Weight Loss — Why Your Diet Isn't the Problem

You've tried everything. Keto. Carnivore. Calorie counting. Weight Watchers. Maybe even Ozempic. The scale moved for a while. Then it stopped. Or worse — bounced right back.

Every doctor you've seen has told you the same thing: eat less, move more. Here's a pamphlet about the Mediterranean diet. See you in six months.

And you keep trying. Because you're not lazy. You're not undisciplined. You genuinely want to lose the weight. But nothing sticks.

If you're looking for a weight loss doctor near you who actually investigates the root cause, this is what I tell patients every day in my Central Texas practice: this is not a willpower problem. Weight resistance is a symptom. Your body is sending signals that something deeper is broken. And until we figure out what's actually going on — your insulin, your thyroid, your gut, your cortisol — no amount of meal prepping is going to fix it.

The advice to "eat less, move more" is medically accurate. It's also clinically useless. Because your metabolism is broken, and nobody has bothered to figure out why.

What Usually Happens (And Why It Doesn't Work)

A typical primary care visit for weight: your doctor checks your BMI, maybe runs a basic metabolic panel, looks at your fasting glucose, and tells you to eat less and move more. If your fasting glucose is under 100, you're "fine." If your TSH is in range, your thyroid is "normal." You leave feeling dismissed. Maybe with a pamphlet.

The problem? Those labs barely scratch the surface.

A fasting glucose that looks normal on paper might be hiding serious insulin resistance. Your cells could be screaming at your pancreas to make more insulin just to keep your blood sugar in range. That's not "fine." That's a metabolic fire smoldering behind a normal-looking wall.

This is exactly why I start every weight loss patient in the same place: the foundation — metabolic health, gut function, and stress response. Before we talk about macros or exercise programs, I need to understand what your body is actually doing with the food you eat and why it's choosing to store instead of burn.

Where I Actually Start

The first labs I run aren't the ones you're used to seeing. I'm looking at fasting insulin, something called HOMA-IR — which is basically a calculated score that tells me how well your cells respond to insulin — a full thyroid panel, and markers of gut health and inflammation.

​Insulin resistance is the single most common root cause of weight resistance I see in practice. A good chunk of my patients — many who drive from Temple, Killeen, Georgetown, and across Central Texas — come in frustrated about weight and have fasting insulin levels well above where I want them. And nobody has ever checked it. The HOMA-IR score gives us a direct window into how well your cells are responding. Most of my weight-resistant patients are walking in with elevated scores that nobody's ever measured.

​Thyroid is another area where conventional medicine leaves people hanging. TSH alone is not enough — full stop. I need free T3, free T4, reverse T3, and thyroid antibodies.

Here's why: your TSH might look "normal," but if your free T3 is in the basement and your reverse T3 is elevated, your body is actively downregulating your metabolism. So what's happening is your body is converting your active thyroid hormone into a metabolic brake pedal. You're telling your own body to slow down.

And then there's the gut. Bear with me here — this one goes deeper than most people expect.

Your gut bacteria directly influence how many calories you extract from food, how much inflammation you carry, and how your hunger hormones behave. Research has shown that transferring gut bacteria from obese animals into lean animals causes the lean ones to gain more fat — without changing their diet. The bugs themselves change how energy gets harvested from food.

Here's where it gets interesting. When your gut is out of balance, it creates this low-grade inflammation that directly worsens insulin resistance. So now you've got a vicious cycle: bad gut bacteria drive inflammation, inflammation drives insulin resistance, insulin resistance drives weight gain, and weight gain makes the gut worse. Round and round.

Once I have a clear read on metabolic function, thyroid status, and gut health, I have a map. I know why the weight isn't moving. And that changes everything about how we approach it.

The Stress Piece Nobody Talks About

I can't have this conversation without talking about cortisol and your stress response — what we call the HPA axis, which is your body's central stress management system.

Chronic stress — whether it's work, relationships, poor sleep, over-exercising, or just the relentless pace of modern life — keeps cortisol elevated. And elevated cortisol does something very specific to your body composition: it drives visceral fat. Not the fat you can pinch — the deep abdominal fat that wraps around your organs and drives metabolic disease.

This is the person who exercises hard, eats clean, and still can't lose the midsection. Cortisol is literally redirecting where your body stores fat.

And this is where I bring up something I call the pillars of health — sleep, diet, movement, environment, community, and mental health. You can't out-supplement a cortisol problem. You have to look at the inputs.

Is the patient sleeping six hours a night? Are they isolated? Is their work environment toxic? These aren't soft questions — they're metabolic questions. Poor sleep alone can increase insulin resistance significantly after just four nights. That's not a lifestyle footnote. That's a metabolic wrecking ball.

Going Deeper When the Foundation Isn't Enough

For some patients, optimizing insulin, thyroid, gut, and stress doesn't fully crack it. That's when we go deeper — environmental toxins, sex hormones, and food sensitivities.

Environmental toxins — particularly endocrine disruptors like BPA and phthalates — are increasingly linked to obesity. There's actually a term for it: "obesogens." These are chemicals that mess with your metabolic signaling, and they're in plastics, receipts, conventional produce, household cleaners. You're swimming in them.

Sex hormone imbalances — low testosterone in men, estrogen dominance in women — directly affect body composition, muscle mass, and fat distribution. I see this constantly: a patient in their early forties with progressively worsening weight resistance, and nobody has checked how they're metabolizing hormones.

And then food sensitivities. I'm not talking about true allergies — I'm talking about sensitivities that create a persistent low-grade immune response, driving up inflammation and making weight loss biochemically harder. We see a lot of this in my practice, especially with dairy, gluten, and eggs.

Where GLP-1 Medications Fit — And Where They Don't

Now let's talk about the elephant in the room: semaglutide, tirzepatide, and the GLP-1 revolution.

These medications work. I prescribe them. The data is impressive — we're seeing 15-20% body weight loss in clinical trials. Numbers we've never seen with pharmaceutical intervention before.

But here's the thing nobody at the "GLP-1 mill" clinics wants to tell you: if you don't address why your metabolism is broken in the first place, you will regain the weight when you stop the medication.

The research backs this up. Roughly two-thirds of weight lost comes back within a year of stopping. Two-thirds. Because the medication was managing the symptom — appetite and glucose regulation — without fixing the underlying dysfunction that made the weight accumulate in the first place.

This is where my approach is fundamentally different. I use GLP-1 medications as a tool within a root-cause framework, not as the plan itself.

In practice, this means we do the deep investigation first — find the metabolic dysfunction. Then we start fixing those root causes. And if needed, we layer in a GLP-1 as an accelerant. Something that gives the body momentum while we're rebuilding the metabolic foundation underneath.

The goal is always the same: get you off the GLP-1 as your metabolism normalizes. Not stay on it forever. Not use it as a crutch while ignoring the five other things that are broken. Actually fix the engine so it runs on its own.

And look — I need to say this directly. A lot of the GLP-1 clinics popping up, especially around Central Texas, are basically telehealth prescription mills. You fill out a questionnaire, talk to someone for ten minutes, get a prescription. No labs. No investigation. No plan for what happens after. That's not medicine. That's a vending machine with a DEA number.

The patients I see the best long-term results with? They're the ones where we've spent the time to understand their specific metabolic picture, addressed the root causes, and used the GLP-1 strategically — as a bridge, not a destination. A good chunk of my patients are able to come off their medication within 6 to 12 months because their metabolism is actually functioning again. That's a completely different outcome than what you get from a prescription-only approach.

When We Need to Go Even Deeper

Occasionally, we need to look at genetics and structural factors. Genetic variants that affect things like satiety signaling and metabolism can change how aggressively we need to intervene. These aren't excuses — they're variables. And they're part of why cookie-cutter approaches don't work for everyone.

The Bottom Line

If you've been told your labs are "normal" and you just need to try harder, you haven't had the right labs run. If you're thinking about a GLP-1 but you want more than just a prescription — you want someone to actually figure out why your body is holding onto weight — that's exactly what we do.

Weight resistance is a solvable problem. You just have to stop treating the symptom and start treating the system.

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​Ready to find your root cause? Book a consultation or call us at 254-780-0023.

Rooted Health Clinic — 1401 N Stagecoach Rd, Salado, TX 76571