Adrenal health

Is stress making you fat? Adrenal balance and weight loss

by Marcelle Pick, OB/GYN NP

• How stress can make us gain weight
• Best place to store fat? The belly
• Number-one for your adrenal health: Eat!
• Pacing yourself to promote healing

Too often, women and their healthcare practitioners think weight loss is all about cutting calories and exercising more. But I have plenty of patients who’ve tried these avenues with no success. These women are genuinely trying to do everything “right” for their health. They exercise regularly, eat well, take their supplements, and so on. But they haven’t lost a pound, and they’re frustrated — and trust me, I know how they feel, because I’ve been there!

These patients are always surprised when I ask them about the stress in their lives, and they want to know, What does stress have to do with weight gain?

After years of chronic stress, our adrenal glands — which govern our stress response, help balance a woman’s blood sugar, and regulate many other of our body’s processes — can become imbalanced. Our adrenal glands are fundamental to our health, and when they are out of balance, the body prepares for disaster the best way it knows how — by storing calories. Genetically, some of us are more predisposed to this than others. But the good news is that if we restore the adrenals to their normal, healthy function, stubborn pounds often fall away without too much effort, and our energy returns.

Let’s take a closer look at the adrenal glands, then talk about solutions for healing your stress response — and finally getting rid of that stubborn weight.

How stress can make us gain weight

I’ve seen stress lead to weight gain over and over — especially as women’s lives become increasingly demanding. We usually think “being stressed-out” is an emotional state, but the body understands stress quite physically. And one of the ways it physically handles stress is by being stingy about how it uses calories, storing them primarily in the form of fat around the abdomen.

Why we’ve evolved this way has much to do with living in the wild. If we were being chased by a bear, our adrenals shifted instantly into fight-or-flight mode, releasing adrenaline and cortisol into the blood. The adrenaline and cortisol helped to give us that superhuman strength and to quickly mobilize energy production from carbohydrates and fats. And once the threat was gone, our instincts led us to refuel with calorie-dense foods that are most readily stored as fat. With cortisol’s influence, we are less sensitive to leptin, the hormone that makes us feel full, and eat more than we normally might.

The problem is that this sequence of events takes place whether the threat is real or perceived. Since most of our modern-day stressors don’t require fleeing or fighting, we generally don’t need all the extra calories our bodies ask for. What has also changed is that in the past, stress came and went. Many of us exist now in a state of constant stress, operating at elevated cortisol levels over long periods of time.

Best place to store fat? The belly

Women with adrenal imbalance often have a “spare tire,” or what we call visceral fat deposits. This happens for several reasons. Under normal circumstances, when we haven’t eaten for a while, our blood sugar (glucose) drops and the brain sends a message to the adrenals to release cortisol. This cortisol mobilizes glucose (via glycogen in the liver), amino acids (primarily from muscles), and fat (from fat cells). This prevents hypoglycemia (low blood sugar), keeping your brain and body fueled with energy in the absence of food. So cortisol maintains glucose levels in the blood, while insulin helps usher glucose into the cells.

When we have long-term stress, cortisol and insulin remain high in the blood, and the extra glucose that isn’t needed for energy gets stored in the form of fat — primarily abdominal fat cells, or “visceral fat.” Scientists have discovered that fat cells have special stress-hormone receptors for cortisol, but that there also seem to be more of these cortisol receptors on the fat cells in the abdomen than anywhere else in the body! And sadly, visceral fat doesn’t just “sit there” doing nothing; it’s almost as if this fat is, itself, an endocrine organ that reacts to the stress response, spurring still more abdominal fat deposition. So the cycle continues unless we take steps to heal the metabolic imbalance. A good place to start is with the adrenal glands.

Number one for your adrenal health: Eat!

Some of you may have read my article on how to eat for adrenal health; everything I discuss there applies here as well. Here are a few key points.

Eat well, and regularly. Sounds funny, I know — telling women to eat more instead of less! But if you want to convince your body that it’s in no danger of starving to death, that’s exactly what you have to do — only make sure it’s good food that provides nutrients you need.

As I explained above, cortisol is integral to maintaining blood sugar, so it makes sense that keeping your blood sugar as level as possible lightens the load on the adrenal glands. Allowing yourself to get too hungry sends the “oh, no! famine is here!” message and puts added stress on your adrenals, forcing them to pump out excess cortisol. To prevent this, I recommend you eat well and regularly — three balanced meals and two balanced snacks per day, spread out across the day to work with your natural circadian rhythm.

When you eat matters too. Cortisol has a natural cycle that works with your circadian rhythm. Normally, cortisol is highest in the early morning and declines gradually throughout the day to help you get ready for sleep. Because eating always bumps up cortisol, it’s ideal to eat your largest meal in the morning. Eating within one to two hours of waking helps cortisol reach its optimal morning peak, replenishes your body, and relieves your adrenals from maintaining fasting blood sugar levels. Healthy snacks between meals help moderate the natural downward slope of cortisol levels as the day wears on. If you experience a slump in the late afternoon, a balanced, low-carb snack around 3:00 PM will help avert this. I also advise eating dinner early, around 5:00–6:00 PM if you can, and making this your lightest meal of the day. (For a picture of how this works, see our diagram of the cortisol cycle, showing the effects of meals and snacks.)

Keep healthy foods close at hand. What you eat is equally important. And if they don’t have access to healthy food when they need to raise energy levels, many women load up on sweets and caffeine, because they’re so easy to get! But this often leads to an even greater drop in energy. When you need a boost, make sure you have micronutrient-rich foods that support your adrenals, like asparagus, avocado, cabbage, garlic, ginger, and lean protein. Limit or avoid refined and processed sugars, other processed foods, damaged fats, alcohol, caffeine, and possibly gluten. I’ve found that many of my patients with adrenal imbalance are sensitive to gluten, and do much better when they take it out of their diets.

Pacing yourself to promote healing

We live in a multitasking world where we’re expected to be on-line 24/7. From cell phones and e-mail to TiVo and Facebook, we rarely take a break. Restoring adrenal balance means taking time for yourself, and for many of us, that means slowing down. I know it seems counterintuitive: we think being “on the go” all the time would help us to lose more weight. But if you’re tired, wired, and overweight, it’s likely you will need to lower your stress and heal your adrenals to stop the vicious weight-gain cycle.

What do I mean by pacing yourself?

• Sleep. Many patients tell me they get a second wind after dinner, or that they’re “born night owls.” But when you turn your circadian rhythm upside down, your cortisol cycle can follow, leaving you tired all day and wide awake all night. You can avoid this pattern by eating less late in the day, ending all screen time (TV, computer, cell phone) by 8 PM, and making a point of being in bed, asleep, sufficiently early that you get no fewer than 8 hours of sleep each night (and more, if you can manage it). Quality sleep is essential for your adrenals to heal so you can shed those pounds!
• Exercise wisely. If you already exercise regularly, try easing up for a few months while your adrenals are healing. And try to keep your heart rate under 90 beats per minute. If you don’t exercise, try walking 15 minutes once or twice a day, especially after meals, outdoors if you can. Exercise helps to reduce stress, as long as you are enjoying it, but this is not a time to push yourself hard.
• Play. For once in your adult life, make having fun a priority! Many of us forget just how relaxing a few hours of fun or a good laugh can be. So today I am writing out a virtual prescription for you: “Play!”
• Breathe. Three to four deep breaths through your nose can slow your heart rate and calm the whole body down. Find time throughout your day to just breathe, especially when you feel stressed. Learn to recognize the signals that you need to take a break, and get some fresh air, have a cup of herbal tea, or simply put your feet up.

Let your body relax and release

In talking with women every day, I know how much we have on our plates. It can seem next to impossible to take a minute for ourselves! But I also know that weight gain and lack of energy are serious concerns for women, and that it’s frustrating to try everything to shed extra pounds without success. For many of us, the stress in our lives is intimately connected to our weight. Our bodies are wise — when stress is the predominant state, your body will protect you by holding on to extra pounds.

You can coax your body away from “crisis mode” by healing your adrenals. Doing this often means taking more time for you — including taking more time with what you eat, how you sleep, and how you live each day. You deserve every bit of it! And once you replenish your energy and calm your stress response, you will be amazed and delighted by how the weight will come off!

Comment on this article:

Related to this article:

References & further reading on stress, adrenal imbalance, and weight gain

 

Last Modified Date: 04/15/2011
Principal Author: Marcelle Pick, OB/GYN NP