With the recent rise in popularity of CBD and all of its variations also comes a litany of claims regarding the benefits of this compound. CBD has been discussed as possibly having benefits ranging all the way from reducing anxiety to pain management, and it seems like the list of uses just continues to grow.
If you’ve done any of your own research on it and seen the headlines yourself, you might be asking at this point “what exactly can’t this substance do?”
Without years of confirmational research, none of these claims will be medically or legally backed for a while. Despite this, you may continue to see anecdotal signs of positive effects from CBD supplements, with the next perhaps being its potential impacts on weight loss.
Can CBD Actually Help You Lose Weight?
Nobody can say definitively if CBD products will cause, initiate, or boost your weight loss journey. However, you can click here to read some testimonials of those who have had success with using CBD products and how it’s positively affected their weight loss goals. The only way to truly know if it works for you, and what works for you, is to test it on your own accord.
How Fat Loss Works
Before you begin to try out CBD products available for weight loss and conclude what the best route to go is, it’s vital to understand how the body works first and understand how CBD may be affecting it.
Fat is normal, and healthy even in the right amount. Think of fat as food stored for later for the body, because that’s exactly what it is. In modern times, most humans don’t actually need that much though, simply due to the fact that food is readily available. It was a survival tactic of the body, but it’s seldom used for this now. Keeping too much of it, and keeping it for too long, can actually be detrimental to your health, as you already know.
Fat and Your BMR
Fat is accumulated when you consume more calories than whatever your basal metabolic rate (BMR) required of you for that time period. Your BMR is the number of calories required to maintain your current weight, and stay alive. Eat less than that, you’ll lose weight; eat more and you’ll gain.
To lose weight, and lose fat specifically, you have to create a caloric deficit. This means you consume less than you need, and force your body to tap into its energy stores. After there’s no glucose left in your blood stream, the body will turn to the glycogen stored in your liver (which doesn’t last all that long) and then to fat, converting your triglycerides into energy and maybe eventually ketones as you enter ketosis.
How CBD Interacts with Fat and Could Encourage Weight Loss
So how does CBD play its role in this fat burning process? CBD interacts with your body’s endocannabinoid system. The endocannabinoid system is responsible for, and interacts with, all sorts of bodily processes ranging from metabolism to various other signaling that goes on in your nervous system and brain, essentially nudging you on what to do or feel.
CBD’s interactions with this system have, in some cases, have shown signs of increasing metabolism in individuals sometimes. It’s also been noted that it could potentially influence ghrelin in the body, which is a hormone responsible for stimulating feelings of hunger and appetite. As a result, this leads to an overall reduction in calorie intake just due to the simple adjustment of less hunger, ultimately aiding in fat loss.
It has also shown indicators of impacting sleep, mood, stress, and overall exercise performance too, all of which come together to make for a potent weight loss strategy.
CBD has, at times, been seen to have some noteworthy interactions with the body’s mitochondria as well. You may remember this from biology class as the “powerhouse of the cell” or something like that, and that would be true. Researches have noted that CBD seems to strengthen this little, yet important, cell organelle, and in some cases rid the body of bad ones too.
Deciding if CBD is for You
CBD is a supplement as is anything else used to aid or boost your weight loss, so whether it’s for you or not is a personal choice. Every supplement affects every user differently, so trying it out in the proper dosage first is an important test for CBD products first, just like any other product.
Some things work for others and aren’t for everyone, and CBD isn’t guaranteed to have an impact on your weight loss, but the positive correlations are encouraging.
