High Cortisol Could Be Sabotaging Your Health

Transcript:

MELANIE: Hello, and welcome to Dishing Up Nutrition. To start today's episode, let me ask you a question. Do you ever feel like the stress in your life just won't let up? Or do you feel these effects of stress on your health maybe? Or do you have a hard time keeping up with the day-to-day tasks because you're exhausted all the time?

But then when it's time for bed, your brain is wired and you can't fall asleep. Do you feel like a lesser version of yourself because you feel like you're running on empty all the time? If it sounds like you, stay tuned because today we're talking about cortisol, the stress hormone and how it affects your energy, weight, mood, and your overall health.

But before we go any further, I want to take a moment to introduce ourselves. I'm Melanie Beasley, and I've been a Registered and Licensed Dietitian for over 35 years. Joining me today is Brandy Buro, who is also a Registered and Licensed Dietitian. Thanks for joining me today. How many years for you?

BRANDY: I think we are approaching, let me do the math, 14 years. But thanks for having me here today, Mel. I'm happy to be here with you today because this is a really important topic. I can't think of anybody in my life who is not under a lot of stress right now. And all the clients that I'm working with are exhausted, you know, but they can't get good rest. They're anxious all the time. They're wired and tired by the end of the day, but they just can't shut it off.

Does that sound like you? So today, we're going to be answering a lot of questions that are probably on your mind, like what causes high cortisol? Can high cortisol cause weight gain? And of course, what can I do about it? And we'll talk about how to balance cortisol naturally, and what a healthy cortisol pattern looks like.

So if you are feeling tired, but you're wired, maybe you're gaining stubborn belly fat, or you're just more anxious than usual, you're not alone. Cortisol could be part of the problem. And I bet for some of you, it might be new information that stress alone can impact your weight regardless of what you're doing with your food, regardless of what's going on with your exercise habits. And we'll talk about that today.

What is cortisol & its role in our lives

MELANIE: Yeah. So let's start by explaining what exactly is cortisol and what role it plays in our lives. To put it simply, cortisol is a natural hormone produced by our adrenal glands that is part of our everyday hormone symphony. Its job is to wake us up and be alert in the morning and it helps us cope with stress and when we're in fight or flight mode, which is an acute type of stress, cortisol spikes to help us deal with stress and take action to get us to safety.

Think of it a tiger chasing us back in the day. Cortisol would spike, you could escape the tiger. But chronic stress can keep cortisol high all day and into the evening when it really shouldn't be high. And chronic high cortisol can lead to a host of health problems like chronic fatigue, decreased concentration, weight gain, especially in the midsection, high blood pressure, anxiety, depression, low libido, a weakened immune system and really in general high inflammation throughout the body. You just feel inflamed.

BRANDY: Right. And like you said, like running from a tiger, of course. The stressors are very different now, but they could be happening all day long.

MELANIE: Yes.

BRANDY: It could be being in a traffic jam, getting ready for an intense meeting, getting in a fight with your partner. There's all of these new stressors that are hitting you constantly throughout the day. And that is why we're ending up with all these symptoms.

MELANIE: Yeah. And I mean, it's, I feel like what you said earlier, we are living in chronic stress, whether or not we really realize it, but not even 50 years ago, people would open their mailbox and have five pieces of mail. Now you open your phone and you have 145 emails to address. That's stressful.

BRANDY: Absolutely. And you know, the stress hormone cortisol, it's not that it's a bad thing. We need cortisol to live a healthy life. We just need it at the right times. We run into problems when it's stimulated all day long.

MELANIE: Yeah.

BRANDY: But a healthy cortisol level looks a little something like this. So just before you wake up in the morning, your cortisol is going to shoot up and that's what's going to get you out of bed. That's what's going to wake you up, make you alert get you ready for the day and it's going to peak mid-morning. But then from there it should gradually start to taper slowly declining throughout the day until it's time for bed. It gets you ready for sleep.

Cortisol should be almost at zero while you are sleeping. So it has an inverse relationship with melatonin. So melatonin is also known as our sleep hormone. I kind of think as cortisol and melatonin as like the sun and the moon.

MELANIE: I love that.

BRANDY: When the sun is up, cortisol is going to be higher, gradually decline with the sunset. And when the moon is up, melatonin is higher. So if you were to look at a healthy cortisol chart, it should look like the beginning of a roller coaster where there's a sharp incline right away in the morning and then a big drop and it's just going to get calmer and calmer until the end of the ride or the end of your day and then you'll be able to sleep.

High cortisol can increase fat around the midsection & increase insulin resistance

MELANIE: Yeah. Well, have you noticed that when you're extra stressed and not sleeping well you're putting extra weight on around your midsection, even if you're not eating any differently? I saw this so much through COVID with my clients because of the chronic stress.

You're not crazy for thinking this is happening to you. A chronically high level of cortisol does put extra fat on around the midsection. And why is this? One of the reasons is that we have more cortisol receptors in our abdominal adipose tissue than in other areas of fat storage. In other words, our bellies have four times more doorways for cortisol to act on fat cells.

Cortisol also increases our blood sugar level temporarily, giving us quick energy to fight or flight the stressor at hand. Well, when stress is high all day long, it could keep blood sugar elevated higher than we want for longer than we want, leading to insulin resistance. The classic look of insulin resistance is weight around the belly.

BRANDY: Yeah. So if you look at where you might be gaining weight, that does give us some clues about what the underlying cause might be. So midsection weight gain sometimes is connected to chronic stress. When cortisol is high from ongoing stress, your blood sugar goes up.

Cortisol causes your blood sugar to go up and that causes your pancreas to pump out more insulin. Insulin is our primary fat storage hormone. So insulin is also going to cause that fat storage at this point around the midsection.

And then, the high cortisol can also cause your muscles to break down, as if it wasn't bad enough. So, now you're starting to lose that lean body mass, which is so important for our metabolism. And your body composition starts to change, and your metabolism starts to decline. So it just goes to show that weight is really not just that old equation, calories in, calories out. There are so many factors at play when it comes to weight, especially hormones.

MELANIE: Yes. Yeah. I think there's also often that aspect of emotional eating when you're stressed. Yes, your cortisol is going up, but you're also possibly more likely to overconsume comfort foods, carbohydrates or sugar during a time of stress, which of course can also contribute to weight gain.

Factors that can cause stress

So regarding our stress hormone, cortisol, you have to take a minute to think about what is causing you stress these days. Is it work, family, relationships, aging parents, the breaking news cycle that never ends, all of the above. I had a client recently and her cortisol level was up because of her chronic long aerobic sessions.

And so she was trying to lose that weight. She was doing what she knew to do back in her twenties. And so she was doing these long runs, these power walks. She was doing long classes and that is a form of stress to the body. So I have her take two days of rest and she started losing weight where she couldn't before because her cortisol was so high. That's a cortisol provoking system when you're chronically exercising for long periods of aerobic activity.

Food choices directly impact cortisol

So do you ever think about how your diet also could be adding to your stress? Well, yes, your food choices can directly impact your cortisol levels. As dietitians, that's of course, where we'd like to focus. You can't always control your outside stressors, but one thing you should have more control over is your food choices. We know sometimes diet isn't 100 percent in your control, but we want to help you make better choices regardless of your situation. That's what we're for.

BRANDY: Exactly. Yeah. Fortunately, food is something you have a little more control over more so than most stress in our life, so if that's something that you could change to lower your overall stress you would, and we can help you with that.

And as I mentioned earlier, your cortisol levels should look something like the beginning of a roller coaster where there's one big spike in the morning and then it starts to taper down. So when we're thinking of a healthy balanced diet I always like to think about blood sugar, and I picture that perfect, stable blood sugar graph in my mind, where it's got more of the rolling hills pattern of ups and downs.

There's slight ups, gradual declines all day long. So it should go up a little bit after you eat and then come back down gradually to baseline after about three hours. That's what we like to see. And this should happen every time you eat. So whether it's, you know, after a meal, after a snack, ideally it's like three, three to five times a day, but we really want to take that opportunity to stay as stable as possible and prevent those big spikes in your blood sugar and those big crashes in your blood sugar.

So this could happen when you're eating a really high carbohydrate meal. So maybe it's a big slab of lasagna with a breadstick on the side or a big plate of fried rice. Or maybe you decide just to have a big bowl of popcorn for dinner. I have seen this with a lot of my clients.

MELANIE: It's great with the clients that have that continuous glucose monitor because they can see those big spikes or “just a cup of coffee” on your way to work.

BRANDY: Right.

BRANDY: And it's loaded with a sugary syrup.

BRANDY: Yeah. Like those fancy coffee drinks. It's basically just sugar.

MELANIE: Very stressful. Raises cortisol.

BRANDY: Exactly. Anytime your blood sugar spikes, it's usually followed by a big crash. And in both of those extremes that is stress on the body. So, we need to think about how we can optimize our blood sugar to prevent that added stress on our body.

MELANIE: Well, just think of it like this, high stress equals high cortisol and high sugar, ultra processed foods create that stress in the body. So high sugar equals high cortisol. To avoid adding extra stress to your body, we aim to keep blood sugar levels nice and steady throughout the day.

It's exactly what you said, the rolling hills. We do this by eating real food, what we call in balance. So that's quality animal protein, real natural fats and carbohydrates, mainly from vegetables, which is loaded with fiber, which helps them buffer that peak. I love clients to start with a fibrous, good crunchy salad that has a little bit of fat in it and then go to protein.

And then lastly, maybe that's when they have a little sweet potato or beans or something, but stacking your food and in order eating really makes a difference and to keep blood sugar balanced, the goal for women is for each meal to look like this: three to four or even five ounces of animal protein.

This looks like pasture raised eggs and poultry, wild caught fish, seafood, grass fed beef, even quality protein powder made from whey or beef from grass fed cows. And then the vegetables, the fiber. We want to include that fiber before the concentrated carbs. The more colorful, the better. Don't get stuck with just broccoli, just green beans, right?

BRANDY: Switch it up.

MELANIE: Lots of colors and lots of variety. And we want this to take up about half of your plate, at least two cups worth. If it's leafy greens, pack those cups. So and then about a half a cup of grains or legumes or starchy veggies like potato or squash. And you want to round it out, of course, with some good natural fat, a tablespoon or two, like olive oil, avocado, nuts, coconut.

I love coconut flakes for people to just even start with a little handful of coconut flakes because they literally have no glycemic load at all. And they're loaded with fiber. So anyway, making sure you have these three components with each meal or snack every three to four hours will make your blood sugar nice and stable all day long, and this is how the body was designed to eat and it'll support your cortisol levels. Balanced blood sugar levels really lower that stress response which in turn lower the cortisol and the inflammation in the body.

BRANDY: Yeah, so that's optimal picture for blood sugar balance. We need to take a quick break, but when we come back, I'm going to show you the flip side of that. Like, you know, let's go to the other extreme and what that can do to your stress and your cortisol levels.

MELANIE: Oh, good.

BRANDY: We'll be right back.

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The Standard American Diet adds stress to the body

Welcome back to Dishing Up Nutrition. We are talking about stress and the stress hormone cortisol today. And we were just describing how to optimize your blood sugar to help reduce stress in your body. And what I'm going to do now is show you the flip side. So I'm going to show you the other extreme. So the optimal picture would be get a good balance of high quality protein, some high fiber vegetables, and a little healthy fat.

That's going to help prevent those blood sugar spikes and those blood sugar crashes that can trigger stress in the body. On the flip side, the standard American diet actually add stress to the body, or maybe you've heard of this as the sad diet, standard American diet.

MELANIE: It's so very sad.

BRANDY: It is very sad. So the sad diet is basically comprised of foods that are heavily processed far from where they began in nature. And these foods are often very high in refined carbohydrates and processed oils. And at the end, there's really not a lot of nutritional value here.

MELANIE: It just fills you up briefly for you to be starving later.

BRANDY: Right. It puts volume in your stomach, but it's not really giving you any benefit. And you're hungry an hour later. And studies have shown that people who eat this ultra processed Standard American Diet tend to have higher cortisol levels overall.

And it's a pretty difficult cycle to break because, you know, you probably don't have the best energy eating this way.

MELANIE: Yeah.

BRANDY: And you're probably motivated to grab something that is already prepared, those convenience foods that are ultra processed, but they're so nutrient poor that you're not really getting the energy you need to pick yourself up and make a good meal. So the cycle just goes on and on.

Common coping mechanism for low energy: caffeinated beverages & alcohol

So in addition to reaching for those processed sugary foods, another coping mechanism that I often see for that low energy cycle is reaching for caffeinated beverages and alcohol. And these are both things that are going to increase your cortisol. So not the best.

MELANIE: Tell us more about that.

BRANDY: Yeah. So you may be reaching for some caffeine right away in the morning, or maybe even throughout the day to pick yourself up and give yourself that little stimulation.

MELANIE: Like coffee or Diet Coke.

BRANDY: Yeah. Not just coffee. It could be soda. And then, you know, that's going to stimulate you. It's going to jack you up kind of, and then by the end of the day, you want to relax, so you might be reaching for some alcohol, a little cocktail, a glass of wine to wind down. It's a pretty difficult cycle to break, but both of these substances actually do add stress on your body and wreak havoc on your adrenal glands.

So what we here at Nutritional Weight & Wellness recommend is that cap your coffee off at about 16 ounces. Do not add sugar, maybe a little heavy whipping cream, that's fine. But, you know, that might look like a large mug. Or a full thermos, you know, use that as your guide. As far as alcohol, there really is no recommended amount for alcohol.

Zero is best. Less is more when it comes to alcohol, especially if you're somebody that suspects that you are under chronic stress or your cortisol levels are high. So really what it comes down to is both caffeine and alcohol really throw your cortisol levels off balance and make it really difficult for your body to get into that deep sleep state.

MELANIE: And even when you have, you're having that one big cup of coffee in the morning. Something to remember, especially as we age, is that caffeine stays full strength for seven hours. Then it goes to a half strength for seven hours. Then it goes to a quarter strength for seven hours. Really the older we get, the less tolerant we are of caffeine.

So you may have been drinking caffeine like this your whole life, and suddenly you're not sleeping well. It's something to think about. I know I started sleeping a lot better when I decaffeinated and it made me sad because everybody loves that energy bump in the morning, but I just wouldn't sleep at night. And, it wasn't until I read that study that I really made that connection for both myself and my clients, just that one cup of coffee could disrupt me later at 11 o'clock at night.

BRANDY: Yeah. And I've, I've seen it with clients too, like they'll be doing their two modest cups of coffee, struggling with sleep. So she did an experiment. She dropped it down to just one eight ounce cup of coffee a day. Transformative. She could actually sleep. So it was just…

MELANIE: She got to keep the one.

BRANDY: She got to keep one.

MELANIE: Good for her. And then what happens is if you're super stressed is at night, of course, people will have that wine to unwind, but that wine or the alcohol is going to keep you in surf sleeping, where you're just surfing across the top of your sleep zone instead of dipping into that deep restorative REM sleep.

And that's where you just have that wake cycle. I sleep until three and then, boop, I'm awake. So frustrating. So cutting that out, even just as an experiment, both, caffeine, do it slowly so we don't get, you know, horrible reviews because you're angry with the headache, but, slowly wean off the caffeine, stop the wine, reevaluate.

How am I doing with my sleep? But what you're doing is you're gifting yourself healthy cortisol levels, which in turn is going to help with that belly fat that people can start accumulating.

BRANDY: And good sleep is a great way to manage your stress.

MELANIE: Oh my gosh, we're just nicer people when we get that sleep.

Skipping meals: a bad habit that negatively affects cortisol

BRANDY: Absolutely. I think another bad habit that's common when we're under stress is skipping meals, especially breakfast. You know, if you wake up, you're feeling frantic, you don't have time to actually prepare, you know, this, this gorgeous breakfast that you might expect you need, that's a detriment to you. You know, that's going to throw your blood sugar off balance for the rest of the day.

And it puts stress on the body. So making sure you start your day with a balanced breakfast that has a little protein, some fat, and that fiber rich carbohydrate, that's going to give you the fuel you need to get your day going, and it's going to set your blood sugar up for success for the rest of the day. So this might look like maybe two or three eggs or three ounces of nitrate free sausage. Add a couple of cups of vegetables, topped with a tablespoon of butter.

MELANIE: Yeah.

BRANDY: Pretty simple. You know, that's pretty much what I did today. I used a couple cups of leftover green beans, butter, fried a couple of eggs, a couple chicken sausages. It came together in a few minutes, but if you're really in a rush, maybe make a smoothie, you know, that takes just a few minutes, throw it in a blender, about a cup of frozen berries, add a couple of tablespoons of nut butter, or maybe a third of a cup of canned coconut milk.

MELANIE: Or half an avocado.

BRANDY: Or half an avocado. Yes. And then I'll do like a scoop and a half or two of whey protein powder blended up. I can sip on that on my commute into work, maybe even during my first meeting, no one has to know, but that's just going to keep me feeling calm, collected, and stable, not stressed and frazzled.

Examples of what to avoid for breakfast

And on the flip side, what you want to avoid for breakfast are those typical breakfast foods. You know, a bowl of cereal, a big bowl of oatmeal, a muffin, and that

MELANIE: A Pop-Tart.

BRANDY: Yep, exactly. So things that have been marketed as breakfast foods.

MELANIE: That you definitely cannot pull a Pop-Tart from nature. There is no toast tree, there is no cereal bush. So you want something that's close to nature because that's going to be nutrient dense because you need more than just calories. You need nutrition for our cells. We can't feed our little cells on nutrient void foods.

BRANDY: Exactly. Even if they're marketed as health foods, you know, those high carb breakfasts really aren't giving you a lot.

MELANIE: Key, key word, marketed, marketed. Yeah.

BRANDY: So don't fall for it. You're smarter than that. These are going to spike your blood sugar and then you're going to be on that blood sugar roller coaster all day setting you up for high stress. We don't need that.

MELANIE: Oh, it makes you feel exhausted too. When you're on the dash and go diet or the standard American high inflammatory diet, it will come home to roost. Sooner or later, you have to pay the piper, and it creates stress. It stresses out, you know, busy lifestyle triggers cortisol releases all day long and you can manage your stress in your life that you can't control better when you're well nourished like this. The good news is that an anti-inflammatory diet full of real foods from nature can counteract the impact of high cortisol.

Magnesium: helpful for balancing adrenals & cortisol

One nutrient that is especially helpful for adrenal health and balancing cortisol levels is magnesium, magic magnesium, and stress depletes minerals like magnesium from the body. So it's extra important that we supplement. I had a client and she was going through extremely stressful time with aging parents and she was doing all the things that we told her to do, but she suddenly started having leg cramps.

And I was just discussing with her, this was just earlier today. When you're stressed, you are burning through more magnesium. So there's no shame in the game with upping how many capsules that you're taking. But that's your body's tell that your body's flare gun that it needs more magnesium or water.

But in her case, it was magnesium. So you want to think of magnesium like a relaxation mineral. And we can get magnesium naturally in foods, of course, like leafy greens, nuts, and seeds, but we always recommend supplementing Magnesium Glycinate because we just don't get enough from the diet alone. Even if we eat healthy, our soil is different that we are growing our vegetables in.

So I recommend start with supplementing two to 400 milligrams of Magnesium Glycinate or, you know, if you've got a little hard stool, you might want Mixed Magnesium, which is a blend of both magnesium glycinate and citrate. And both of these options work great when you're trying to really improve your relaxation and your sleeping quality. But don't run out and get magnesium citrate or oxide from your big box store because you'll end up with diarrhea and that's stressful.

BRANDY: Exactly. Yeah, so it does, the form of magnesium does matter.

MELANIE: It does.

Omega-3 fats fight inflammation

BRANDY: When I'm working with somebody who's focusing on balancing their cortisol and reducing stress, something else that I'll also recommend supplementing with are those omega-3 fats. So we've all probably heard that omega-3 fats are really important, so it's probably not surprising to you, but it is really important for keeping inflammation at bay.

So omega-3s fight inflammation, remember that. We can, of course, get some omega-3 fats naturally through real foods. Fatty fish is going to be your best source, but there's also a little bit of omega-3 fats in certain nuts and seeds. But I always like to recommend supplementing with an additional 2,000 to 3,000 milligrams per day for somebody who's really trying to fight inflammation.

So, 2,000 to 3,000 is a pretty standard dose. And just like magnesium, a lot of us are not able to get enough omega-3s from food alone. So it's just a good foundational supplement to have in your toolkit.

L-theanine is calming for the brain

MELANIE: Yeah, it's great. And especially here in Minnesota, the dry skin is crazy. The dry eyes are crazy. So that helps. Let's talk about another supplement that's in my go to for calming my brain. And that's L-theanine. Love L theanine. L-theanine is an amino acid that comes from green tea. So the leaves, when they're broken down and they're made into a supplement called L-theanine.

So nothing too magical here. If you think of sipping a cup of tea, green tea, but what you're doing is you're taking L-theanine at a higher dose in supplement form, actually reduces that cortisol.

BRANDY: Yeah, and there's no caffeine.

MELANIE: There's no caffeine in it, so I can't do green tea, I can do L-theanine. And you can take a capsule of L-theanine as part of your daily routine, or as needed when you're under stress. I like to take it before an important meeting, or if I'm traveling to a new place, or just any time my brain feels overwhelmed or anxious. It's very calming and I'll tell my clients, do that before you reach for the wine.

BRANDY: Yes. And so if you're looking for, you know, a little calm relaxation, a little L-theanine might just get you there.

MELANIE: Might get you there. Even I have one woman and I have her take it. She's got maybe a 20 minute drive and I have her take it before she leaves work. She takes one before she leaves work and she takes one when she comes in the door to, and then I said, reevaluate, do you actually need that wine now? And she's like, I don't.

BRANDY: Yeah. So her sleep, beautiful.

MELANIE: And no high blood sugar, you're not cranking that blood sugar up with; it just converts to sugar really.

Ashwagandha: another calming herbal supplement

BRANDY: Well, on a similar note, there's another herbal supplement that I like for that calming relaxation effect. It's something that we also have in our Nutrikey website: Ashwagandha. And you've probably heard of Ashwagandha. It's becoming a little more popular over the last few years.

MELANIE: It's trending in drinks now, I see.

BRANDY: Oh yeah, yeah.

MELANIE: It's full of a bunch of other crappy ingredients in those drinks.

BRANDY: Yeah. You've probably seen it as an ingredient in drinks that promise stress reduction, calming, relaxation. But what this is, it's considered an adaptogen. So it's something that basically mimics your body's nervous system and its ability to calm the body down.

So just like L-theanine, ashwagandha is naturally calming and this is something that I might take during acute stressors in my life. Like when I last moved, big stress, right? We're packing, we’re uprooting our life and moving. Like I'm going to do a little ashwagandha for a couple of weeks.

MELANIE: Love it.

BRANDY: And just taking it before bed, it helps me relax, get really good sleep. Then I'm ready for what the day has in store for me. There are a couple of clients that I work with that just as a disclaimer, they don't tolerate Ashwagandha that well. So the thought is it is a nightshade. It comes from the nightshade family. So if you know that you're sensitive to nightshades like tomatoes and peppers, maybe ashwagandha is not for you. But if that's not something you deal with.

MELANIE: Do you see a lot of clients that have nightshade issues? I never see clients with nightshade issues.

BRANDY: Not a ton. Just a handful that know it's a sensitivity for them.

MELANIE: That's good. That's good reminder for people.

BRANDY: So we'll have that conversation, but truly not a significant issue for most people.

Exercise tips to support health cortisol levels

MELANIE: Yeah. Interesting. I want to circle back to exercise. And what we recommend versus what could actually be causing harm because so many women tell me that they get up extra early around 5 a.m., they sacrifice their sleep to get intense workouts in before, of course, the kids get up or before work. And this, I applaud that.

I applaud the fact that they want to exercise. Exercise is so very important for longevity, health, everything. And this usually, this is usually women who are at an age where they're at their busiest time in their lives. They're working, they're raising children, perhaps caring for their aging parents. I was in a workout class talking to a couple ladies in my workout class and they were talking about prior to their retirement, they would get up at 5:30.

And I said, do you ever do that now? And they're like, oh, heck no. So it's always when you are the busiest, I think is when people are doing this. And they're frustrated because they're so burned out and they're gaining weight in their belly and they just don't feel like themselves. So all that hard work.

And they're always surprised when I tell them that I would rather have them get that extra hour of sleep than intense workout in early in the morning. You know, if they just switch to 20 minutes of HITT somewhere in their day, maybe their lunch break or some other time, it serves them so much better.

And this is assuming that their total sleep is under seven hours. Now if you're asleep by nine and then you're waking up at five, it might be okay, but most of us are not sleeping a full eight hours and I don't care how driven you are. Your body needs eight hours of sleep. If we're waking at five and have full time jobs and raising children and doing all the things you need that restorative sleep. That's when our bodies repair.

So there's just that. You could not have told me that in my twenties. You know, I thought I could do six hours and I'm doing great. Well, there's just, there's too much to do in your day to go to bed early. This is the noise that you always have. But what if I told you that you could lose weight more easily by sleeping that extra hour than you would by getting that intense workout.

So let's face it, waking up just a few hours after just a few hours of sleep and then doing intense workout day after day. is just plain stressful on the body, so we have to come up with a different system.

BRANDY: Right. I always tell my clients, sleep before that workout. Hierarchy of needs.

MELANIE: Mm hmm. That's good.

BRANDY: If you're not hitting your 7 1/2, 8 hours, and you're getting up for a workout, like I, the sleep is going to do you much more good than that workout ever will.

MELANIE: It does. Once we get optimal sleep, they start losing weight.

BRANDY: Yeah.

MELANIE: The body is just hanging and clinging on for life when it is sleep deprived.

BRANDY: Exactly. Okay. So I think it's important to understand when there's too much of a good thing when it comes to exercise. Overexercising does lead to high cortisol. And you might be thinking like that early morning is really the only time that I can get a workout in.

If you insist on getting your movement at the very beginning of your day, maybe we could compromise instead of killing yourself on the treadmill for an hour, trying to just burn those calories, leaving you feeling depleted and then you don't really have much gas in the tank to get through the rest of your day. Could we compromise and do something like some yoga or like 30 minutes of like some strength training, you know, maybe you're not committing as much time, but you're still putting some work in to build strength.

MELANIE: Yeah, I love that.

BRANDY: So taking the intensity down a little bit, but you're still getting some movement. You're still getting the benefits of exercise.

MELANIE: And it's not so long, so you have more time to sleep, right?

BRANDY: You get a little extra sleep. It's just compromise. That's what we're shooting for here because again, weight loss and weight gain, it's just not as simple as calories in versus calories out. Your body under chronic stress is going to hold on to more fat than a body that is not under stress, even when you're consuming the exact same amount of calories.

MELANIE: I love it.

Cortisol testing is an option

BRANDY: And I want to mention before we wrap up today that if you really want to know more about your cortisol levels, it is something that you can get tested through your medical provider. So it might be worth looking into if what we talked about today did resonate with you.

You don't really need to get your cortisol tested in order to implement some of these diet and lifestyle changes that we talked about today. I will say that if you are curious and you want to get your cortisol levels tested, the best cortisol test will be drawn several times a day.

So it could be a saliva test or a urine test, but because cortisol fluctuates throughout the day, higher in the morning, lower at night, randomly testing it somewhere in the day isn't really going to give you that full spectrum picture of what your pattern is like.

MELANIE: So, if what we discussed today struck a chord with you, we invite you to meet with one of us at Nutritional Weight & Wellness. You can make an appointment with one of the dietitians or nutritionists because you have the power to feel better naturally through diet and lifestyle practices. We want to help you.

You want to, be your coach and, and get you there. Stress in life is definitely inevitable, but there are things that we can do to combat stress that are in our control. We want to help you. You can give us a call to learn more or schedule an appointment at 651-699-3438 or visit weightandwellness.com to learn more.

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Our goal at Nutritional Weight & Wellness is to help each and every person experience better health through eating real food. It’s a simple but powerful message. Eating real food is life changing. Thanks for listening.

BRANDY: Thank you.