Cortisol and Belly Fat

The Connection between Cortisol and Belly Fat

As you leaf through your women’s magazine you see endless pictures of beautiful women with flat abdomens; not a spare tire around the tummy in sight. And there you sit with a roll around your middle that you can grab hold of. What’s a young, vibrant woman with the best years of her life yet to be lived to do? Stop stressing out! I say that not in a general way. It’s literally your stress that could be causing that belly fat.

What’s Cortisol Got to Do With It?
Cortisol is a stress hormone. Our body’s adrenal glands produce it. Why would our body be designed to produce something that creates stress? There’s actually a good reason. The little glands located just above your kidneys are an emergency safeguard. Excess cortisol levels kick in in response to stress and low blood sugar levels to suppress inflammation make blood sugar levels rise so your body can prepare for “battle,” our built-in “fight or flight” response. That battle can be about whatever is stressing it.

While an excess of cortisol circulating in your blood is good during an emergency, it’s not so good when it circulates there for a long period. Here’s where belly fat comes in: High blood sugar levels caused by a constant flood of cortisol signal your body to store more fat in your abdomen.

How Does Belly Fat Develop?
Now, you should be aware there are different kinds of fat. There are a couple kinds of visible fat that are stored inside of fat cells. They’re called visceral and subcutaneous fat. These fat cells aren’t like the other fat cells that burn fuel to create energy. They are metabolically inactive. They keep busy secreting hormones and chemicals that have many kinds of effects on your body.

When your body experiences high cortisol levels, it breaks down protein reserves into glucose (sugar) which is then used as fuel or for storage. It also mobilizes the fat it has stored elsewhere in your body and puts it into a fat reserve in your abdomen.

If you’re being constantly bombarded by stress, your body is going to start a nice collection of accumulated fat, right there in your abdomen. Voila, you’ve got belly fat! Having a belly fat roll isn’t very attractive and it’s also not healthy. Weight gain can cause a lot of serious and chronic health issues like heart disease, hypertension, diabetes, gynecological problems, cancer, and other risks. Plus, the extra pounds put more stress on your body, causing further increases in cortisol. So, do you see how your stressful life can negatively affect your health as well as your weight?

A Weight Management Plan
At Total Health and Wellness Center for Personalized Medicine, we can help you control your stress and your weight. First, we’ll introduce you to some stress-reduction techniques you can do yourself, like yoga, meditation, and other low and high-impact exercises such as running, walking, cycling, aerobics, and high-intensity interval training.

We have many other groundbreaking management tools available at our center to jump-start your belly fat reduction program. Read on to learn about some of them.

Peptide Therapy
Cutting-edge Formulations are proteins in your body that control functions like digestion and weight loss on a cellular level. As part of newly emerging anti-aging science, peptide therapy can signals cells to perform in certain ways. This has far-reaching abilities not only to control and lose weight, including improving your mood, focus, sex drive, muscle mass, skin elasticity, and bone density.

When you’re not feeling well, feel drained of energy, when your body isn’t functioning as well as it used to, peptide therapy can help you feel and look younger and more energized. It’s a powerful tool that can help make your weight management plan even more successful.

Fasting Mimicking Diet
This form of dieting tricks your body into thinking it’s fasting when it’s not. You don’t abstain from food completely, like a regular fast so you’re not depriving yourself of food but you are heavily restricting your calories for five days out of the month. You eat small amounts of nutrient-dense food in certain percentages of carbs, protein, and fat.

Briefly, the diet is between 800 to 1100 calories per day, it’s high in fat and fiber, and low in starch sugar and protein … and you can repeat the diet several times a month or every other month.

Fast mimicking helps you lose body fat, increases lean body mass, improves cellular and brain function, rejuvenates the immune system, and has anti-aging benefits.

Lipo-B Injections
Lipotropic are a class of nutrients that affect the body’s use of fat. The injection is composed of three amino acids: choline, methionine, and inositol. These amino acids help your liver process fats at peak efficiency, making weight loss easier. The liver is the key organ that controls body fat. With Lipo-B, your liver and gallbladder have decreasing fat deposits as your increased metabolism speeds up their removal. Lipo-B jump-starts your metabolism, giving you a boost in energy and a reduction in fat reduction and weight.

So now that we have the weight management nailed down, how do we control stress? While there’s a definite connection between stress and weight gain, shedding the weight doesn’t get rid of the stress. Your weight and your health are one less thing in your life to be stressful about. You need to look at other aspects of your lifestyle, your relationships, and behavior patterns for those answers. That’s a subject for another time.
Ready to get started on your customized weight management plan? Make an appointment at Total Health and Wellness Center for Personalized Medicine.

……be ageless