Have you ever noticed when your really stressed you tend to gain weight, especially around the belly? That’s the result of a hormone called cortisol. Cortisol is released with adrenaline during times of stress or sometimes called fight or flight situations. The stress of dieting, fasting, illness, or stuck in a traffic jam, to imagining worse case scenarios all day long.
As Mark Twain said, “I have been through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.:
When a person is actually in a fight or flight situation, the body is prepared to fight the attacker or run from the situation, either way the body is physically very active. This burns up the cortisol and after the threat is over the body goes back to it’s natural state of calmness.
However, today we’re often in a constant state of stress. Plus, often there is no physical action to burn up the cortisol so it stays in your body. It’s meant to be used not stored. Your body now has more cortisol then it needs, so you can’t relax as well as you should. On top of that, the next time you get stressed, your level of cortisol goes even higher.
Your body can only produce so many hormones at a time so if your always using cortisol it leaves less availability for your body to make other hormones like: estrogen, testosterone, insulin, sex hormones, and all the other ones you need.
Therefore, until you learn to relax it’s going to be very difficult or impossible to lose fat.
Action Steps
- Physical Activity: walk, run, punch, etc. to work the cortisol out of your body.
- Meditation-Prayer-Quiet time-Time in nature all of these activities help you to relax. I have a friend who meditates about 20 minutes a day. He had an incurable lung disease that’s now gone. He attributes that to his meditation.
