In today’s episode we’re talking about influencing family and friends when you’re trying to adopt healthier habits. We answer listener questions about how to motivate and encourage people we love to make healthier choices and how to handle family and friends who don’t support our choices and goals. For more information on motivation, fat loss nutrition strategies, workouts and recipes, make sure to get yourself on the free VIP e-newsletter list!
How can we go about influencing family and friends? How can we motivate, inspire and encourage people we love to embrace healthier habits and improve their health?
How do you navigate situations where family and friends are outright unsupportive of the healthy changes you’re trying to make?
I’m sure you realize that your stress levels might be contributing to your trouble losing weight. But I’m not sure you realize what is contributing to your stress levels. Sure, emotional stress is a big problem. But what about physical stress? Processed foods, sugars and toxins create a stress response in your body whether you feel it or not. They cause damage at the cellular and vascular level that you might not recognize or feel for years. In today’s episode we talk about stress management for weight loss: the common causes of stress, the symptoms of elevated cortisol, how it impacts your health and fat burning potential and how you can control cortisol via diet and lifestyle.
“Manage stress like your life depends on it, because it does” Dr. Sara Gottfried
Stress is a hormonal issue. Fat loss is a hormonal issue. If you believe that your stress does not impact fat loss, you’re wrong.
Stress is more than emotional. Poor food choices create a physical stress response in the body (especially processed foods and sugar) even if you don’t feel it or know of it for years.
Chronic stress elevates cortisol. High cortisol levels impair fat burning and accelerate fat storage.
Chronic stress influences your metabolic rate, mood, energy, sleep, focus, attention and more!
Signs of high cortisol include:
Belly fat
Muffin top
Pink or purple stretch marks
The feeling of “tired but wired” – feeling tired but unable to relax enough to sleep
Trouble waking in the morning
Mood swings
Sugar cravings
Indigestion
Brain fog
Slow recovery/wound healing
Implementation Strategies
Stress management for weight loss needs to be a top priority. Here are some of the most effective ways to manage your body’s stress response.
It seems like in almost every podcast episode, blog post and email I’m repeating the absolutely essential fat loss fact: fat loss is about hormones. Your hormones allow or disallow fat burning. Unfortunately, we are fantastic at screwing up our hormonal balance in two primary ways:
Poor food choices
Chronic stress
As Dr. Sara Gottfried says in her book The Hormone Cure, treat stress management as a matter of life and death, because it is. Sure, chronic stress impairs fat loss but it also does a whole lot more than that. When it comes to stress and weight loss, there’s more to it than meets the eye.
Emotional stress is only one form of stress you need to be aware of. Eating processed foods and regularly consuming sugar elicits a physical stress response in your body. You might not feel the stress, but those regular food choices are creating hormonal chaos and stressing your body in ways you might not feel or know of for many years. The stress response is triggered whether you realize it or not.
Your stress response is designed to be intermittent – short bursts of stress followed by long periods of relaxation. The state of chronic stress from emotional triggers and poor food choices creates a state of constant alert in your body – this impacts all your hormones including insulin, testosterone, thyroid hormones, adrenaline, estrogen and progesterone. Hormonal imbalances impair fat burning and accelerate fat storage.
Cortisol, one of the primary stress hormones, belongs to a class of hormones called glucocorticoids. Why is it called a glucocorticoid? Because elevated cortisol levels raise your blood sugar (whether you eat or not). Clearly, chronic stress contributes to weight gain for this reason: you cannot burn fat when blood sugar is high.
Chronically elevated cortisol signals the body to deprioritze fat burning and to slow your metabolism so that resources are reserved for the percieved impending emergency.
A second hormone responds to chronic stress – neuropeptide Y. This hormone increases the rate of fat storage, especially around the abdomen, and triggers cravings and hunger.
Cortisol compounds the fat storing impact of insulin. If cortisol is elevated when insulin is elevated (in response to a high carb/high sugar meal), the likelihood of excess carbs being converted and stored as fat is much higher.
Chronically high cortisol can impair the production and release of feel-good chemicals in the brain known as neurotransmitters. Not only can this lead to depression and mood swings, it can lead to overeating, especially sugar, in an attempt to achieve that emotional pick-me-up you crave.
Stress and weight loss are inextricably linked. Poor food choices causes a physical stress response in the body. If you’re making poor food choices every few hours, each bite sounds the “emergency” alarms in your body. Overreacting to every emotional or mental challenge in your life compounds the problem. If weight loss is the goal, physical, emotional and mental stress reduction absolutely must be a priority. Even when you can’t change your circumstances, you can reduce mental and emotional stress by improving your response to your circumstances. And don’t underestimate the power of reducing physical stress by reducing consumption of processed foods, sugar, caffeine and alcohol.
Don’t miss any fat loss tips, recipes and workouts! Make sure you’re on the free VIP email list! And if you want more specific info on stress and weight loss or all of your metabolic hormones and how they impact fat loss (along with what you can do via diet and lifestyle to bring them into balance), make sure you check out the Hormones & Fat Loss e-book!
Fat loss is 90% what you eat. What you eat is 90% mental. If you don’t control your thoughts, they will control you. This is very clear when we consider all the times we’ve really wanted to make good food choices but cave to temptation in the moment. Controlling your thoughts isn’t just about positive thinking – in fact, positive thinking often falls far short. This is where power thinking comes into play. In this episode we talk about why positive thinking isn’t enough and how power thinking can make a huge difference in your life regardless of your goal.
The Difference between positive thinking & power thinking
positive thinking: framing your thoughts in a positive manner despite any doubt and disbelief in your rational mind or your heart
power thinking: choosing to frame a situation in a way that is both useful & empowering to you
based on premise that everything is neutral & we choose to assign values or emotions every event and circumstance
Resources
If you want more info on overcoming nutritional, mental and emotional barriers to lasting fat loss, make sure you’re on the free VIP e-newsletter list!
One of the most common questions I get is, “How can I lose weight after menopause?”. So many women feel like their bodies have changed and no longer response to the weight loss strategies that always worked in the past. There’s no question that weight loss and weight maintenance are more difficult after menopause, but it is still 100% possible. In this episode we talk about the most important and effective strategies for weight loss after menopause.
What do fat loss & menopause have in common? Hormones. Bring hormones into balance via food & lifestyle and you can control both fat loss & menopausal symptoms.
Fat loss prerequisites:
Hormone balance
Slight energy deficit
Keys to achieving hormone balance for menopausal women:
Control insulin
Control cortisol
Your sensitivity to both insulin and cortisol changes significantly during perimenopause and menopause. This doesn’t make fat loss impossible. It makes quality nutrition, stress management and nutrient timing absolutely critical. When you employ the strategies discussed in the episode you can experience a wide variety of benefits beyond fat loss! However, all these benefits require that you take control of insulin & cortisol via diet and lifestyle.