How the Stress Hormone Cortisol Affects Weight Loss

What is cortisol?

Cortisol is a hormone that is secreted by the adrenal glands. It regulates blood pressure and regulates the body's use of macronutrients. Cortisol also affects the release of insulin release and your body's ability to convert sugars into energy.

Typically, cortisol levels peak in the morning, and is at its lowest level in the middle of the night. At natural, healthy levels, cortisol provides sustained energy and even improves memory. In stressful situations, extra cortisol is released to provide an immediate, easy-to-use energy supply. While this reaction is helpful in life-or-death situations, it actually becomes harmful when it occurs in response to minor everyday stresses like traffic and bills. Chronic stress, over-working, and insufficient sleep cause a chronic excess of cortisol, which is harmful in the short-term and life-threatening in the long-term.

 

What are the drawbacks of too much cortisol?

Most modern-day stresses are mental or emotional—not truly life-threatening. The result of a week’s worth of minor conflicts is a body under constant stress. This provides a few immediate complications: 

• Suppressed thyroid function.
• Lowered immune response.
• Imbalanced blood sugar.

Over the course of a lifetime, excess cortisol is associated with far more damaging effects:

• Loss of muscle mass, which also slows your metabolism.
• Chronically increased blood sugar, which increases appetite, cravings for harmful sweets, and can lead to insulin resistance (a precursor of type 2 diabetes).
• Accumulation of body fat from stress-eating due to an overstimulated appetite. Stress-eating tends to add fat around the abdomen. Belly fat is linked to metabolic syndrome: a group of risk factors linked with increased risk of type 2 diabetes, heart disease, obesity, high cholesterol and high blood pressure.

Resolve to Relax: Coping With Stress in the New Year

Happiness and positive thinking are typical of the physically fit. Similar to strength training and conditioning, mental fitness can be improved through persistent effort. Simple exercises can help people of any age cope with stress and find happiness. Stress relief encourages healthy habits. This New Year, resolve to relax. Get fit by tackling stress head on.

Fears vs. Motivation

Eighty-five percent of our worries are grossly exaggerated. The fear of a difficult situation is almost always more stressful than the actual situation. Don't let your artificial worries dictate your real-life actions. To help achieve your New Year's Resolution, physically write down your worries and fears, as well as why you've chosen your resolution. Writing gives weight to your thoughts. By laying out your motivation against your fears, you can consciously evaluate how the long-term benefits of your resolution vastly outweigh your immediate fears.

Concentrate on Relaxing

Relieving emotional stress can prevent destructive habits like overeating and stress eating. Similarly, soothing physical soreness can help ensure you stick to your exercise routine.Stress management is a physical and emotional process. While it is fairly common knowledge that exercise itself helps alleviate emotional stress, few know that your mind can help reduce physical soreness.

After exercise, lactic acid gathers in the muscles and causes stress. A technique called progressive muscle relaxation—using your mind to instruct your muscles to relax—has actually been shown to reduce physical stress. This year, exercise, then use your mind to quicken post-workout recovery. You will be more likely to stick to your resolution.

Tweaking Routines

Lasting changes cannot be made if immediate changes are not implemented. New routines can yield new ideas and ease old worries. Plan a specific routine to help you track your progress. To succeed, you must be accountable for your sucessess and setbacks. Any routine changes you make should be specific.

If your resolution is to eat healthier, create a shopping list and week-long meal plan every Sunday. If you want to exercise more, schedule specific days and times to work out. Remember, failing to plan is planning to fail. Invest in yourself and your resolution ahead of time, and you will be successful.

Achieving Success in the New Year

Maximized Living wellness doctors are trained in all core aspects of health. From a prepared, forward-thinking mindset to a time-efficient fitness program, our doctors can help you achieve any goal you may have for the New Year.

How Stress Effects Your Digestion and Weight Gain/Loss by Marc David, Dr. Mercola and Brian Bartholomew D.C.



Highlights from the article:

1. Many people are eating under a state of physiological stress or anxiety.  e.g. eating on the run, eating at work, eating with while watching tv or the news, eating while arguing with their family.

2.  Physiolgocial Stress Response is our body’s mechanism to escape predators.  It increases heart rate, increases blood pressure, shunts blood away from the mid section to the arms and legs for quick fighting, thinking or fleeing.  Physiological Stress is considered a negative stress or a dis-stress especially when inappropriately timed and timed with eating.

3. While under stress your body cannot properly digest, assimilate or burn calories correctly even if you are eating the healthiest foods on the planet.

4. The stress response causes: Decreased nutrient absorption, decreased oxygenation to your gut, 4 times less blood flow to the digestive system and as much as a 20,000 fold decreased enzymatic output for breaking down your food.

5.  Water soulable nutrients, macrominerals and micro minerals are excreted by the body during physiolgocial stress.  An example of your body under stress is calcium excretion which can reach 60-75 mg in the first hour of stress.

6. Under chronic stress hormones like cortisol are increased which increases the inablity to lose weight, increases the inability to lose body fat, the inability to build muscle and commonly causes more weight gain around the mid section.

7.  Under stress blood cholesterol and triglycerides go up while helpful gut flora populations decrease and increased food sensitivities and gastroesophageal reflux (heartburn) are common.


Action Steps:

1. Practice gratitude, prayer, deep breathing prior to eating.  Take a minute or 5 and relax, breath before, during and after your meal.  Allot enough time to have a non-rushed, uninterrupted meal.  Put your fork down and chew, taste, enjoy your food.  Strive to eat nutrient filled, local foods you love.

2. Eat your meals in a quiet, comfortable and relaxing place.  Try not to eat in front of the tv or in the car. 

3. Exercise helps decrease stress and inspires me to make healthier food choices and eating strategies: Studies have shown that during exercise, relaxing chemicals (endorphins) are released in the brain that bring pleasurable relaxation and rejuvenation.

3. Proper sleep 7-8 hours in a dark room between 10pm and 7am are best.  Lavender, calming music, gratitude journals, light reading, avoidance of caffeine and tv are great ways to help sleep and bust stress.

4. Meditation sitting or laying with relaxing music or meditations from youtube.com are great ways to relax prior to or after a meal.  I also recommend stretching before or after your meal to help the body relax and digest better and to help you unwind.

5. Make sure you are getting your weekly chiropractic adjustments to improve the communication between your brain and your body and maximize you life potential. 

Feeling sluggish or out of sync? Having skin problems, aches and pains, or digestive problems? Straying from your healthier habits lately? It might be time for a detox.

Practiced for centuries by many cultures around the world — including ayurvedic and Chinese medicine systems — detoxification is about resting, cleaning and nourishing the body from the inside out.  By removing and eliminating toxins, then feeding your body with healthy nutrients, detoxifying can help protect you from disease and renew your ability to maintain optimum health.

The body has its own natural healing system and Detoxification greatly enhances this system.

How Does Detoxification Work?
Basically, detoxification means cleaning the blood and body. It does this mainly by removing impurities from the blood in the liver, where toxins are processed for elimination.  The body also eliminates toxins through the kidneys, intestines, lungs, lymph and skin.  However, when this system is compromised, impurities aren't properly filtered and every cell in the body is adversely affected producing dis-ease.

A detox program can help the body's natural cleaning process by:
1) Resting the organs through fasting;
2) Stimulating the liver to drive toxins from the body;
3) Promoting elimination through the intestines, kidneys and skin;
4) Improving circulation of the blood; and
5) Refueling the body with healthy nutrients.

Detoxification works because it addresses the needs of individual cells, the smallest units of human life.

How Do You Know if You Need to Detoxify?
Because of toxins in our environment and food everyone should detox at least once a year.  A short detoxifying program is generally safe; in fact, scientific studies show that a detox is beneficial for health.  However nursing mothers, children, and patients with chronic degenerative diseases, cancer or tuberculosis should use caution.

Where Do You Begin?
First, lighten up your toxin load.  Eliminate alcohol, coffee, cigarettes, refined sugars and poly un-saturated fats, all of which act as toxins in the body and are obstacles to your healing process.  Also, minimize use of chemical-based household cleaners and personal health care products (cleansers, shampoos, deodorants and toothpastes), and substitute natural alternatives.

Another deterrent to good health is stress, which triggers your body to release stress hormones into your system.  While these hormones can provide the "adrenaline rush" to win a race or meet a deadline, in large amounts they create toxins and slow down detoxification enzymes in the liver.  So it's a good idea to detox stressful life situations along with detoxifying your body.  Yoga, chiropractic and meditation are simple and effective ways to relieve stress by resetting your physical and mental reactions to the inevitable stress life will bring.

10 Ways to Help Your Body Detoxify Daily

1. Eat plenty of fiber, including brown rice, quinoa and organically-grown fresh fruits and vegetables.  Beets, radishes, artichokes, cabbage, broccoli, spirulina, chlorella, and seaweed are excellent detoxifying foods.

2. Cleanse and protect the liver by taking herbs such as dandelion root, burdock and milk thistle, and drinking green tea or squeezing a quarter to an eight of a lemon in your water.

3. Take vitamin C, which helps the body produce glutathione, a liver compound that drives away toxins especially heavy metals like mercury and aluminum.

4. Drink at least 2 quarts or half your body weight in ounces of water daily preferably lemon water and or water from a reverse osmosis filter.

5. Breathe deeply to allow oxygen to circulate more completely through your system.  Count your average breaths per minute, 12-20 is normal, if you are in the high 20's or 30's you are panting like a dog and not allowing your body to de-toxify properly.

6. Transform stress by emphasizing positive emotions, changing out any dis-empowering thoughts with healing, empowering ideas.

7. Practice hydrotherapy by taking a very hot shower for five minutes, allowing the water to run on your back. Follow with cold water for 30 seconds.  Do this three times, and then get into bed for 30 minutes.

8. Sweat in a sauna so your body can eliminate wastes through perspiration.

9. Dry-brush your skin or try detoxifying patches or  detox foot spas / foot baths to remove toxins through your pores. Special brushes are available at natural products stores.

10. What is the most important way to detoxify? "Exercise," says Bennett. "Yoga or jump-roping are good. One hour every day." Also try qigong, a martial-arts based exercise system that includes exercises specifically for detoxifying or cleansing, as well as many other exercises with specific health benefits.