How does stress cause belly fat?

So it's not just in your head. Stress really does lead to overeating. It's a biological response designed to help you cope, but it can backfire if it becomes a habit. All right, story time. You know I like to tell some stories. A few years ago I mean more than a few years, actually, now I think it's going back almost a decade Some of you may be familiar with some of my stories. I've talked about me being hospitalized through burnout and then also discovering I have an autoimmune condition. And just you know, there's been some pretty big health scares. But you know I look at them as more as wake up calls. They were these moments bringing my awareness to something that I obviously wasn't paying attention to. And as soon as I started paying attention to it and started changing certain things changing certain foods and how I moved, how I recover things slowly corrected itself.

Acting like a soothing melody amid the chaos, the serotonin boost provides a fleeting sense of relief and comfort, much like a lull in the storm. But here's the catch Just like a temporary lull doesn't end a storm, these comfort foods don't resolve the underlying stress. They offer a brief moment of respite, but the storm of stress continues to rage and the cycle of stress eating perpetuates. But don't worry, it's not all doom and gloom. The good news is that by managing stress and becoming more mindful of our eating habits, we can break the cycle. Think of it as learning to become your own conductor, gradually taking control of the orchestra and restoring harmony. By incorporating stress, reducing techniques and mindful eating practices, you can quiet the disruptive drums of cortisol and bring harmony back to your body's orchestra. So what can you do to stop stress eating and stop NIMH?

More importantly, what I've been doing to manage my cortisol levels more effectively, which has had a really big shift, especially on how much fat I retain as well as inflammation I retain in my body, and so if you want more on that, I'll include in the show notes the link to the cortisol episode. So if you want to do more of a deep dive on that, I definitely invite you to go check it out, because when we're stressed, your body releases cortisol, which triggering effect of cravings for, like sugary, fatty and often salty foods. These comfort foods temporarily make us feel better, usually by boosting some of those chemicals I was referring to serotonin, dopamine. These are like the feel good chemicals in our brains. Imagine your brain as a thermostat trying to maintain a comfortable temperature.

Incorporate stress-reducing activities into your routine. Take breaks during work. Practice deep breathing exercises. Spend some more time doing the things you love. Second to that mindfulness and relaxation techniques. These are simple. They're accessible. They don't cost anything. Mindfulness and relaxation techniques are powerful. Whether it's meditation, tai Chi, maybe just going for a walk outside. These practices can significantly reduce stress and start to balance and harmonize your cortisol levels. The American Mindfulness Research Association has found that mindfulness practices are highly effective. These are just a few things. There are a few things that don't take a lot of energy to go out and do, but what it can pay you back as far as dividends is immense. I mean, it's life-changing. So what's holding you back? Just start doing it right. Get out there for a walk.

But just like a pressure cooker, we need to find a way to let off some steam. Like many others, I used to look to food and drink as a way to deal with stress. Eating sweets releases feel good endorphins to surge through the body, but the effect is short-lived. Alcohol may seem to bring short-term relief from stress, but it's actually a depressant that slows down reaction time, impairs vision and makes it harder to think clearly. Over time, alcohol abuse can have a negative impact on the liver and kidneys and puts you in a higher risk category for heart attack, stroke and various forms of cancer. In other words, the seemingly easy ways to deal with stress come at a cost. As an overweight teen, I dealt with stress by absorbing myself in TV, video games, movies and by eating sweets and fatty foods.

Think about like a little window when our HRV heart rate variability is chronically low, there's usually something going on that's not good. When it's high, it shows that we have greater resiliency under stress. We're probably more rested, metabolically speaking, we're a little healthier, but things are just going better. I know when my HRV is high I've slept well, I've been eating well, I've got no issues going on in my life, you know, no external stresses. That's creating a little bit of anxiety and it shows with this HRV and this is what I discovered about myself was my cortisol was doing that Because my chronically poor cortisol level. I was retaining fat around my subcutaneous fat, around my mid drift, especially around the belly button region. So I had this killer four pack.

Welcome back to another episode of the 2% Solution. I'm your host, Dai Manuel, and today we're discussing a crucial topic for our health and well-being understanding cortisol how to thrive and not just survive. You might have heard of cortisol as the stress hormone. Did you know that chronic high levels of cortisol can wreak havoc on your physical, mental and even your spiritual health? That's right. When cortisol is out of sync, out of balance, it can lead to everything from anxiety and depression to weakened immune function and even spiritual disconnection. So if you've been feeling overwhelmed, constantly tired or uninspired lately, this episode is for you. Let's explore what cortisol is, its role in our health and, most importantly, how we can regulate it to start thriving. All right, let's get into it.

5. Positive ways to manage your stress. Many people revert to unhealthy messages of stress busting, which may offer temporary relief but do very little to reduce stress in the long term. Some can even be harmful. I'm talking about substance abuse, smoking, venting to others, playing video games or zoning out in front of the TV. The good news is that there are many simple but healthy, effective ways of dealing with stress, but they may require you to change the way you think and behave. While some stressors are unavoidable, you can limit their ability to affect you negatively. 1. Stop over-committing. Except that you are not a Superman or Superwoman. You can't do everything and you can't always be perfect. What you might find surprising is that most people won't expect you to try to be more assertive and learn to say no. 2. Control your environment.

Not evenly. Arms and legs are roughly what they were. It is the waistband. You open the document, read the same paragraph four times, and go and make a coffee. You spend the day being patient and professional and the person who gets the leftover version of you is the one you would most like to be good to. This is the tell, and it is the one that finally makes men do something. Any one of these means very little. Five at once is a pattern, and the pattern has a name. Partly, and I want to be careful here because this gets oversold constantly, including by me in older writing. The mechanism is real. Cortisol released under stress affects where the body stores fat, favouring the abdominal cavity, and visceral fat is the metabolically dangerous kind. It is the fat associated with insulin resistance and cardiovascular risk, not the kind you can pinch.

Your body cannot tell the difference between a predator and an unread email from your boss, so it holds the allocation system open and keeps making the same trade. Energy now, maintenance later. Run that for a decade and later arrives. That is the fatigue. It is the interest payment on ten years of borrowed energy. Gallup's most recent global workplace data puts 40 percent of employees experiencing a lot of stress on any given day, with only 20 percent engaged in their work. Those two numbers together describe a very specific exhaustion: high activation, low meaning. It is the most draining combination there is, and it is the water most of the men I coach have been swimming in since their early thirties. Nobody arrives at a coaching call saying they have chronic autonomic overactivation. They arrive with a pile of separate small complaints they have never connected.

You do not need cortisol to explain that. You need to interrupt the loop. I am not going to give you nine tips. Nine tips is what I wrote in 2020 and it was not useful, because a man in energy-saving mode does not have capacity for nine new behaviours. He has capacity for about one and a half. So here is the order, and the order matters more than the list. This is the highest-leverage thing on the page and the one men skip because they think it is a body composition intervention. A recent network meta-analysis of exercise treatments for adults with anxiety disorders found resistance training produced a standardised mean difference of minus 0.79 with moderate certainty of evidence.

The men who keep going have had enough time to associate the behaviour with feeling better, which takes longer than most programs run for. How do I stay motivated to exercise? You do not, not reliably. You lower the bar until motivation stops being the deciding factor. Pick the smallest amount you would do on your worst day, build the week for a bad week rather than a good one, change one default a month, and get one other person who would notice if you stopped. Why do I keep quitting after a few weeks? Because month one feels like nothing is happening. The visible results arrive in month three and four, and most men quit in the gap between doing the work and seeing the work. Measuring what you control, rather than the scale, is what gets you across that gap. Fothergill, E., Guo, J., Howard, L., et al. (2016).

I still think that is true and I now think it is close to useless as advice, because it describes the destination and not the road. Here is the road. You change the defaults, one at a time, and you wait. Protein at breakfast for a month until it is not a decision. Then fat at every meal. Then the evening cutoff. Each one takes about four weeks to stop requiring thought, and the compounding is what does the work , not the intensity. I have watched this play out with enough men to be confident about the timeline, and the honest version of it is that the first six weeks feel like nothing is happening, and then the fourth month is when someone asks you what you have been doing. Does eating fat make you fat? Not in the way the low-fat era claimed.

Each attempt confirmed the same story: I know what to do, I just cannot make it stick. That story is wrong, and the DadBody project exists to prove it. He does not lack knowledge. He lacks a structure small enough to survive his actual life, and other men to answer to while it does. I have been in the fitness industry since the late nineties. I owned gyms, I trained hundreds of clients, and I watched the same pattern repeat until I could not unsee it. A man would arrive motivated, train hard for six weeks, hit his goal, and then slowly return to exactly where he started, plus a few pounds and minus some confidence.