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Month: December 2018

Cortisol and body fat

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In my years of working with women, many have shared that even if they eat like a bird and exercise like crazy—they still gain body fat.

And according to the calories consumed versus calories burned theory, this doesn’t make sense to them.

After all, why aren’t they ‘rewarded’ for all their effort?

It’s because, in many cases, they’re pulling the wrong levers. Despite good intentions, they’re giving their body the wrong instructions when it comes to asking it to burn body fat effectively.

They are unknowingly suffering from a major effect of too much cortisol.

Cortisol is a stress hormone, and our body produces this when it believes we’ve been experiencing persistent stress. It might be our response to our overflowing inbox or to-do list, how we feel about our finances and relationships or just the result of never slowing down to give our body a chance to rest. We might not even realise our body is stressed—sometimes our brain can be more capable of coping with our lives than our body.  

When we churn out cortisol, our body believes we’re in danger and that food could be scarce, so it stores fat, rather than burning it. It doesn’t know why you’re churning out cortisol, it only interprets the hormones that are being produced and acts accordingly—in its best effort to save your life.

And, for many women, over time, this leads to an increase in body fat.

In my Weight Loss for Women course, I discuss this in much more detail. I also offer you lots of insights, tips and strategies on how to reverse this process, get your body into balance and burn body fat effectively.

Join me for the next intake and learn:

  • Why body fat around our middle region can increase and how to mobilise this
  • What foods might be driving an increase in body fat
  • The importance of the liver in burning body fat as fuel
  • The role the thyroid plays in body fat mobilisation, how to know if yours is out of balance, and ways to support it naturally
  • Tips and strategies to manage emotional eating
  • How to improve your digestion

If you feel that you could benefit from some support in these areas, you might like to take a look at my online Weight Loss for Women course. We only run a few intakes per year. You’ll be supported and guided for nine weeks as I teach you the things you need to know about your body and the levers to pull that can help it achieve long-term, sustainable weight loss.

Your body is yours for life. Knowing how to work with it and how to interpret its messages can completely change your whole experience of life. 

Are you experiencing thyroid troubles?

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The thyroid is a butterfly-shaped gland that sits in your throat area. It makes hormones that play an enormous role in your metabolic rate as well as temperature regulation.

Too often, I see people who exhibit symptoms of an underactive thyroid, yet their blood test results come back within the ‘normal’ range.

Symptoms of an underactive thyroid include: 

  • Gradual weight increase over months, for no apparent reason
  • A tendency to constipation
  • Depressed mood, forgetfulness
  • Hair loss or hair drier than normal 
  • Dry skin and brittle nails
  • Exhaustion
  • Headaches

And when you’re experiencing these symptoms, yet your bloodwork returns as ‘normal’, it can be incredibly frustrating.

To correct any imbalance in the body, first you must find the road in. How or why did it become imbalanced in the first place? This will give you the answers for how to return it to optimal functioning.

Some of the factors that can drive a thyroid imbalance include mineral deficiencies, infection, poor liver detoxification, too much estrogen (as this suppresses thyroid function) and/or elevated cortisol levels. 

If you suspect you might be having thyroid troubles, whether you’ve had a blood test or not, I encourage you to start to look into some of these factors that might be relevant for you. For a tiny gland, the thyroid packs a mighty punch, and getting it functioning optimally is so important to our overall health.

If you are interested in supporting your thyroid health, you might like to take a look at my online weight loss course, Weight Loss for Women. We only run a few intakes per year. You’ll be supported and guided for nine weeks as I teach you the things you need to know about your body and the levers to pull that can help it achieve long-term, sustainable weight loss.

Are you whispering your boundaries?

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Are you whispering your boundaries?

How often do you catch yourself saying ‘yes’ when you really want to say ‘no’?

In a recent blog, I wrote about how self-care won’t always feel comfortable.
How sometimes, in order to prioritise this, you may need to have uncomfortable conversations.

To take that conversation further, let’s now talk about boundaries because these go hand in hand with self-care. Too often I witness people trying to ‘whisper’ their boundaries to others—they are like hopscotch chalk lines, too easily washed away by the rain. They really need to be asserted, clearly, not erasable—more like the paint of a tennis court baseline. 

Having great boundaries is about accepting that you’re not superhuman and respecting what you’re truly capable of saying ‘yes’ to. It also involves knowing what your priorities are and having a desire to live your highest priorities most days. After all, we make time for what we priortise. Many people know what they can and can’t take on, they just don’t know how to communicate this to others.

So, what stops us from making our boundaries clearer to people? Fear. And mostly it’s the fear of what other people will think of us.

We don’t want to let people down, to disappointment them or have them think we are aren’t kind (all of which are another’s perception based on their joys and pains up until this point in time). And that’s a natural human concern—but is it worth letting yourself down in the process? No, it’s not. Besides, it can be all in the way you communicate—it is possible to say no or ask for what you need with kindness.

When we prioritise our own boundaries we have more energy, we’re better able to enjoy life and show up for the things that matter. In fact, when we take better care of ourselves by prioritising our own boundaries we have even more to offer the other people in our lives because of the benefits self-care gives us.

A great way to start cultivating your boundaries is to begin to notice, with great kindness, when you try to implement them. Simply observe how it makes you feel when you do so. If speaking up is new for you, it might feel a little uncomfortable. It may also feel like you’re almost whispering your boundaries or sugar coating them, speaking indirectly rather than with clarity, which can make them difficult for others to hear. But just like a muscle, your voice will become stronger the more you use it and soon you’ll be comfortably expressing your needs. Plus, the way others respond to what you express may actually surprise you in the most wonderful way – you give them the opportunity to display compassion for you, which you’ve likely been offering them for years.

Having great boundaries involves holding true to you, to your soul, to your own inner compass, and sometimes finding strength in places where you currently feel small. It’s also about remembering that how another person reacts is not under your control, but how you take care of yourself is.

If stress is an ongoing issue for you, read this

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Stress is something that most people experience to varying degrees. It’s part of being human and it’s also part of what keeps us safe.

However, the relentless output of stress hormones is strongly linked to a host of health challenges, so rather than trying to avoid stress altogether, as this will be almost impossible, you want to instead work on deciphering what stress really is for you, as well as take steps to decrease the intensity of your stress response. This will help your stress responses to be less relentless and give your body more calm breathing space.

Here are some suggestions.

Caffeine.

I know you might not want to hear it, but caffeine has an almost immediate effect on your stress response. Once in the body, caffeine blocks the receptors in the brain that help to slow down our nervous system, so they can’t work effectively, and it also activates the stress axis, sending a signal to the adrenals to make adrenaline.

Antioxidants.

When you’re in a state of stress, your body produces more free radicals because you tend to breathe more rapidly when adrenaline is elevated. Antioxidants nullify the harmful effects of these free radicals. Increase your intake of antioxidants from whole, real plant foods with a wide variety of colours.

Perceptions.

The thoughts you think are directly correlated to the amount of stress you feel. Explore your perceptions around pressure and what you believe is urgent. For example, if a car pulls out in front of you, it is urgent for you to slam on your brakes. If you receive 100 new emails overnight, you may feel that all of them are urgent, when in reality maybe 10 need your attention quite quickly. Both of these examples can induce the same stress response in your body when you perceive them as urgent, even though the latter example really sits lower on a scale of urgency.

Reframe.

When you look at your to-do list, remember how privileged your life is because all your basic needs are met and still for too many people in the world, this is not the case. It can help to remember that you ‘get’ to do all of this, rather than you ‘have’ to. We are, after all, busy with what we say yes to.

Fear.

If you feel that stress (I’m not referring to trauma in this instance) is really an ongoing issue for you, then I urge you to consider this. Whatever you are stressed about—anything at all—is usually what you are frightened of. Peel back the layers on what you perceive are your stresses—running late, for example—and see what’s really there. See what you are actually afraid of. Of being seen as a failure or lazy, of people not liking you, of letting others down… For most people, when they peel it all back, their fear is that they are not loved, or that there will be a loss of love. Everything—and I mean everything—comes back to avoiding rejection and obtaining or maintaining love. I don’t know how else to say it. People think the opposite of stressed is relaxed or calm. I say it is trust.

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