What is Stress?
Many of us in this modern-day and age suffer from chronic stress. Our stress comes not only from work and traffic, but it can come from anywhere including toxic mold in water-damaged buildings, endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDC)s from the use of plastics and chemical-laden beauty products, pesticides in our food supply, air pollution and poor ventilation in our homes and even over-exercising!
The Impact of Stress on Your Health
Stress and the resulting fight or flight response is a biological process that served to protect and helped us survive in the past during our ancestral times. This is important to note when we look at how our stress hormone cortisol is put first place before the production of all our other hormones.
Disrupts the production of other hormones
Our bodies release cortisol, our stress hormone from our adrenal glands and this is in response to a stressful situation. One of the reasons why women especially, suffer from hormonal imbalances, is because when cortisol is being produced over and over every day, its production takes precedence over others such as the sex hormones, estrogen, testosterone and progesterone. Our survival is first priority over reproducing in any given stressful situation. For women, our hormones are everything – it heavily influences our metabolism, energy levels, moods, period health and the ability to lose weight. This could be also a reason why women have more challenges when it comes to losing weight, as compared to men.
Fertility Issues
If you’re thinking of conceiving, having excessive stress is not going to help. It could also lead to the development of hypothalamic amenorrhea – a condition where a woman does not get her periods at all.
Digestive Issues
Stress can also cause digestive malabsorption, by which your body is unable to absorb nutrients properly and our fat cells in the abdomen region produces fat cells so we end up getting stuck in an endless loop of feeling stressed out and overweight.
Impacts the Thyroid
Cortisol is needed for your thyroid to function properly. The thyroid itself is a butterfly gland that sits at the base of your throat and has a role in metabolism, muscular homeostasis, regulating body temperature, skin, memory, clarity, and moods. Most importantly, cortisol is involved in converting the inactive form of thyroid T4 to the active form T3 in the bloodstream! Too much cortisol can influence the thyroid and cause the thyroid to go out of whack (i.e. hypothyroidism). How does this affect weight loss? You bet that any impact on the thyroid’s role of fat metabolism will affect your ability to lose weight.
Weight loss is affected by a multitude of factors and one of the biggest sources is chronic stress. The best way to address your weight loss journey if it has started to stagnate is to alleviate the levels of cortisol in your body and enhance the detoxification of the body. In fact, MindBodyGreen (MBG) claims that changes in body fat are equated to changes in the gut microbiome, sleep, metabolism, movement, inflammation, genes, unexpressed emotions and hormones.
Lifestyle Tools to Counter-Act Stress
There are plenty of ways to help to manage your stress and detoxify the body.
Nutrition
One of the ways starts off with having an anti-inflammatory diet filled with plenty of vegetables and cruciferous vegetables which are great to enhance the liver’s capability to remove toxins from the body. The liver especially, needs antioxidants and amino acids in its detox processes to help remove toxins and excess estrogen from the body in a safe manner.
In addition, cutting out sugar, wheat and other inflammatory ingredients that are in processed foods can help the gut to recover and rebuild the immune system. Inflammatory foods can further exacerbate the stress response and this clearly does not help with weight loss. Start off with an elimination diet and see where it takes you.
Slow down when you eat, practice mindful eating and have meals regularly with lots of protein and fat and greens in order to keep your blood sugar in check.
Self Care
I like to stress to my clients (pun intended) that a big part of stress management involves not only cultivating awareness and knowing what your stress triggers are but also creating and expanding on a self-care toolkit. What makes you relaxed and content? What kind of beauty products or physical objects can you use to help your body recover? Some favourites are epsom salt baths, magnesium supplements, the use of essential oils and having more indoor plants to increase and purify the air at home.
Meditate or Journey
Meditation is a great tool that can help to release stuck and suppressed emotions in our body. On a spiritual and energetically level, our emotions can form blocks in the energy pathways and thus create stagnation in blood circulation and also our biological processes. If something is stuck inside of you that has not been released, your weight can also become stuck. Emotional and stress eating is not something new and this is something that can be addressed with meditating, reflecting and changing our behavioural responses in order not to end up binging and putting on more weight. Journeying is open to everyone who has a clear intention and knows what they want to release- and it can be a great way to access our inner selves and inner power in order to let go of things that have been stuck with us for a long time.
Have a variety of low impact exercise
More studies and professionals are showing and pushing for people to go for low impact exercise instead in order to keep a variety of movement going. Low impact exercise can be great for losing weight and it does not involve a highly stressful response on the body as compared to interval training or running marathons. Some examples include yoga, pilates, swimming and hiking.
Removal of toxins from the environment
Cleaning out beauty and household products and swapping them for more sustainable and natural organic products will have a huge impact on weight loss. Toxins love fat cells and they tend to accumulate in them. Having less plastic use in the house, more plants that can give out more oxygen at night and switching to cleaner beauty brands such as Pai or Cocokind are great first steps.
Bonus!
The team at Essential Oil Labs have given me a code ‘NOURISHMEL25’ to use for anyone to get 25% off their essential oil products. This is not an affiliate link at all, but rather a kind gesture by the company.
Melissa Lee is a PCOS Health Coach who specialises in helping women deal with the struggles of stubborn weight and guide them to lose it in natural ways. The number one result her clients receives is weight loss and the cultivation of detoxification strategies and the expansion of their self-care toolkit. Melissa works virtually as a coach and thus serve women worldwide. Her work can be found at NourishMel and she speaks regularly about various health topics on her NourishMel Podcast. She is constantly reading books about periods, soul work and loves to travel and experience new cultures.
