Hidden Sources of Stress
Approx Read Time: 5 Minutes
If you read our latest post about how stress can sabotage your weight loss, you know that stress can have a detrimental role to your health and your body composition. You will also know that stress causes an increase in the hormone cortisol, and that chronically elevated levels of cortisol leads to a million undesired effects on your body (including the ever-so dreaded increase in belly fat).
With that being said, its worth it to take measures to reduce some of the stress in your life. The first step is to identify sources of stress. When I say stress you probably immediately think of your emotional stressors: things like school or work, finances, or frustrating relationships. These are all common causes of stress in our modern world, they can all lead to elevated levels of cortisol and the negative health effects that come with it. Taking active steps to control these stressors is important to your overall health. However, its important to understand that there are a variety of sources of stress that may be less obvious to identify, and be playing just as big of a role in your health and/or your weight loss efforts:
1) Steady-State “Fat-burning Zone” Cardio: Elevated cortisol is a natural response in our bodies. Any exercise you do is technically a form of stress on the body. Balancing the right amount of stress with the right amount of recovery is exactly what a well designed workout is all about. Research demonstrates that the elevations in cortisol are lower in strength training style workouts. Steady-state aerobic cardio is shown to cause greater increases in cortisol levels than other types of exercise (this can be particularly harmful in someone training for a long period of time or someone who is already under a lot of stress). Studies suggest that increasing intensity, and keeping your cardio within the 25-minute mark is beneficial to controlling your stress hormones!
This doesn’t need to scare you away from cardio machines all together, it should just make you aware that there can be more effective ways to arrange your workout. Poloquin group has a really great article on this, click here if you want to learn more.
2) Missing meals, Severe Calorie restricting, and Fad Dieting: People keep coming back to try different diet after diet. WHY? Because any time you are restricting calories or carbohydrates too much, your body reacts with stress. Remember how stress causes you to feel hungrier, to crave carbs and sugars (the exact foods you are probably trying not to eat), and reduces your ability to feel full? No wonder your diet has failed: your hormones are working against you! This is exactly why it is so important to be eating enough meals throughout the day and ensure you are fueling your body with enough food for it to run properly.
3) Excessive Caffeine: Now enjoying a cup of coffee in the morning or early afternoon isn’t going to kill you, but you should be aware that excessive caffeine drinking can work against your weight-loss/muscle building efforts. If you are having a high stress day, with work and school, curing that with a cup of coffee will only add to the negative health effects. Avoiding coffee in the evening is another important point, since caffeine disrupts sleep.. which brings me to my next point..
4) Not Enough Sleep / Poor Sleep Quality: During sleep your muscles fully relax and your body is given time to repair and restore from the stresses of the day. Without enough sleep, those daily stresses just keep building up. Lack of sleep can result in a variety of hormonal disturbances. Sleep deprivation decreases Leptin production; the hormone that signals when you are full. It also increases production of Ghrelin; the hormone that stimulates your appetite. Inadequate sleep over a longer period of time results in decreased Thyroid Stimulating hormone; a hormone that stimulates proper function of the metabolism.
References:
VanCauter E, Knutson K, Leproult R, Spiegel K. The Impact of Sleep Deprivation on Hormones and Metabolism. (2005) Medscape Neurology. http://www.medscape.org/viewarticle/502825
