Hello and welcome back to the podcast, everybody. My name is Dr. Stacy Heimburger, and I am so happy to have you here with me today. I want to talk about cortisol. So cortisol is our stress hormone, and lots of times when we’re feeling stressed, we notice we’re not really losing the weight that we want to be losing. And that is because cortisol absolutely affects our weight loss. So, I just want to talk a little bit about it today so you understand a little bit more about it. We’ll talk about some things that may increase our cortisol that you might not realize. And some ways to decrease our cortisol, which let’s be honest, we all need. We all need a little bit less stress and a little bit less stress hormone in our lives, right?
Cortisol's primary function in our body is a stress response, and this is a really necessary thing, right? So, if we are sick, if we are injured, we need cortisol to be released, so it is protective and necessary. It is not something we can just get rid of, but it is something we need to manage. Cortisol was probably a little bit more useful when we had more attacks to self, meaning we are back in cave man days. Something is attacking us. We are stressed. Cortisol helps us ramp up all of our systems and run away. We deal with stress very differently now. We also deal with very different circumstances that we have thoughts about and then feel very stressed about.
I would say one of the number one complaints I hear from my clients is how stressed out they are. So, I want you to see if this might ring true with you. We’re doing our best to lose weight. We have set a plan. We have done great for breakfast. We’ve done great for lunch. Then by the end of the day, we feel so stressed out that we just can’t wait to eat at the end of the day, right? Cortisol ramps up when we are stressed, and it absolutely will trigger us to eat sugary delicious comfort foods. If you’ve noticed you’re gaining weight just around your midsection, lots of times, this is where cortisol weight gain presents itself. Increased abdominal fat has directly been related to increased cortisol can also lead to sugary cravings are eating behaviors, and makes sense right if we were under stress, we needed to run away from the sabertooth tiger, our body would then crave really quick energy. We would need to replenish quickly what we had used to run away and since we still might be under threat, we should also get as much sugary quick energy in case we need to run away again, so it makes sense why we would crave those things when we are feeling stressed. But perceiving people being assholes at work is a very different stress than running away from a sabertooth tiger.
Running away from a tiger these days, yes, we should absolutely have a high stress response. Dealing with people at work, we have other ways to manage that. We don’t need to be eating to do that. So, let’s talk about some other things that might increase our cortisol: stressful thinking, just thinking thoughts that make us feel stressed, and we’ve been over this, right? If we are feeling stressed, we are having thoughts that are driving those feelings, so stressful thinking can increase our cortisol. When we then reach for that sugary food and we have high sugar and high carbohydrate intake, and this is like simple sugar is not your whole grain carbohydrates, not your vegetable carbohydrates. We’re having refined sugar and flour that can increase our cortisol.
If we are not sleeping, if we are not getting enough sleep, and they classify that at seven hours, if we are not getting our seven hours of sleep, we are increasing our Cortizone if we are in a very haphazard way, skipping meals, frequently or delaying meals that can increase our coral overworking, and this can be mental or physical, right? So, sometimes people will say I’m working out so hard and I’m not losing weight and I’m just gaining around my midsection and I keep going to the gym and I keep going to the gym, we might be increasing our cortisol with overworking physically or bodies.
Any type of surgery or traumatic injury toxic exposures being dehydrated and mentioned sugar a couple of other times in the list I have, I want to tell you from personal experience had two surgeries back to back a couple of years ago. I had back surgery and hip surgery, so I had a tear in my hip joint that I had gotten from that number of reasons excessive exercise but also a little bony deformity was there so it was a recipe for disaster. I put off that surgery so long trying other conservative methods that I ended up herniating a disc in my back just from poor mechanics and sort of babying my hip so I needed it so bad I had to undergo minimally invasive surgery to fix that cause I was having some weakness on that side and there was no way I could recover from hip surgery if I was having weakness on that side from my back so you can see where I had to do two surgeries back to back my cortisol for the next 12 months was so high I physically could feel it. It felt like a buzzing in my entire body and I absolutely gained weight after those surgeries and it wasn’t that I couldn’t go out and exercise truth be told I wasn’t exercising that much before the surgery because I had been in pain for a while baby this, so it’s not that I couldn’t exercise or walk and I couldn’t walk for a few weeks but it was the cortisol. I like the feeling is so hard to describe but it literally felt like my whole body was buzzing and doing nothing different with my exercise or my diet I noticed that I started to gain weight, especially around the midsection and I knew 100%. This is from cortisol and I started doing things to decrease my cortisol, but it honestly took a long time decreasing your cortisol is not gonna be a quick fix, but I want you to know about this concept Because I think it’s important and there are absolutely active steps we can take to reduce our cortisol and it’s gonna be things you hear all the time we get so much messaging and I really want this podcast to simplify things some things you’ll hear over and over and over again right Get enough sleep drink enough water you hear these in different areas and so it feels like complicated information but these are the things that have been studied and are proven to help us in our weight loss change your mindset decreasing our cortisol through these means sleep and water sleeping water are so importantnot only decrease our cortisol but we’ll go through it on another podcast like the benefits that we get are so important because when we’re not getting enough water and we’re not getting enough sleep, it increases our cortisol and that alone can help put the pounds on right Exercise can help us decrease our cortisol, but the caveat is remember overworking or excessive exercise can increase our cortisol so this is not maximum effort exercise. This is mild to moderate exercise at about 6040 to 60% of maximum effort that actually does not increase Cortizone the long-term and I love this it 100% lowers your levels at night while you sleep so exercise during the day whatever time of day at that 40 to 60% maximum effort range not only doesn’t raise your cortisol at the time, but it helps lowered at night. I love that Mindfulness and positive thinking they actually did a study 122 adults when they wrote about a past stressful experience they had increased cortisol for over a month so just writing about a past stressful experience increased their cortisol for a month or more but when they wrote about positive life experiences or positive plans for the day that mindful Exercise actually help reduce their cortisol so the more aware we are of our thinking around stressful events around a stressful day. If we can start to reframe those things and start to do some work on our thoughts that are causing that stressful feelings we can help decrease our cortisol when we are thinking we’re stressed all the time our cortisol is going to be high all the time And it is going to stay high for a month even if we change our mindset today we have a month so this is why this is so important because we wanna start today so that a month from now we can start getting rid of this cortisol belly fat training yourself to be aware of your thoughts your breathing your heart rate if you start to feel that fuzzy, anxious weird energy from stress from cortisol that body awareness can be super helpful here And then we can start to change our thoughts about it change to positive thinking relaxation exercises, so having relaxing music, deep, breathing yoga meditation gratitude these will all help decrease our cortisol and keep it down and I know some of you are gonna love me when I tell you this, there are actually some food choices. I can help lower your cortisol. I’m gonna save the best one for last water, staying hydrated, probiotics, probiotics, black and green tea lots of fruits, fruits, help decrease our cortisol and my all-time favorite dark chocolate, so there you have it from me one piece of dark chocolate decrease your cortisol maybe as a reward for meditating meditate we have a piece of dark chocolate. We have some great sleep we stay nice and hydrated after we write down what we’re thankful for for the day. All of these things can help decrease your cortisol, I would love to hear from you guys what you do to decrease your cortisol how you manage stress so I would like for you to send me a message support at sugar-free md.com send me your best stress relieving activities or send me what you want to implement from what you’ve heard today to help manage your stress so that a month from now that cortisol is nice and low and we start Getting rid of some of that belly fat OK decreasing our cortisol absolutely has health benefits losing weight is just one of them highly highly recommend. Thank you so much for listening today please subscribe right and review the podcast and share it with a friend if you found anything useful from today until next time bye.