Can’t Lose Weight? It’s Maybe Your Liver

It’s One Of The Symptoms For Fatty Liver

If you’re doing all the right things and still Can’t Lose Weight? It’s Maybe Your Liver, don’t blame yourself… it could be your liver. And it may be the last place, anyone, even your doctor, thinks to look. Why is that?

We can’t say for sure but I’m thinking that when someone says they’re doing all the right things to lose weight… diet, exercise… and still can’t shed pounds, they think you’re cheating or lying. If I can take the literary license with a Jimmy Buffett song, “Some people claim that there’s a donut to blame, but I know… it’s my own liver’s fault.”

Fatty Liver Disease Slows Your Metabolism

Your liver is responsible for a lot of what goes on in your body. It is the control center for your metabolism, it removes toxins, it supplies nutrients to the rest of the body, it stores excess sugar in the form of fat and converts it back to sugar as needed for energy, it produces cholesterol and certain proteins needed by our body. There are hundreds of functions performed by the liver. It’s an amazing organ! It deserves your attention and your utmost care for its well-being.

Metabolism is a chemical process that occurs in the liver that converts food into energy. That energy is what powers our body and enables it to do all the things it does. Ideally, with proper diet and activity, there would be a balance between the amount of energy produced from our diet and the amount of energy expended by our daily activities.

There are a number of things that can go wrong to upset the balance. About 30 years ago, the most prevalent cause upsetting that balance was alcohol. The excessive use of alcohol caused fatty deposits in the liver weakening its ability to burn fat. The condition was called fatty liver disease.

Heavy Drinking, Heavy Eating: Either Can Cause Fatty Liver Disease

In recent years we find that excessive weight (obesity) can have the same effect on the liver as alcohol. In fact, the prevalence of the fatty liver disease among persons who consume little or no alcohol prompted the medical profession to devise the term, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), to distinguish between the two causes. Another term you will hear is non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH) which is a fatty liver disease that has progressed to the point where damage to the liver has occurred.

So what we have here is a Catch-22 situation. Can’t Lose Weight? It’s Maybe Your Liver  People who are overweight or obese need to lose weight to reverse fatty liver disease but the disease’s impact on their metabolism makes it really difficult for them to lose weight even when doing all the right things through diet and exercise.

But do you have a fatty liver? Remember I said, “It may be your liver.” It may not but here are some things that are common among those who do have fatty deposits in the liver.

• Obesity (with a predominance of belly fat)
• Difficulty losing weight
• Diabetes (Type 2)
• Insulin resistance
• Elevated liver enzymes
• High blood pressure
• High cholesterol and triglycerides
• Fatigue
• Sleep apnea

What To Do When You Can’t Lose Weight

Remember this… fatty liver disease makes it hard to lose weight but not impossible. The most important thing is not to give up. Equal in importance is to make sure you are doing the right things.

Losing weight rapidly may actually exacerbate the fatty liver disease. Be patient. Stay the course.