Last month I had the opportunity to spend a week with 5 women with PCOS at Green Mountain at Fox Run's first ever PCOS week. I learned a tremendous amount from them, maybe even more than I went to teach to them, about the syndrome.
One of the most important insights I gained, was why it can be so difficult to lose weight once you've decided to change your eating and exercise habits.
Insulin has a lot to do with it.
Your body is constantly taking in data, recording the temperature, the light level, energy levels, etc., and adjusting itself to be able to meet the demands of the situations it's recording. When it comes to hormones, it often records and hangs on to information from weeks before. It's as if it wants to be sure it's ready to handle the worst case scenario it's going to have to be asked to deal with. So…if you've been binge eating, and you've changed your habits, information it's taken in about that binge, if it occurred in your recent past, is still in the database. Your body is likely to want to make more insulin than it currently needs, just in case it's asked to have to handle a binge session like one it remembers you engaged in.
If you continue your new eating habits, consistently, that will register positively, your body will trust that it needs to make less insulin, and your lab values will improve.
The challenging part is being patient with your body while the new data has a chance to be recorded and acted on.
If you've got high insulin levels and all of a sudden you decide to go on a diet, or exercise at high levels, the insulin levels won't automatically adjust. It can be very easy to create a hypoglycemic state if you take on too much too soon. And, as your blood sugar levels drop, your hunger and carbohydrate cravings are likely going to be triggered to correct the situation.
Hypoglycemia is a stressful situation for the body, so when this scenario kicks in, it also triggers the release of stress hormones. Cortisol, one of the major stress hormones, is made with cholesterol. As are estrogen, testosterone, and progesterone. If choices you are making are demanding of the body that it makes more cortisol, it's going to be hard for it to make the other three hormones in the proper proportions.
The other thing that is common with PCOS is an intelligent, driven, all-or-nothing tending personality. When you decide to take on diet and exercise, it can be in an extreme fashion. When weight doesn't come off as planned, you can be very hard on yourself, raising your stress levels, possibly bingeing out of frustration.
And thus the cycle starts, all over again.
Hence the title of this post. How do you back yourself out of such a situation?
Ohhhh…you all are going to hate this, but the key word is"moderation". Be gentle with yourself. Rather than taking on an extreme exercise plan and a rigid diet, focus on small simple changes and working to turn them into habits. Be patient. Understand that the changes you're implementing on the outside take time to be registered by your internal hormone control systems.
Probably key? Remember this: THE DAYS YOU FEEL THE LEAST LIKE STICKING WITH YOUR NEW HABITS ARE THE DAYS IT IS MOST IMPORTANT TO DO JUST THAT. It's tempting to blame a bad day on something you've done, to take it personally, rather than let your body do what it does best when it's not interfered with. By bingeing and not exercising on a day you feel badly, you prolong the time it's going to take to get things back into balance.