How Chronic Stress Can Affect Your Weight Loss Journey

You may hear about hormones the most when you experience a big stage in life, such as puberty or menopause, but the truth is that hormones affect your life every day. Although most hormones can have an effect on how you feel and even impact your weight, one stands out as particularly important to understand and keep under control: cortisol. In this post, you’ll learn more about this hormone and how you can naturally keep it balanced, increasing your chances of successfully losing and keeping off excess weight.

What Is Cortisol?

Cortisol is the hormone your body produces when it experiences stress. In and of itself, cortisol isn’t a bad thing—it has helped the human species survive and adapt. However, if your body is constantly producing cortisol at a low-grade level, this chronic stress can affect areas of your health and directly contribute to weight gain. This can be particularly true during the stressful holiday season!

How Can You Reduce Chronic Stress?

Although chronic stress is the result of the cortisol hormone, your solution may not necessarily include hormone adjustments. Just as your hormones affect certain parts of your lifestyle, adjusting these lifestyle habits can help your body produce the appropriate amount of hormones. They work together and enable you to lose weight in a sustainable, healthy way. So what are the lifestyle changes you can make to keep stress under control? Here are some of the most important ones:

Get Enough Sleep

Unfortunately, many Americans don’t sleep well consistently, and it can increase stress as well as complicate weight loss. When you don’t get adequate rest, your body can’t recover from the day and be recharged to tackle another one. As a result, your body may crave sugar, caffeine, or other stimulants to provide energy.

You should be getting between seven and nine hours of sleep every night, and try to avoid using your phone an hour before you go to turn in to reduce your exposure to blue light, which can interfere with your ability to fall asleep.

Get Proper Nutrition

Any wellness journey begins and ends with proper nutrition, and it is definitely important when talking about stress relief and weight loss. If your body isn’t getting the nutrients it needs, it has to work harder to function. Plus, stress hormones can cause your body to hold onto fat for self-preservation. On the other hand, when your body can work optimally, it doesn’t have to release stress hormones to operate normally, and your body can burn fat more easily.

Use a Balanced Training Plan

If you aren’t exercising on a regular basis, you need to be. However, it is often the small changes in your lifestyle that can make the most difference. By parking a little farther away, walking more, taking the stairs, and being more active, you can retrain your body to produce the appropriate amount of cortisol and get your weight back under control.

Ultimately, there may be a lot of factors that influence your ability to lose weight, but you will find it difficult if you are under chronic stress. The answer may not be to adjust your hormones, but to implement these lifestyle changes, and an experienced medical team can help you put together a plan that works best for you!

About the Practice

Richardson Pain & Wellness is a clinic that focuses on total wellness. From pain management to medical weight loss and hormone replacement therapy, our team offers various methods to help you feel your best. We don’t utilize one-size-fits-all plans but rather customize our services to each patient’s individual needs. If you would like to learn how Richardson Pain & Wellness can help you, contact us to schedule a consultation online or by calling 972-907-1125.