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Keto Accelerator Masterclass

By Clauda J. Caldwell

MODULE - CRAFTING YOUR DIET MINDSET

Video - Weight loss and stress
Hi again, it’s Claudia Caldwell. Welcome back to this training video. Now we will talk about weight
loss and stress. Stress! The word itself can cause stress, haha. If you feel that you have too much
stress every day, which you can’t control, you are certainly not alone in this. This video deals with
stress, how our body reacts to it and how it affects weight loss. Along with all the psychological
factors that cause stress, there are many physical stresses that affect the body too. For example,
insomnia has a stressful effect on the body and sudden food intolerance may appear just because
you are under the impact of hard stress. These physical reasons are not stated to scare you but to
help you realize that the body responds equally to stress no matter what the source is.

How our bodies respond to stress. I guess you already knew that the hormone known as cortisol will
be released when the body senses a stressor and that cortisol is bad for losing weight and that your
body produces it because of the huge amount of stress in your life. The truth is a bit more
complicated than that. Cortisol is an active daily hormone, which means that the levels of cortisol
should be high in the morning with the aim of giving you energy and they should slowly fall during
the day so you can fall asleep in the evening. In fact, cortisol is a hormone of energy and caution.
When it comes to shortage of insulin, normal circulating cortisol helps our body to burn fat with an
increase in hormones in the morning. Most people, however, do not have normal circulating cortisol
in the body. For example, most people "need" coffee early in the morning. This means that cortisol
production is lower in the morning than it should be. Coffee, tea, and caffeine help the body to
release small amounts of cortisol. Another bad sign is when you feel the excess energy at night. It can
bring additional problems, going to bed later, getting less sleep and waking up tired the next day. The
circuit can be repeated for years, when you wake up tired, feel energetic at night and sleep poorly
overall.

In today's society, stress is almost constant and chronic, which therefore can cause various problems
related to loss of weight and health. Add to that the easy availability of fast food. When cortisol is
chronically released due to emotional and physical stress, the body responds in three basic ways that
negatively affect weight loss: Cortisol makes cells have a weaker effect or response to some other
hormones. A good example is insulin resistance. Cortisol increases inflammation. In order to explain
this better to you, I have to revert to fat again. Our body has different types of fats that react
differently. For example, the fat located beneath the skin, which you can feel and hold, is called
subcutaneous fat. Another type of fat—deep in the body that surrounds the organs—is called
visceral fat. Visceral fat is more dangerous than subcutaneous for two reasons. First, it releases the
same inflammatory signals as cortisol. Second, since it surrounds organs, it increases the chances of
damaging them and it alters metabolic regulatory mechanisms. Thus, stress signals increase the
possibility of storing more visceral fat, while this fat increases the release of inflammatory signals.
This causes an inflammatory circle of increased storage of visceral fat leading to increased
inflammation, and so on. The third reaction of our body when it comes to cortisol is linked with
regulation of the hunger hormones. There are two hunger hormones named ghrelin and leptin.
Ghrelin is a hormone that is released whenever you are hungry, and leptin is a hormone whose
primary job is to signal to the brain and other organs to decrease appetite. When you are under a lot
of stress, the level of leptin will decrease, making you hungrier. The combination of lower amounts of
the leptin "anti-hunger" hormone and increasing the ghrelin or "hunger hormone" makes people
overeat. In fact, this combination causes people to have cravings to increase their blood sugar
because insulin helps to reduce cortisol levels. In other words, if you’re striving more for chocolate
than for broccoli it means your cortisol levels are high.

Many health experts agree that the brain "remembers everything" during the years of stressful life so
in one moment your body have to pay the bill for that, whose debts most often pays our stomach
and digestive system. Stress causes you to accumulate more fat, or at least slows down the
metabolism of fats.

Alright, unfortunately there is no magic pill to always free yourself from stress. Everyone suffers from
different stress and has different options to achieve a stress-free life. Therefore there is no general
instruction on how to reduce your stress. But now you know how stress is related to your weight. I
don't think I need to advise you to avoid stress as much as possible. That is self-evident.

Thank you very much for watching and we'll see you in the next video.