Pressure, worry, rumination, obsession, fixation…

I’m doing everything I can to not use the word “stress.” Because you already know chronic stress is bad for your health, and makes your health journey an uphill battle. You may have an understanding of the stress hormone, cortisol… you may have heard that it is one of the root causes of belly fat. 

I want to broaden your understanding of this metabolic pathway so you can make moves to change the way you think about your body and health, so you can get out of your own way. 

Your body releases the hormone cortisol in periods of stress so that you can cope with whatever pressure is in the environment. You adrenal glands produce cortisol, signaled from your brain (your pituitary gland). 

Your brain doesn’t KNOW what the specific stress is. Traffic, taxes, disease, discontent… It has NO idea. It only trusts that there is a stressor in the environment because it picked up a signal from you. 

You may have only been worrying about the 3lbs the bathroom scale says you gained over the weekend, but the brain perceived this worry as a stressor and kicked off cortisol. 

You saw the 3lbs on the scale and started saying mean things to yourself, creating the neurochemical signals of worry that your brain passed on to your adrenal glands. 

You decided to go out and crush a punishing workout to burn off the 3lbs. That punishing workout is more pressure. More cortisol. 

You decide to restrict your food and white-knuckle it through epic feats of willpower. That food scarcity sends another distress signal in; cortisol secretion is the result. 

At this point you’re bathed in cortisol because the bathroom scale told you a filthy lie: that you had somehow defied the laws of biology and gained 3lbs in a weekend. 

With cortisol high in the blood, your body will NOT let go of your stored fat. Fat is a protected, guarded, vital fuel to SAVE during periods of prolonged strife. 

But cortisol will ask your body to dump some of its stored sugar into the bloodstream. This “fast fuel” is useful to help you run away from the thing that is stressing you out (your body doesn’t know that the thing that is stressing you out is the self-inflicted pressure to lose weight asap). 

Now you have a blood sugar surge, and the resulting insulin surge, which is absolutely fine in the context of an animal running away from danger, but metabolically problematic in the context of a modern human trying to get a handle on their health and happiness. It isn’t much different than eating a bunch of sugar, which of course you would never do because you’re on a diet. 

(And then: how frustrating and cortisol-producing is it to know that your valiant attempts at restricting sugar have caused sugar to just “magically show up” in the blood anyway?! Augh emoji! Another stressor to add to the list…)

You spend three days dutifully:

Eating less

Exercising more

Weighing, measuring, obsessing over every morsel of food

Talking sh*t about yourself and your brutal willpower

Looking in the mirror and feeling sad and ashamed

And when you finally get on the scale after three obedient days as a perfect little stressed out dieter you see… 

Nothing has changed. 

And it won’t. 

Just like anything, you need to solve this mysterious health struggle at the root: start by having a more productive goal than the world’s fastest weight loss. Take the pressure off. Smash the scale with a sledgehammer. Lean into patience and kindness.  

The chronic pressure of dieting will make dieting not work.

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