Daily Tip: Stress and weight loss. I saw a friend’s post the other day stating that stress was a great way of losing weight, but many folk state that it has the opposite effect. The link is normally made with the stress hormone, cortisol. Cortisol does have the potential to affect your rate of weight loss. But it’s not as simple as saying that when cortisol goes up, your rate of weight loss goes down. Nor is it the case that suppressing cortisol — as the people trying to sell you cortisol blocking supplements would have you believe — will help you lose weight. Cortisol has firmly established itself as one of the “villains” in the hormonal world of goodies and baddies. But actually, it isn’t. In the right amount and at the right time, cortisol has several benefits for anyone wanting more muscle and less fat. Firstly, cortisol has anti-inflammatory properties. It doesn’t cause inflammation, but rises in response to inflammation. This gives it an important role to play in repairing muscle damage after exercise. But, if cortisol levels are high for long periods of time, e.g. during periods of high stress, there can be problems. Note that a high-exercise, restricted diet regime will cause significant stress to the body. However, cortisol has the ability to make us retain more water, so often the weight gain you see is not due to fat storage. The only way to dissipate cortisol is to rest and eat good food, although many people are under the impression that you should exercise heavily. This will set up a vicious circle. You need to address the stress-causing factors in your life, not chase around trying to drive it away. A prolonged elevation in cortisol isn’t great news for your muscles either. Also, cortisol inhibits protein synthesis, promotes protein breakdown, as well as countering the effects of other anabolic hormones, testosterone in particular. Cortisol makes your brain less sensitive to the effects of leptin (see tip 2/9), blunting its satiating signal. This can leave you feeling a lot hungrier than normal. Cortisol also tends to stimulate your appetite, particularly for foods that are high in starch, sugar or fat (if you combine with the carbs). Not everyone will experience all these effects and some people actually lose their appetite due to stress. I don’t want to create the impression that a rise in cortisol levels somehow makes weight gain inevitable, because that certainly isn’t always the case. Combining massive amounts of exercise with an extremely restrictive diet in a frantic attempt to lose as much fat as you can in as little time as possible is not a great idea. But cutting out exercise completely because you’ve read a bunch of “scare stories” about what it’s going to do to you is also a mistake. The truth can be found somewhere in the middle. The best advice is not to get over-stressed in the first place and learn other non-exercise/diet methods for dealing with it. Learn about the subject, look at your life and try things like yoga, meditation, a good hobby, a decent holiday, or simply facing your problems down and dealing with them. Easier said than done I know – this year has been probably the most stressful of my life!
Posted on: Sat, 06 Dec 2014 15:40:44 +0000
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