Cortisol has been demonized for a reason, ladies.
It’s a devious monster of a hormone as far as weight gain goes.
Now, don’t get me wrong. Cortisol is a good thing when it’s in balance. We need it for all kinds of crucial biological processes in the body.
But when you experience chronic stress, day after day, cortisol soars and creates a domino effect in the body that inevitably leads to weight gain, belly fat, a very sluggish metabolism, and all kinds of other negative effects.
You can try Paleo, Keto, the Victoria’s Secret Model diet . . . you can even starve yourself and live on a handful of almonds and carrots, but if you’re jacked up on stress and cortisol is flowing through your body like crazy, you will not be able to lose weight with the most herculean of efforts of will.
So, if you’ve been living on gazpacho and power walking 5 miles a day and still, that scale won’t budge, stick with us.
Today, we’re going to explain the high cortisol weight gain syndrome, a 21st century syndrome that’s plaguing women everywhere, and tell you what you can do to lower cortisol and get lean, fierce, and happy again.
Cortisol: The Highs and Lows of It
As I mentioned earlier, we need cortisol, and it’s actually good for our bodies when it’s in balance. In fact, without enough cortisol, we can experience dangerous health effects of all kinds.
That’s because cortisol is responsible for all kinds of crucial hormonal mechanisms in the body such as:
But when cortisol is high, typically from stress of any kind (in fact, the reason menopause often causes high cortisol is the stress of its physical symptoms), the body will begin to catabolize precious muscle tissue, promote the storage of fat, and cause insulin resistance from the constant presence of adrenaline-fueling glucose, which will place you at risk for diabetes, metabolic syndrome, and the deadly cascade of diseases that follow.[i]
The effects of chronically high cortisol on the body are
Women and Cortisol: A Catch-22
Women have issues with cortisol for all kinds of reasons but all of them tend to originate in stress.
Stress causes cortisol to spike in the body, and cortisol is our fat storage hormone. Cortisol can increasingly become a problem for women as they approach menopause and after it as well.
Hormonal balance is a delicate thing and estrogen loss impacts cortisol and other hormones, throwing them into havoc. Menopause itself is a physically stressful event, causing night sweats, fatigue, weight gain—all of which are stressful.
It’s a catch-22.
The longer you suffer with high cortisol, the more weight you gain, the more muscle you lose and then you get a body full of fat and bone—for example, the “bat wing arms” women dread.
Cortisol and Stress
One of cortisol’s chief functions in the body is to equip and prepare the body for stress.
Stress kicks in our adrenaline. When we sense stress or danger, that surge of fright we feel initially transforms into high energy to power you through a stressful situation and give you the energy for “fight” or “flight.” That surge of power is caused by cortisol and other hormones. So they come to our rescue, in a sense.
The stress reaction, that fight or flight response, is a biochemical process of molecular and hormonal reactions in the body to stress, which our body always equates with danger.
So, we sense danger (stress), our fight or flight response kicks in, and then the body is flooded with adrenaline (epinephrine) and norepinephrine as well as adrenocorticotropic hormone to power you through this stressful event. At the same time, there is an immediate emergency shut-off of the immune system, a slowing of metabolism, and fat storage is turned on to accumulate an emergency food source and to encase vulnerable organs in fat.
Smell and hearing are heightened so you can hear and smell the enemy better. Heart rate increases. You feel the sweat on your brow. All of these reactions are our ancient, ancestral responses to stress.
And in fact, all of this is a good thing.
It’s what keeps you alive in dangerous situations when you need power, speed, and heightened senses. It kept our ancestors alive when animals roamed the earth that had much bigger teeth and claws than they do now.
The problem is this: the body cannot distinguish between one kind of stress and another.
The body equates all stress situations as life or death and powers on cortisol and adrenaline full force to meet this challenge.
This constant flooding of the body with fight or flight hormones ultimately wears your system out and you become exhausted, cranky, fatigued, and your body wants to go into a “hibernation” mode and repair. When your body feels excessively tired, you need rest. You have to LISTEN to the body.
Back to stress.
If you live in an emotionally abusive environment, for example, or if you’re in one of those “toxic relationships” . . . that’s prolonged and extreme emotional stress.
Therefore, the body will flood the body with a constant stream of adrenaline and cortisol to keep you alive— all the time – even after the fight is over or, hopefully, the relationship ends, as the effects of stress are long-lasting.
This kind of stress is chronic, toxic, and it accumulates because as an endocrinologist will explain to you—stress is cumulative. That’s what scary about stress. It’s cumulative. That’s why we need to take strong measures to alleviate stress. Stress is the one major cause of disease today, doctors believe, and is responsible for hundreds of diseases and disorders such as acquired diabetes, heart disease, inflammation, and autoimmune disorders.
And stress can be physical, chemical, emotional – all the “als.”
If you’re breathing in a lot of harsh chemicals in a hospital or on the subway, that’s toxic stress – extreme toxic stress in fact, which is exacerbated if you go home and are surrounded by xenoestrogens in cosmetics, plastics, aerosols, and perfumes – aka constant toxic stress.
If you’re running marathons, overtraining, and getting up every day at 5 a.m. to diligently work out without a good 8 hours’ sleep, that’s excessive physical stress (and this, too, has a highly negative impact on the body—whether you are doing something “healthy” or not).
If you’re an adjunct professor teaching a huge freshman lecture of 300 students with a ton of papers to grade and no assistant to help you—that’s major mental stress.
And all this creates chronic, prolonged, cumulative stress.
I find this scary because we’re accumulating a lot of stress in our fast-paced, constantly changing world, with technology moving so fast it’s mind-scrambling.
Just turn on the news. It’s all stress and “dis”stress. Global warming, terrorism, and the increasing threat of nuclear war.
So, yeah, we’re all more stressed than I think we even know anymore.
We’ve learned to adapt to habitual stress but the problem is, our hormones are adapting to habitual stress in ways that are very dangerous for our health.
So, if you’re not finding healthy, creative ways to cope with that stress—from crafts, to walks in the woods, to Pilates – ways to try to defuse, unplug, and get that stress out of your body–then you’re going to pay a price with your health.
And funny thing, you’re going to get fat—not skinny—from all this stress.
How Cortisol and Stress Is Making You Fat
So cortisol’s chief and most important job is to help us stay alive through stressful situations. We’ve got that down, right?
But here’s the problem.
Cortisol is also our chief fat storage hormone.
In fact, the fat storage is part of its job as a stress hormone.
See – stress—tells the body to prepare for famine, siege, and to stay alive for days without food when that saber toothed tiger is pacing outside your cave . . .
As we touched upon earlier, stress mode causes fat storage around the middle (to protect your organs—they’re very vulnerable there in your soft middle) and more fat being stored on the body for you to feed on in case of starvation . . .
But there’s more. It also affects insulin, and insulin is the enemy of fat burning.
The body not only creates a back-up storage of fat, it also transforms everything into glucose for energy now. It does this through a process called glucogneoisis and what this means is that even dietary proteins are being transformed into quick glucose (sugar) energy instead of amino acid that normally fuel the muscles and hormones.[iv]
It does this because your body is in stress mode, of course and wants all the fast fuel it can get so you can think faster, move faster, run faster. The body is not thinking about the long run effects of this process on your health.
It does this because the body loves glucose fuel even more than fat fuel. In fact, the body’s order of preferred fuel sources goes like this
That’s because glucose is quick, powerful fuel for the brain and the muscles, and your body is trying to give you exactly that—power and quickness—to help you through this stressful situation in case you need to run or fight off an enemy.
By doing this, by flooding your body with glucose and, consequently insulin, a side effect of high cortisol is that it will block you from fat burning, meaning you run on glucose and burn up precious muscle instead of tapping into your fat stores.
Muscle is rich in nutrients for fuel. It’s saving the fat for later. It will also cause insulin resistance, because insulin is ever present in the bloodstream but not doing its job to lower blood sugar. Hence, no fat burning—ever.
See? Stress is coating your body in fat.
If your body is constantly flooded with cortisol because prolonged stress is overloading your system, exhausting your fight or flight mechanisms, and literally suffusing your body with excess this hormone, you’re going to not only have high cortisol, you’re going to become cortisol resistant, just like people become resistant to insulin, another fat storage hormone . . . hmm.
In fact, new research is showing that cortisol resistance, when our body stops “listening” to cortisol – may be the chief cause of the cascade of dangerous effects cortisol has on health. This is still a working theory, at this point.[v]
Now, let’s talk about whether or not you have high cortisol.
High Cortisol: The Sign of the Times
Does the following conversation sound familiar to you?
Sarah! Good to see you. How you doing?
Oh, I’m trying to get this new business started online.
I thought you were a lawyer? . . .
Oh yeah, I still practice law. Corporate law, yeah. Every day. 10 hours a day. Then, it’s kids, kids, kids. I have the new baby, you know. So, I’m trying to set up a consulting business in my free time. Get some passive income going. Well, more passive than court all day. You know, tuition for three, it’s something no parent can afford if you want quality schools. Well, look, Jen, I’ve got to go get me an espresso . . . I’m exhausted. I haven’t been sleeping. I’m jogging every morning—5 miles. I don’t get it. You’d think the body’d have to sleep after that, right? Gotta go. I am latte-bound with a vengeance!
Can you see how stress is running us? And eventually, ladies, caffeine doesn’t work anymore and we’re burning up our adrenal glands, adrenaline, and the only thing left is cortisol to run on.
When you are thriving on cortisol, and it’s too high, you will experience symptoms. If you have 5 or more of these, in fact, you probably have high cortisol.
I wanted to put this symptom first because it’s the one that is most prevalent in women suffering from high cortisol. It’s partially the depression caused by cortisol eating up all your serotonin and, partially, the exhaustion of not getting true, deep, slow wave sleep.
When even hard-charging, type A, typically up at 5 a.m. gleefully greeting the day-type personalities start feeling this way, it’s obvious something is “off.”
So, if you used to be a morning person in extremis and you suddenly don’t want to get up, this is a good sign of high cortisol and stress overload.
If you have high cortisol, your body doesn’t get sleepy at night. You may feel exhausted, yet you cannot sleep. This is because you’re running on sugar (glucose) and stress and your cortisol is not coming down enough for you to get sleepy.
Cortisol tends to make you hit plateaus that won’t budge, even when you’re being militantly strict with diet and exercise. This often confounds women, who find it baffling that even fasting they cannot lose weight.
One problem is that high cortisol makes belly fat impossible to lose. You’ll notice this in the lower belly—which may get a little saggy. They call this a “pendulous abdomen,” and it comes with high cortisol. Why is the belly so impossible to lose – as it is–even with 300 crunches a day?
Well, you can tone the abdomen muscles, but you cannot burn fat off the body unless you’re tapping into those fat stores. You have to fix the cortisol (and the high blood sugar that accompanies it) to lose the belly fat.
Cortisol deactivates your body’s immune system. Even if you weren’t highly allergic before, you may notice a new sensitivity to allergens. Are you getting sore throats quite easily after you go outside? Are you really puffy under the eyes? Allergies!
Running on sugar makes you want more sugar. High blood sugar dips throughout the day, and the body wants that energy to kick back in. That’s what these cravings are about.
The other reason is that the nutritional deficiencies you’re experiencing because of high cortisol signal you to eat more to satisfy them. That’s the source of the carb and sugar cravings. What your body is really wanting is B vitamins, C to flood the adrenals with much needed nourishment, and vitamin D to help regulate your sleep cycles. But it tells you this via midnight Little Debbie cravings.
Are you noticing everything gives you heartburn now? From yeast rolls to tomato sauce? This is a common symptom of high cortisol, which makes the system more alkaline, depletes bile, and leads to acid reflux and heartburn. High cortisol can also throw off gut bacteria. In fact, some gut specialists, such as Marcelle Pick, say discovering their high cortisol problem has helped many of her patients finally cure their typically impossible-to-cure GERD.[vi]
An excess of cortisol can impair the ability of the hippocampus to both encode and recall memories. So, if you’re walking into rooms and forgetting why you’re there and losing your keys constantly—there’s a REASON.[vii]
Since your limbs are primarily bone and muscle, you’ll notice you’re your limbs stay thin while the face, abdomen, breasts, and the whole middle body from nose to tail gets heavier.
Extended stress leads to extended periods of high cortisol which suppresses healthy processes in the body that repair collagen and manufacture hair and nails. If you notice that your hair is thinning, especially around the temples or on the eyebrows, especially the outer area of the eyebrow, it’s probably because when the adrenal glands are busy making extra cortisol, they make less of the hormones that support healthy hair growth. It’s also because you’re losing protein (amino acids).
High cortisol affects the manufacture of neurotransmitters, especially serotonin, because serotonin is made out of amino acids (which are made from protein). Since you’re converting all your amino acids to glucose, you won’t have enough serotonin to keep your mood up and you may experience depression.[viii]
High cortisol will trigger both high cholesterol and high blood sugar. This is because of stress, again, causing that surge of cortisol and adrenaline in the body to send both cholesterol and blood sugar soaring.
Pamela Warren, MS, CHN explains this best:
Staying calm and cool helps manage cholesterol. . . . [stress causes] the release of cortisol [which] raises blood-sugar levels for the body’s use as energy, as it locks away fat so it’s not used during this state as energy. Therefore, as cortisol is released, it raises the body’s blood-glucose level, which in turn creates more triglyceride production. Higher triglycerides create higher cholesterol levels. Keeping your stress response under control is a great way to manage cholesterol levels for the long term.[ix]
How to Lower Cortisol and Get Your Happy (and your Body) Back
But there is good news. You can fight back. You can lower cortisol and lose weight again and return to your normal happy self. But as Yoda says, you must “Do. Or do not. There is no try.”
To get better, you must, must, must get rid of the stress. You can also try some of the methods below that we have found produce the most results.
However—none of these methods below will work without addressing the stress issue. You cannot merely take vitamins and adaptogenic herbs and hope it will go away.
Find ways to unplug, relax, and practice mindfulness. If you’re not into meditation, try yoga, Pilates. In fact, stretching those tense muscles out with either one of these types of exercise will help. Get outside barefoot. Grounding helps you center and relax. And I highly recommend a morning routine. You don’t want to start off the day scrambled.
Guided imagery, meditation, TM, deep breathing, yoga, arts and crafts, grounding (going barefoot on grass), long hot baths, whatever works for you. Experiment. You must resolve the stress issue to lower cortisol, period.
Most people don’t even breathe the right way anymore. We’re walking around with all our muscles tensed and don’t even notice it. So focus on breathing and try deep breathing exercises at night as you try to sleep. You know, long inhales through the nose and out through the mouth. Try taking 20 to 30 seconds to do both.
Kresser makes one recommendation on this issue which is worth mentioning here.
It has been demonstrated in studies that how we perceive stress has everything to do with how it affects our body—remember that stack of papers I mentioned the professor is faced with grading? Well, studies show if you look at that situation as an opportunity rather than something you cannot handle, the stress will impact you less negatively. This is called “reframing” the situation and it has proven to help lower the cortisol response. We highly advise reading Kresser’s article “Five Simple but Powerful Tools for Fighting Stress” on this.
When cortisol is very high in the bloodstream, it blocks your Vitamin D receptors in the cells. You need to remedy that by getting some sun every day and/or taking a 10,000 IU vitamin D supplement. Take it with K2 for maximum absorption. Most good D3 supplements include K2 now for this reason.
Natural forms of vitamins are always better. So, get your vitamins from the sun, food, and plant compounds if you can– not synthetic vitamins, all you can.
Early morning sun is great, a half an hour of it or so. Avoid sun exposure between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m., of course, to avoid the most damaging UV rays.
The sun is great not only for getting more vitamin D in the body naturally, it will also help with your circadian rhythms, which will help you sleep.
The adrenals thrive on vitamin C and go through it like crazy, so take a good C supplement.
Vitamins B1 and B6 promote healthy cortisol levels by supporting adrenal gland function. Vitamin B5, also known as pantothenic acid, is easily depleted by stress, and supplementing with with this vitamin will help prevent cortisol fluctuations. It will also help you get deep delta wave sleep to repair the body.
Zinc can also help decrease cortisol levels. We need 25 to 30 mgs. of it a day and few people are getting enough zinc or any of the trace minerals anymore due to our soil quality.
Nutritional yeast is rich in all the B vitamins and zinc. You can get it in flavors like cheese and stir it up in about a quarter cup of almond milk. That’s the way I do it. And it’s not that bad – and it’s worth it.
Now you’d think when you’re not losing weight and you’re gaining belly fat that you would need to hit the gym and hit it hard—long sessions, full on HIIT workouts, right?
But here’s what’s up. You don’t need to be creating more stress in the body, and physical stress is stress. If you train too hard now, you’ll only further raise cortisol, deplete your adrenals, and exacerbate this whole situation.
Instead—moderate exercise, light strength training, and some of the relaxing forms of exercise I mentioned earlier are in order here.
If you have high cortisol, you need to put some real effort into getting a full 8 to 9 hours of good, quality sleep a night. Delta wave sleep is when you release growth hormone. That’s stage 3 and 4 of sleep. It’s a deep sleep cycle that happens before REM sleep and you experience 4 to 5 cycles during a typical 8 hours of sleep.
You need all that growth hormone to repair your hormone levels, balance cortisol, hold onto your muscle and build muscle, and, finally, burn fat. This is your only real chance to repair.
So right now, be a selfish sleeper. If you sleep better alone, sleep alone. If you need to kick your S.O. out of bed, do it. Give them some loving—then go to your own rooms.
Get sleep. B5 will help.
Adaptogenic herbs can help anyone with high cortisol because they help the body to handle and manage stress, which is exactly what you need.
Good ones to try for high cortisol include holy basil, ashwaganda, rhodiola, and astragulus root. Panax ginseng can also be good in moderation—but be careful with it. You don’t need too many stimulants going into the body because you’re already stressed.
In fact, you’ve probably been chronically stressed for so long – jaw locked, neck tensed, staring at your cell phone and your laptop in a virtual daze of stress, that you can’t hear your inner voice anymore.
You’re hearing static—white noise.
So unplug. Get back in tune with you.
Quiet the mind and body.
Achieve health again, and the body will follow. And you’ll reap the rewards of your diet and exercise efforts in a leaner, healthier body.
Stay lean, stay strong, and stay happy,
[i] Mark Sisson. (2008). How stress can make you fat. Mark’s Daily Apple. http://www.marksdailyapple.com/how-stress-can-make-you-fat/
[ii] Mayo Clinic. Healthy lifestyle: Stress management. http://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/stress-management/in-depth/stress/art-20046037
[iii] Whitworth, J. A. (2005). Cardiovascular consequences of cortisol excess. Vascular Health Risk Management, 1(4): 291-299.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1993964/
[iv] Randall, M. (2010). The physiology of stress: Cortisol and the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis. Dartmouth Undergraduate Journal of Science.
[v] Kresser, C. (2012). RHR: Chronic stress, cortisol resistance, and modern disease. https://chriskresser.com/rhr-chronic-stress-cortisol-resistance-and-modern-disease/
[vi] Dr. M. Pick. Acid reflux: What’s eating you. https://www.womentowomen.com/digestive-health/acid-reflux-whats-eating-you/
[vii] Lee, B.K. (2007). Associations of salivary cortisol with cognitive function in the Baltimore memory study. Archives of General Psychiatry, 64(7): 810-8. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17606815
[viii] Pariante, C. M. (2017). Why are depressed patients inflamed? A reflection on 20 years of research on depression, glucocorticoid resistance and inflammation, European Neuropsychopharmacology. doi: 10.1016/j.euroneuro.2017.04.001. [Epub ahead of print] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28479211
[ix] Everyday Health. How does stress contribute to cholesterol? http://www.everydayhealth.com/high-cholesterol/living-with/experts-how-does-stress-contribute-to-cholesterol/