CHAPTER THREE
Stress and Your Metabolism
Okay, my dear friends, I’m going to tell you why stress makes you gain weight—regardless of how you eat and exercise. Stress isn’t just a psychological state; it’s a powerful biochemical response. And when you understand how it works, you’ll know why it’s a hugely important factor in your metabolism—and your weight. I can’t change the stress in your life, but I can give you some awesome tools to mitigate its physiological effects on your body. Let’s start by exploring where our stress response came from and why it works the way it does.
Many, many millennia ago, we humans were evolving into the complex biological creatures known as Homo sapiens. Life was rough and dangerous, and we didn’t have much in the way of protection—no strong jaw, fangs, or claws, not even thick hides or super-speed to keep the predators at a distance.
And yet somehow, we managed to survive in some pretty fierce situations. What got us out of many a jam were survival skills—plus a biology that was geared to make the most of our physical, mental, and emotional resources.
So I want you to imagine you are sitting in a field, feeling pretty good, until suddenly you look up and see a tiger! Instantly you jump up and run faster than humanly possible, scrambling up a nearby tree or flinging yourself into a rushing river and swimming as hard as you can. And what enables you to perform these superhuman feats—this extra strength, this lightning-fast plan for escape? Stress hormones. Your trusty adrenal glands are participating in an elaborate biochemical cascade that begins in our brain and travels throughout our entire biology, commonly known as the “fight-or-flight” response, which enables you to outrun the tiger and live to see another day. And that’s how the human race survived.
That superhuman effort takes a lot of energy. So when the stress reaction is working properly, you tap into fat as an energy source. Then, when the stressful event is over, you relax, the stress hormones leave your body, and your whole biochemistry shifts, replacing the stress response with the relaxation response, a.k.a. “rest and digest.” You relax, digest your food, and eventually enjoy a deep, restful sleep that restores your exhausted body.
We’re used to thinking of stress as bad—and it can be. But I would never wish for you a life without stress, because that would be the dullest life imaginable! Without the stress response, you’d never know that extra revving up when you rise to an occasion, prepare for an exciting challenge, or try to woo your one true love on the most important romantic date of your life. As you can see in the lists that follow, some types of stress are what give life its kick and its savor. Other types of stress are not so pleasant. Compare the two types:
Fun Stress
Learning something new
Falling in love
Riding a roller coaster
Working hard to achieve a cherished goal
Not-So-Fun Stress
Worries about money
Family problems—sickness, aging, arguments, etc. Conflicts at work
Too much to do and not enough time to do it
Some types of stress start with your emotions or life situation. Others are physical:
Physical Stressors
Reactive foods
Too much exercise or the wrong type of exercise
Skimping on sleep
Missing meals
So here’s your takeaway: As long as stress is replaced by relaxation, it won’t affect your weight. But what if the stress never really goes away? What if you undergo too many stressful events too close together, or if the stress seems constant? That’s the type of stress that causes you to gain weight. Even if you’re eating and exercising in ways that are perfect for your body, stress that gathers and builds and doesn’t go away can create a huge weight problem that is all the more painful because it seems so mysterious.
When the Stress Doesn’t End…
For most of you reading this book, stress is primarily mental and emotional. Too many deadlines. A kid with learning disabilities, plus an aging parent, plus the threat of layoffs. Worries, demands, and challenges that never seem to let up, so that even during dinner, you’re responding to work emails, and even after dinner, you’re having an anxious phone call with tomorrow’s babysitter, and even on the weekends, there’s nothing but chores.
For most of us, that’s twenty-first-century chronic stress. But back when our bodies were evolving, chronic stress meant something quite different: imminent danger, fire, floods, starvation. In such situations, your body has one job and one job only: to keep you alive. And body fat—both to keep you warm and to keep you from starving to death—is literally lifesaving. So when there’s too much chronic stress, your body does something very special: It slows down your metabolism as far as it can. Your thyroid function drops as low as it can go. Your body stubbornly clings to every extra ounce of fat. And this state will continue just as long as the stress continues and maybe—just to be on the safe side—for some time after that.
If your primary concern today was to prevent starvation, you’d give thanks every night for this miraculous biological arrangement. But if your goal is to lose weight, you’re fighting a tough battle, because as long as your body is struggling with chronic stress, it will strive to keep the fat on.
So what do you do? Probably what so many clients have told me they do: “cut calories” and skip meals to lose weight. I mean, that’s what we were taught, right? If you want to lose weight, you need to cut calories. Maybe it’s intermittent fasting or juicing. Maybe it’s coffee drinks to curb hunger or maybe you just tough it out. However you cut calories, you have lost the belief that you can lose weight eating normally every day.
Well, that ends today! Weight loss does not mean punishment, and I want you to drop this punitive mind-set right now. Sure, starving yourself might give you temporary weight loss, but over the long term, skipping meals will actually cause you to gain weight because you’re slowing the rate at which you burn the fuel that is your food.
By now you can probably guess why. When you miss a meal, your body thinks, “Starving! Starving!” and your entire metabolism grinds to the slowest possible pace, clinging to every extra ounce and lowering your metabolism. The body fat stays on, and you’re feeling desperate. And that increased emotional stress just makes everything worse!
I know it seems counterintuitive, but it’s absolutely true: Eating more will actually improve your ability to lose weight. So let’s banish the 1,200-calorie mind-set. Start eating decent-sized regular meals right now and reassure your body that starvation is not a possibility.
Your Amazing Adrenals
Key to the whole stress experience is your adrenal glands, so let’s take a look at them. In response to signals from your hypothalamus and pituitary—yes, the very same glands that direct your thyroid—your adrenal glands produce stress hormones.
If your adrenals keep working overtime, cranking out too many stress hormones, you could end up with a condition known as adrenal burnout, in which your adrenals are producing the wrong levels of stress hormone at the wrong times of day. You might feel wired when it’s time to sleep, exhausted when it’s time to get up, or burned out all through the day. Excess stress creates other problems, also—for your metabolism, your weight, and your overall health.
The Cortisol Connection
Cortisol can be your best friend or your worst enemy. In the right amounts, at the right times of day, cortisol is your fuel. Your cortisol levels should be highest in the morning; in fact, they are literally what give you the drive to get out of bed and start your day. This is known as your cortisol wakening response. All throughout the day, cortisol drops gradually until, by evening, it should be low enough for you to fall asleep. Then, in the morning, cortisol spikes upward to awaken you again, and the whole cycle starts over.
Now, we evolved to be flexible, and cortisol levels are part of that flexibility. So whenever you meet a challenge during the day, your cortisol levels spike to give you some extra energy. In a healthy body, a small challenge triggers a small cortisol spike; a big challenge triggers a big one. And with every challenge, you get that whole fight-or-flight stress-hormone cascade, because as far as your body is concerned, you just saw a scary tiger and you’ve got to be ready to move.
In a healthy body, each stress response is followed by a relaxation response, which allows your cortisol to fall back to wherever it was supposed to be (higher in the morning… lower in the afternoon… lowest at night). Your cortisol level spikes… and falls. You stress… and then relax. You keep rising to challenges… and then you stop feeling stressed and feel calm again. If that’s the way your day goes, stress is not going to create weight gain.
But for all too many of us, that’s not how the day goes. Instead, each new stressor stays with us and never really goes away. Stress accumulates, mounting every hour, until by the end of the day our cortisol levels are through the roof. In that state, even little things cause cortisol to spike much higher than it otherwise would, and to take much longer to fall back to normal.
To make matters worse, that high-stress moment at the end of the workday is when many of us choose to exercise. And since exercise is a stressor—you’re challenging your body—that means your cortisol is spiking once again, just when it should be falling. Even worse, when your cortisol levels are chronically high—when the stress never really goes away—that, my friends, is when you gain weight and when your weight becomes nearly impossible to lose.
It makes sense, right? Your body doesn’t know that you’re stressing over deadlines and paying bills. It thinks you’re being put through the incredible physical demands of famines and migrations through the desert. And so now your chronically heightened levels of cortisol lead to long-term fat storage, especially abdominal fat, which in the old days would have been used to fuel you in outrunning that tiger. To make matters worse, that abdominal fat contains higher levels of an enzyme that prods inactive cortisol to life. The more stress you have, the more cortisol you make—you’ve basically become a cortisol-producing machine! And through it all, your body is trying to do the right thing for a time of danger: slowing down your metabolism, conserving energy, and clinging to every ounce of body fat.
Cortisol and Your Thyroid
One of the ways your cortisol takes control of your metabolism is via your thyroid. Excess cortisol affects your thyroid in a number of ways:
• It decreases your production of TSH. As a result, your thyroid may not get the stimulation it needs.
• It prevents T4 (the storage hormone) from being converted to T3 (the active hormone).
• It promotes the conversion of T4 to reverse T3—the hormone that slows down T3 activity.
To make matters worse, when your cortisol is either too high or too low (which can happen after long periods of stress), it throws your blood sugar balance off. Your body reads that, too, as possible starvation—and once again, your thyroid slows down.
Cortisol, Thyroid, and Sex Hormones
Excess cortisol also disrupts your sex hormones: estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone. For both men and women, too much cortisol lowers your sex drive and your fertility. This makes sense if you picture, once again, humans in the wild, worrying about surviving extreme conditions and possible famine. Those are not the conditions under which a woman can easily support a pregnancy or breastfeed a newborn. And a physically threatened community can’t easily take care of little children, either. When you’re stressed, your body thinks it is in literal, immediate danger, and its top priority is staying alive, not creating new life.
Excess cortisol is one reason why young female athletes—whose bodies are stressed to the max—often don’t get their periods on schedule, or why they sometimes stop menstruating. It’s why adult women under stress might miss a period or struggle with irregular cycles and other hormonal difficulties. And it’s why both men and women under stress might find themselves a lot less interested in sex. It’s like your body is saying, “Whoa! Let’s wait for a little more security before we make a baby!”
Here’s something else that happens when cortisol stays too high for too long: Your liver starts to struggle. And since one of its jobs is to remove excess estrogen from your system, a poorly functioning liver means excess estrogen. Excess estrogen in turn leads to excess thyroid-binding globulin, a protein that binds to the thyroid hormone in your bloodstream and makes it inactive. So cortisol’s effects on your estrogen levels also disrupt your thyroid. Once again, your metabolism slows down while your weight creeps up.
And guess what? Your body fat itself produces estrogen! So excess body fat gets you into a vicious cycle:
Excess body fat 
excess estrogen lowered thyroid function more extra body fat
At this point, you might feel like your whole body is set up to make you fat. Well, it sort of is—because we evolved in times where starvation was always a risk, so our bodies protect us by fighting starvation every way they can. The good news is that once you understand how your body works, you can reverse this cycle and give your body what it needs to be at a healthy weight.
So how do you keep excess cortisol from wreaking havoc on your metabolism? The solution is simple:
Make sure that any stress in your life is balanced by relaxation.
Believe me, I know that for many of us, that sounds about as easy as if I told you that the solution was to fly to Unicorn Mountain and bring home a rainbow. But don’t worry—I’ve got some great and easy stress-relief suggestions that even the busiest, most stressed-out person can do. First, though, let’s take a closer look at your body’s age-old answer to the stress response: the relaxation response.
The Relaxation Response
Let’s go back to seeing that tiger in the field. When your whole body mobilizes to fight or flee, it’s governed by your autonomic nervous system. This is the system that supports all the responses you don’t choose consciously: breathing, blood pressure, muscle tension, heart rate, and many others.
The autonomic nervous system has two halves: the sympathetic nervous system, which creates the stress response, and the parasympathetic nervous system, which creates the relaxation response. The key to a healthy metabolism is keeping those two halves in balance: every period of stress balanced by some relaxation.
Stress itself is not the problem. As we’ve seen, stress can be exciting and fun, and even when it’s not, so what? You’re tough—your body is built to handle challenges. The problem comes when stress isn’t followed by relaxation—when the stress response occurs, over and over again, but the relaxation response does not kick in.
You’ve been there. You rush in the morning to get the kids out the door and pound the steering wheel in frustration as you navigate through a parking lot disguised as a freeway. You’ve got impossible deadlines before lunch and then you have to fight that same rush-hour traffic on the way home. You’ve got to get through dinner, help the kids with homework, and take care of a million other chores. By the time you go to bed, you’re exhausted—but you’re also wired, because the stress hormones have never really stopped coursing through your body. Then you wake up early to work off that muffin top. It’s all stress and no relief… and that, my good friend, is not just bad for your spirits—it’s absolutely terrible for your weight.
Now, for many of us, balancing stress with relaxation sounds like the most stressful challenge of all! Never fear—I’ve got lots of helpful suggestions, so read on.
Stress Relief: Your Key to Weight Loss
Here’s the deal: You may not be able to make your worries and challenges magically disappear, but you can help your body recover from them. The key is awareness. If you know you’ve had a stressful day, figure out how to relieve that stress every single day. It doesn’t have to take a lot of time—and it can make a world of difference. Here are some tools that will help you with stress relief.
SAM-e: Your Stress-Relief Supplement
SAM-e (s-adenosylmethionine) is an amazing supplement that has changed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people suffering from depression, stress, and stress-related weight gain. Although I’m not a big fan of using any supplement every single day on a regular basis, I do like supplements for helping your body short term or to support your transition out of depletion. And that’s where SAM-e comes in—to help you shift out of stress.
In our office, Mondays are the most intense days, so everybody takes SAM-e. Tuesdays tend to be quieter, so we put the SAM-e back in the fridge. For my accountant clients, tax time is their stress-bomb season, so I tell them to start taking SAM-e on January 1st and not to stop until April 15th. You get the idea: Use SAM-e whenever you need to bring your stress down to manageable levels.
What if stress hits you out of the blue? Take SAM-e right away: You’ll feel calm almost immediately. Now little things won’t drive you crazy, and your stress will stay manageable. Better yet, SAM-e will keep your body from clinging to belly fat because it keeps you out of the “danger zone,” in which everything that happens just makes you feel more and more and more stressed.
Meditation
Did you know that meditating for even a few minutes a day can decrease the size of your amygdala, the part of your brain that is responsible for autonomic responses associated with fear and anxiety? Meditation can also increase the size of your prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain associated with reasoning and logic. Look, I’m like you, and my day is packed to the gills, but even I can find five minutes to meditate. Some of my favorite quick, guided meditations are listed in the Resources.
You can also incorporate “mindfulness meditation” into your normal day. Simply step away from your desk for five minutes, breathe deeply, find something to focus on—a tree, the sky, a photograph or painting—and let yourself be in the moment. I like to set the timer on my phone to a peaceful song, so I can give myself over to relaxation until it goes off.
I am going to say this loud and clear: One of the most effective ways to decrease stress and enhance weight loss is meditation. I promise you, it’s easier than you think!
Inspirational Books or Sayings
Finding words that inspire you can shift your body from stress mode into the relaxation response, so start collecting awesome quotes and books to use whenever you need a stress-relief break. Here is one of my favorite quotes ever, from my friend Ingrid Marcroft, a wonderful yogini and the owner of Upper West Side Yoga and Wellness in New York City:
Befriend your body. Your body is unique and has stories like none other in the world. It is always changing. While walking down the street, while sitting or lying down, be amazed by what your body can do instead of what it can’t do. Fall in love with your body.
Cranking Up the Tunes
Remember your favorite songs from when you were young? Break them out and have an all-out jam. Move your body and revel in memories. Remember, music can evoke joy like few other things, so use singing, dancing, and listening to lower your cortisol.
Caring for Others
Whether it’s adopting a pet, volunteering at a soup kitchen, or spending an hour a week to help a child learn how to read, helping others makes us feel good. Time crunched? Just look through your closet and realize that all those clothes you saved for your heavy days will be gone soon. You can donate those and help others in need.
Sleep: When Your Body Restores
Sleep is literally your shift out of the stress response to the relaxation response—from high alert to letting down your guard. That’s why sleep is the ultimate way to balance your sympathetic and your parasympathetic nervous systems, and why you need deep, restful, and sufficient sleep every night.
Sleep is also essential for optimal thyroid function and increasing human growth hormone (HGH) levels. Both HGH and your thyroid will help reverse the aging process and get you your dream body. Sleep also helps to regulate two hormones that are essential for weight loss: leptin and ghrelin. Leptin is the hormone that says, “You’re full, put down the fork.” Ghrelin is the hormone that says, “You’re starving, let’s go back for a third helping.” Lack of sleep causes leptin to fall and ghrelin to rise, so you feel like you’re starving all day. Over-exercise pushes leptin levels down even further, so if your workout is too intense, you will also have a harder time feeling full. There should be some major light bulbs going off right now!
Need some help getting good sleep? Here are my favorite natural sleep aids.
Lemon Balm: Terrific for Both Stress and Sleep!
One of my favorite herbs is lemon balm, a.k.a. Melissa officinalis. This soothing, de-stressing herb is a member of the mint family and has been cultivated in Europe for thousands of years.
Like all members of the mint family, lemon balm supports digestion. Most of your serotonin—a feel-good hormone that fights depression and supports sleep—is produced in your gut. So it make sense that when you support digestion, you also support better mood and calm a frazzled nervous system. Over the past 20 years, research confirms what we have seen with our own Metabolism Planners: Lemon balm is incredibly effective at establishing a sense of peace in situations of high anxiety and stress. Lemon balm also improves quality of sleep, reducing restlessness and insomnia.
I usually have my clients take 500 mg of the standardized extract. Most of our clients who take lemon balm don’t notice excess drowsiness but only a lovely sense of calm. If you do feel sleepy, try taking it only at night.
Please use lemon balm only on an as-needed basis. If you are experiencing a long period of high anxiety, you might want to alternate: one month of lemon balm and one month of hops (read on!).
Hops
Most of us know hops as the ingredient in beer that gives it its bitter, malty flavor. But the benefits of hops aren’t limited to breweries: They’ve been used by herbalists for thousands of years, and now many of my clients are seeing benefits as well.
Hops have long been studied for use in anxiety, sleep disorders, and hormonal issues. They are an amazing sleep aid with a very potent calming effect. Unlike lemon balm, which tends not to have a sedative effect (just a calming one), hops is more of a sedative, so please save it for nighttime only.