If you’ve been struggling with weight loss despite doing “all the right things”, I’m going to share how the stress hormone cortisol may be sabotaging your efforts and what you can do about it.
Managing your stress and cortisol output allows you to eat more while maintaining or even losing weight, gaining energy and abolishing extra food cravings.
What is cortisol and why should women over 45 care about this hormone?
Cortisol is the major stress hormone in the body. It is involved in your fight or flight response and is responsible for that “stressed out” feeling. Cortisol also controls your sleep wake cycle, lowers inflammation and has many other functions in the body.
The top 3 things you need to know about cortisol and weight gain:
- When cortisol is elevated, it causes fat-storage hormone insulin secretion. This makes gaining weight really easy, and losing weight really hard because your hormones are favoring fat storage.
- Cortisol moves fat from other parts of the body to the belly, resulting in medically worrisome abdominal fat.
- And finally, research suggests high levels of cortisol are associated with increased and unhealthy eating. Although you and I probably didn’t need some person in a lab coat to tell us stress eating is a thing… right?
If you’re noticing these signs of cortisol imbalance in your life, grab my free guide “You’re Done Dieting but Still Want to Heal Emotional Eating”.
You will implement the most important daily eating routine to keep cortisol balanced throughout the day (and night!) and curb cravings and get you started on your weight loss journey.
Willpower vs. Cortisol
One major symptom of cortisol imbalance is feeling like you don’t have enough willpower to manage tempting food.
Food cravings are insistent or so strong you feel powerless to resist them. Or, if you can resist them for a time, eventually you succumb to defeat.
That’s because hormones are a powerful, primitive force, and you just can’t fight your hormones, they win every time.
In my experience helping over 60 peri- and post-menopausal women heal emotional overeating, balancing cortisol is often the first step to freedom from overeating, without an ounce of willpower.
And like my client Anna said a few weeks into working on balancing her cortisol levels:
I finally have the freedom to make healthy choices.
You too can start to make rational choices about eating once your hormones are balanced.
Other Symptoms of Cortisol Imbalance
Other symptoms of imbalanced cortisol include an initial jolt of energy, that then fades to exhaustion when you’ve been under pressure for so long.
Cortisol imbalance has also been associated with anxiety and depression – two conditions that make it hard to make healthy choices.
So, cortisol makes it harder to lose weight, adds belly fat, amplifies your food cravings, and steals your energy.
Ok that’s a bummer, but soon you will see there’s hope.
Factors that can imbalance the stress hormone cortisol
To understand how to right the cortisol imbalance, you have to understand how it gets that way in the first place.
There is the obvious source of cortisol imbalance:
- Psychological Stressors, things in your life that cause you stress like deadlines, arguments, aging parents, adult children, whatever it is.
As a side note, many women I talk to can trace weight regain after losing to a stressful time in life. From a cortisol imbalance perspective this makes sense – your body is flooded with stress hormones, cravings hit, and your body starts to store fat.
And then there are the less obvious sources of body stress:
- Inflammation in your body from conditions like autoimmune disease, arthritis, allergies, asthma, heart disease and more.
- Blood sugar imbalance, whether that be from pre-diabetes or diabetes, or just from eating high-sugar or refined carbohydrate foods often.
- Sleep deprivation. A recent meta analysis suggests for every hour of sleep you are deprived you eat an additional 385 calories.
- Menopause. Going through the hormonal change can raise cortisol levels, not to mention menopausal years tend to be more stressful for women as they navigate careers, relationships, aging parents, and everything else life throws at them.
- And finally, the very act of losing weight can result in elevated cortisol. Restrictive dieting like low calorie diets, keto, and fasting have been found to increase cortisol.
One woman’s experience with cortisol balancing for weight loss
Courage to Trust Method alumni, Traci, shared the following success when she focused on balancing cortisol to control overeating and lose weight:
If you suspect cortisol may be an issue for you, then grab my free guide “You’re Done Dieting but Still Want to Heal Emotional Eating”.
You will implement the most important daily eating routine to keep cortisol balanced throughout the day (and night!) and curb cravings and get you started on your weight loss journey.
How to balance cortisols so you can lose weight
In order to heal imbalanced cortisol, you need to address the root cause of elevated stress in your life.
Nutrition to balance cortisol
From a nutritional perspective, you can assist your body’s inborn mechanisms to balance hormones by focusing on blood sugar balance, anti-inflammatory food choices, and eating regularly.
Making sure you’re getting *enough* food and nutrients so your body doesn’t feel deprived and stressed is also key, since restriction can raise cortisol.
You may be thinking, if I eat more, how can I lose weight?
The key is in using nutrition and lifestyle choices to balance stress and appetite hormones and boost your metabolism.
Two important nutrients for metabolism boosting are protein and fiber.
Lifestyle practice to balance cortisol
Daily stress management practice is another key to dealing with the psychological stress that raises cortisol.
Some stress management practices that have been shown to balance cortisol include:
- Meditation and many mindfulness-based practices have been shown to lower cortisol, increase resilience and feelings of wellbeing.
- Spiritual and religious practices like prayer can also help with stress management, especially in the face of difficult life circumstances.
- Exercise actually raises cortisol in the short term, which researchers theorize helps your body become more resilient, but overtime exercise can decrease stress (as long as it’s not over-training).
- Deep breathing can also lower cortisol, greatest benefits seem to be achieved when you practice regularly.
- Regularly engaging in things you enjoy doing, like hobbies, has also been correlated with lower total cortisol.
How to get started with cortisol balancing for weight loss
Results like Traci experienced (above) come with a concerted effort to not only balance cortisol but also address other factors that lead to overeating and sluggish metabolisms.
In the Courage to Trust Method, we help women 45+ love themselves better by caring for their emotional, mental and hormonal needs without out of control eating. This radical self-care allows you to easily make healthy choices without needing buckets of willpower and motivation.
Members often lose half to two pounds a week while in the program and go on to continue losing weight after it is over.
Perhaps more important than pounds lost is the focus on body acceptance and self-compassion, so you can learn to love yourself no matter your size.
Here’s a brief member story that illustrated why a focus on self-acceptance is so important to the weight loss journey:
To get started on your journey to weight loss and body acceptance, download my free guide “You’re Done Dieting but Still Want to Heal Emotional Eating”.