How Stress Impacts Fat Loss

Could one of these be the reason you aren’t losing fat?

1. Cortisol causes blood sugar dysregulation

• Under stress, cortisol triggers the body to release energy quickly from cells. Your quick energy source is carbohydrate, which is normally stored in the liver and muscle cells as glucose. In the presence of cortisol, the blood floods with glucose and your blood sugar levels rise.

• Normally, insulin comes along and clears that glucose right up out of blood and into the cells. But, in the presence of cortisol, insulin action is suppressed.

• This means when you’re stressed, glucose is dumped into the blood and insulin is not available to shuttle it back into the cells. As a result, you experience elevated blood sugar levels for prolonged periods of time. This environment makes it difficult for access fat for fuel which would normally lead to fat loss.

2. Cortisol causes stress eating

• Cortisol has a way of fueling cravings for high carbohydrate and/or high calorie foods because the same cellular responses that keep your blood sugar up also send signals to the brain that they are “starved” for energy and therefore in desperate need of fuel.

• Your body is smart. It knows that celery and carrots won’t cut it for quick energy. You’ll crave easily digested and rapidly absorbed fuel- think candy, cookies, sweet beverages, cereal.

• When your cells are starved for energy, signals get sent to the brain to eat the type of foods that will provide not only the most immediately accessible energy (carbs), but the most rich energy (fat) by volume and weight. Ultimately, this combo, (especially if you’re not tracking macros and staying within your needs), can lead to body fat gain due to over consumption of calories.

3. Cortisol causes visceral fat gain

• Visceral fat is the fat that surrounds the important organs in the abdomen. Fat cells are not inherently “bad”, but when they pad the most important organs of our body, it can change the way those organs function- which is problematic.

• Elevated cortisol stimulates the breakdown of fat, but then that fat gets relocated to the fat cells that surround the internal organs of the abdomen.

• Cortisol basically acts like a child playing legos: taking the neatly stacked legos from one pile and haphazardly putting them together in another. The legos no longer resemble a little town with building and skyscrapers, but rather a construction zone of half- built buildings and rubble.