Transform Your Body Composition
Why is it important to maintain an ideal body composition? Obesity and overweight are not simply cosmetic issues. A visit to Kenai’s top medical weight loss clinic in Soldotna can reveal that being overweight or obese leads to severe impairment at the molecular level. We know that both of these conditions result in an increase in the inflammatory state, worsening insulin sensitivity, worse lipid panels, accelerated cardiovascular disease, and an increase in cancer rates. In fact, an obesity doctor may tell you that obesity is worse than cigarette smoking for your health. This is not a problem with how you look on the outside; this is a problem with how you look on the inside, and we’ve got to correct this for long-term health and wellness.
In one of Alaska’s leading medical weight loss practice, the initial attempts will be made through teaching a person to rethink how they manage their lifestyle prescription. This includes nutrition counseling, exercise recommendations, and stress management techniques. Soldotna’s premier obesity doctor will help you understand how food affects appetite, how the timing of food ingestion affects appetite, and ultimately, energy consumption. What a person eats determines, to some extent, how their intestine is colonized – the composition of the microbiome. The microbiome, in turn, helps control how much energy you consume and how much energy you spend. The bacteria in our intestines must be fed, and the source of that energy is the foods we consume. So, some of the calories that we ingest go to feeding our microbiome. A healthy microbiome consumes a lot of energy, which can be revealed through comprehensive testing including a lipid panel from our Kenai Peninsula clinic. A DEXA scan can help you and your doctor understand your body composition and track your progress towards achieving a healthy weight.
Strategies to improve energy output are also shared in great detail at our medical weight loss clinic in Soldotna. This will be some combination of exercise and modifications to activities of daily living, as recommended by your obesity doctor.
There are genetic variations in our appetites; some people have obesity genes. Despite these genes, many can learn to control energy intake to match energy output, often with the guidance of a medical weight loss program. Most people do this regularly, but unfortunately, at a higher set point than is ideal. In order to correct the excessive energy stored, energy intake will have to be maintained below energy output for an extended period. This continues until energy stored (fat) is reduced to the optimum storage level, as measured by a DEXA scan. With proper adherence to the lifestyle prescription provided by Kenai’s foremost obesity doctor, most people can reach this balance at our medical weight loss clinic in Soldotna without experiencing a tremendous amount of hunger or feeling deprived of food or calories. It is not accomplished by living in the gym, though exercise and alterations in our daily activity levels can be helpful. Your obesity doctor can help you determine the right balance of diet and exercise for your individual needs.
So, weight loss is very complex.
Not everybody will accomplish what they need to do through lifestyle changes alone. That’s where our medical weight loss clinic in Soldotna, with its comprehensive approach to weight management, can help. Medical interventions, supervised by an obesity doctor specializing in hormone replacement therapy, can be helpful. One common pathway is to return hormones to youthful levels. In particular, the sex hormones—testosterone in both men and women, and estrogen in women—restored to youthful levels, have many beneficial effects in this domain.
Testosterone improves insulin sensitivity and shifts fat storage away from the visceral (gut fat—the dangerous stuff) and into a more healthy pattern, which can be monitored with a DEXA scan. Its ability to enhance the exercise prescription, and thereby affect energy output, has a big impact. This is why hormone optimization is often a key component of Alaska’s top medical weight loss program, alongside other treatments like appetite suppressants and vitamin injections.
Estrogen also has similar effects on metabolic health and fat storage patterns, making it an important consideration in medical weight loss for women.
Supplementation can be an important component of a comprehensive weight management plan. Enhancing the microbiome through the supplementation of bacteria, often recommended at the Kenai Peninsula’s top medical weight loss clinic, can result in a colony that consumes more energy. This is because the bacteria have to divide and grow, utilizing some of the food energy we consume. They also provide important signaling molecules that affect appetite. Therefore, we need to target our microbiome for a healthy outcome.
There are a handful of other supplements that can help with energy regulation and improve overall health. These are often recommended as part of a comprehensive plan at Soldotna’s medical weight loss clinic. See the section on “Supplements” for some “no brainers”.
There are other interventions that are very effective for weight loss. We’re very fortunate that we now have access to a class of medications (actually peptides) called GLP-1 agonists. These peptides, often prescribed by Kenai’s top obesity doctor, act through three mechanisms to help us gain control of our weight. One mechanism is at the endocrine level, where they lower blood sugar. They were originally developed as diabetes medications. They have the added benefit of improving most of the other metabolic and cardiovascular risk biomarkers that we follow when patients are treated with these agents for weight loss, even if they don’t have diabetes. When we put people on these GLP-1 agonists, they not only lose weight, but they also experience a decrease in the inflammatory state, their insulin sensitivity improves, and their lipid panels get better. It is a real blessing to have this tool in our tool bag to help people who can’t succeed with just a lifestyle prescription, simple supplementation, or hormone replacement therapy in our Soldotna, Alaska clinic. A DEXA scan can be used to monitor progress and assess body composition changes throughout treatment with GLP-1 agonists. This helps to ensure that patients are losing fat and not lean muscle mass.
They have additional weight loss mechanisms. These medicines also act to delay gastric emptying, so people tend to feel full and don’t experience constant hunger. The most amazing thing about these interventions is that they cause people to have a different relationship with food, resulting in a loss of cravings for foods that are typically not very helpful to our long-term health and wellness. I cannot stress how important it is to get yourself down to your ideal body weight. Through one or a combination of all of these strategies,
I cannot stress how important it is to get yourself down to ideal body weight. Through one or a combination of all of these strategies, everyone should be successful.
At our medical weight loss clinic serving the Kenai Peninsula, we utilize a highly sophisticated method to assess your current weight and body composition. Known as a DEXA scan (dual energy X-ray absorptiometry), this method is the gold standard for measuring body composition. Our obesity doctors use the DEXA scan to determine your lean muscle mass, body fat percentage, and visceral fat—the type of fat associated with various metabolic diseases. It also assesses bone density, which is crucial when addressing health concerns related to frailty.
With the results from the DEXA scan, we can precisely calculate the weight or fat loss needed to reach general body fat percentage targets—20% or less for males and 25% or less for females. These calculations help us set a clear target goal weight. Thus, the DEXA scan becomes an invaluable tool in our medical weight loss programs, allowing us to determine whether the weight loss is from fat, which is our target, or muscle. Often, an effective lifestyle prescription may lead to gains in lean mass and a reduction in fat mass, meaning that the overall weight might not change significantly, even though the body fat percentage is improving. Regular retesting at our medical weight loss center can prevent discouragement in patients who are actually making progress, even if they do not see changes on the scale.
Weight loss is crucial if you’re not already near or below essential body composition targets. If you choose to engage, whether it’s through learning about proper nutrition and possibly adding some supplementation (many can benefit from just that knowledge and simple intervention), or you seek treatment at our medical weight loss clinic in Soldotna with hormone therapy and actual prescriptions, there is a strategy for success. At our Kenai clinic, an obesity doctor can guide you through these options, ensuring that hope is indeed on the way!