If you haven’t been able to lose weight from your stomach no matter how hard you try, it probably has nothing to do with how many sit ups you’re doing OR what you’re eating. 🤯
Not being able to lose weight from your stomach is actually a sign your body has been producing too much cortisol for a long period of time.
Cortisol is the body’s stress hormone, and gets released by the adrenal glands when your body enters fight or flight mode — which is the nervous system’s response to any sort of physical threat (seeing a choking baby) or psychological threat (dealing with a heavy workload).
Fight or flight mode gets triggered by the sympathetic nervous system, and the sudden and immediate release of cortisol and adrenaline provides your body with a huge boost of energy to quickly and efficiently respond to the perceived threat. This is why you can easily pull an all-nighter if you have extreme amounts of work to get done; or spring into action when faced with a medical emergency.
While adrenaline is responsible for increasing both your heart rate and blood pressure to give you that boost of energy, cortisol is responsible for flooding your body with glucose so it can be used as an immediate energy source throughout your body.
So the stress hormone of cortisol IS a good thing…
Because once the perceived physical or psychological threat is gone, and your body regulates itself out of fight or flight mode and back into homeostasis, the cortisol will stop being released by your adrenal glands, making it ready to be released for the next time your body perceives a threat.
BUT when you’re consistently facing a “threat”, or when you’re constantly stressed, or when you’re dealing with chronic anxiety, or when you’re still healing from a traumatic experience... your body is staying in a constant state of fight or flight mode.
Which is telling your body to continue releasing cortisol, and to continue flooding your body with glucose.
And the body’s response to being flooded with glucose due to eating sugar vs. being stressed over your workload is going to be the exact same.
So if you’ve been doing sit ups or high intensity workouts or going to the gym on a daily basis or counting calories, your difficulty with losing weight might not have anything to do with that.
And it might have everything to do with how stressed you are or how your body is in a constant state of fight or flight.
It’s also important to note some other things you should try avoiding while trying to lose your cortisol belly — because these things are also contributing to the release of cortisol in your body:
- Continuing to do high intensity workouts.
- Not getting a full night of sleep.
- Dieting.
- Dealing with extreme stresses.
- Drinking caffeine.
- Smoking cigarettes.
- Drinking alcohol excessively.
- Doing a cold plunge.
But here’s what you CAN do to lose your cortisol belly — Somatic Exercises.
Somatic exercises are a form of somatic therapy that uses gentle movement to release the trauma, stress, or suppressed emotions that are being stored in your body and keeping your nervous system in fight or flight mode.
These series of movements can be done in the comfort of your own home (and even in your own bed!) and you only need about 10-15 minutes a day to do them.
Start with our signature program 30 Days To Free your Hips and release the cortisol that’s been making weight loss difficult.