

Your sex, height, genetics, age, and medical history also affect your weight and can make it harder for you to reach your weight goals. When starting a new weight-loss program, it’s important to understand all the factors that impact your weight, including those that you have no control over. 

That’s the difference between a commercial weight-loss program and a medical weight-loss program like ours. We conduct a thorough physical exam, do bloodwork, and take a complete diet and weight history. This information helps us better understand all the barriers that keep you from reaching your ideal weight so we can create a plan that really works. 

Bloodwork for weight loss

Blood tests provide objective information about your health. We use these diagnostic tools to screen for diseases and look for factors that influence your health and weight.

For weight loss, we run blood tests to check hormone levels. Hormones are chemical messengers that tell your body what to do. They affect your mood, hunger, and metabolism. More recently, researchers are finding that hormones may play a role in the development of obesity. 

We check thyroid and sex hormone levels for our patients participating in our weight-loss program. Your thyroid hormones control your metabolism, or the number of calories your body needs to function. Low thyroid levels makes it harder for people to manage their weight.

Sex hormone production naturally declines with age, including the female sex hormones estrogen and progesterone and the male sex hormone testosterone. Changes in sex hormone levels affects body composition and energy, making weight control more challenging. 

Tailoring weight loss plans

Once we fully understand all the factors that affect your weight, we create a personalized plan that can best help you. Your weight-loss plan may include:

• A personalized nutrition program
• Exercise recommendations
• Nutritional supplements
• Hormone replacement therapy (HRT)
• Behavioral therapy

We only prescribe HRT if hormone levels are low and affect energy, weight, and quality of life. We closely track progress, providing the accountability and motivation you need to keep going. 

Weight loss is a journey filled with twists, turns, and diversions. No single path works for everyone, but identifying the potential obstacles can make for a slightly smoother ride.

When diet and exercise alone fail to help you reach your weight and health goals, it’s time to try something else. We can run bloodwork to find out what’s holding you back from reaching your goals. Call the office most convenient to you — either in Plano or Addison, Texas — to schedule a consultation with our weight-loss expert today.