You may be aware that the liver is an important organ in keeping you healthy, but many people fail to recognize the importance of the liver in weight loss. While the liver is needed to detoxify various chemicals such as alcohol and drugs, it also has critical functions in the production and/or activation of many hormones - including all of the hormones involved in your ability to burn fat. Natural weight loss is dramatically impaired if the liver is not working efficiently.

Because of poor lifestyle choices, such as excess alcohol consumption, the use of drugs and medications (even over-the-counter medications), and poor diet - particularly eating a lot of fat and animal proteins, it is common for the liver to become overworked and irritated. This results in an inflammatory response in the abominal cavity, which results in an accumulation of fluid (called ascites). This accumulation of fluid causes the abdomen to bulge outward in what is commonly called a "potbelly" or "beer gut". In women, the problem can get bad enough that the protruding belly makes them look pregnant when they are not. For people with this water weight deposition, weight loss can be frustrating because exercise will not "burn it off" - because it's not fat. Since natural weight loss approaches fail to get results in these situations, some people resort to diet drugs, which may work at first, but ultimately harm the liver even more and create even more abdominal water retention.

With liver-related water retention, many diet programs and weight loss aids also actually make things worse. The Atkin's diet, because it is so high in protein and fat, tends to be hard on the liver and will often lead to even more retaining of fluid. Some weight loss aids contain drugs or chemicals that the liver must process, and again, create even more liver irritation and subsequent water retention.

In addition to the water retention issue, good liver function is necessary for the proper production and/or activation of the hormones that stimulate fat burning. For instance, the liver is needed to convert the inactive form of thyroid hormone (T4) to the active form (T3). When the liver is overworked and cannot do the hormone conversions efficiently, the body cannot burn fat efficiently, no matter how much exercise you may do or what other natural weight loss steps you take.

In addition to activating fat-burning hormones as with thyroid hormone, the liver produces insulin-like growth factor (IGF), which is another fat-burning hormone. IGF controls blood sugar during the relatively long-period that you go without eating during sleep. When you are asleep at night, your blood sugar levels fall and the liver generates IGF to cause the fat tissues to burn fat to boost blood sugar. Again, if liver function is not as good as it should be, this hormone is not produced efficiently and you don't burn as much fat. The other thing that occurs is that your blood sugar will go lower than it should and you wake up in the morning feeling very fatigued and irritable.

At this point you may be wondering what steps you need to take to help improve liver function to help alleviate abdominal water retention and to help better activate your fat burning hormones to stimulate natural weight loss? To begin with, it is important to reduce the detoxification load on the liver. This means cutting back on alcohol and any unnecessary drugs and medications. If possible, I recommend avoiding alcohol and non-essential medications entirely for at least a few weeks to give the liver an opportunity to recover.

The next step is to clean up you diet to make things as easy as possible on the liver. The ideal approach is to go vegetarian for at least a few weeks and eat primarily fresh vegetables, and fruits, and use nuts, seeds, and beans as your primary sources of protein. If you can't do that, it is advisable to at least cut out fried and greasy foods and high-fat meats for a while. The better your diet, the faster you'll lose the retained water in the abdomen and the faster you'll make real progress on losing weight.

Herbal and nutritional products are sometimes sold as liver "detoxifiers", and such products do sometimes provide support for the liver. These can be useful in more extreme cases or for those who simply aren't willing to take the dietary and other lifestyle measures just described. In my opinion, changing the diet and implementing the other natural weight loss lifestyle factors is a much more effective way to go, but using a liver detoxification product is probably better than doing nothing. Because some of these products contain herbs that can interact with certain prescription medications, it is strongly recommended that you consult with a physician or a pharmacist before using any of these products if you are on prescription drugs.

In addition to weight loss, as liver function improves, your skin usually becomes clearer and your mood and energy level will typically improve, especially in the morning. People with chronic headaches often notice that the headaches become less frequent and may go away altogether. Likewise, people with chronic pains in the upper back along the right shoulder blade often report that those pains go away as they begin to take better care of the liver.

It should be noted that as the liver recovers and the body stops retaining water in the abdomen, you will typically lose weight very rapidly (it could be 5 pounds or more per day!) and you will need to urinate frequently (that's how the body gets rid of the excess water). As the body rids itself of the excess fluid, the rate of weight loss will decrease significantly. If you continue on a natural weight loss program, a reasonable expectation after you have lost the water weight is about 1 to 2 pounds per week.