How Stress Is Hurting Your Weight Loss (Part 1)

Cortisol affects us in many ways, and is directly associated with a lack of sleep, weight gain and insulin resistance. Cortisol is your body’s main stress hormone – kind of like a built-in alarm system. It works with parts of your brain to control your mood, motivation and fear.

Cortisol is best known as the hormone that fuels our “fight or flight” responses in a crisis, but also has a number of other jobs in the body, as well – like managing how your body uses carbohydrates, fats and proteins for one.

It also helps with regulating blood pressure, increasing blood sugar, controlling your sleep/wake cycle, keeping inflammation down and boosting energy in order to help handle stress, while restoring balance afterward.

The cortisol receptors are in most of the cells of your body. These receptors receive and use the hormone in different ways, depending on your body’s needs each day.

Sometimes your cortisol levels can remain too high. If we are under constant stress, our alarm button stays on, creating high cortisol levels in the body.

This can lead to a host of health problems, such as anxiety and depression, headaches, acne, heart disease, memory and concentration problems, digestive issues, infections, fertility problems, muscle aches and pains, trouble sleeping, weight gain especially around the stomach and much more.

There are two big factors that contribute to high cortisol in the body. One is longer term corticosteroids like prednisone, cortisone, and hydrocortisone, often used to treat many conditions like rashes, lupus and asthma, which help to reduce inflammation.

The other is chronic stress. Stress is stress. It can be emotional, physical or mental stress and cortisol will respond the same way. So, even the wrong type of exercise, inflammation, poor sleep or a poor diet can be stressful on the body and trigger high cortisol levels.

That chronically high cortisol is associated with fat accumulation around the waist, but it also increases the ability of fat cells to store fat. So, a high priority for those of us with ongoing high stress levels is to find ways to better manage stress in order to reduce or prevent the effects of chronic stress on weight control.

So, what are some of the ways we can naturally begin to lower our cortisol levels? Make sure to Eat a Whole Food, Anti-Inflammatory Diet which, fortunately, describes your GHS plan. Poorly managed blood sugar levels, whether high or low, lead to high cortisol levels and other hormonal imbalances.

The biggest contributors to inflammation and high cortisol are eating a diet high in sugars or high-glycemic foods like prepackaged and refined grain products; unhealthy fats like canola, corn, soybean and cottonseed oils; drinking too much caffeine and alcohol; getting too little of the micronutrients found in healthy foods; and not getting enough healthy fats or protein, which lead to hunger, weight gain and high blood sugar.

Next, Reduce and Manage Stress. Chronic stress is connected to almost every health problem for the very reasons we mentioned. Those chemical signals go throughout the body when we are stressed affect our heart, vessels, immunity, respiratory and digestive systems and our brain. It increases our breathing rhythm, heart rate, pain, muscle tension, appetite and disrupts sleep.

We are prone to disease and weight gain if we don’t control our stress. Next week we will look at several ways we can take control over and manage stress.