58. How Stress Is Making Us Fat

My name is Patrick McGilvray. And I’m an experienced marathoner, ultra runner, Master Life Coach, and weight loss coach for runners. I’ve learned that running more and eating less does not work for weight loss, and that there’s a better way. Now I help runners like you to get leaner and get stronger, so you can run faster and run longer than you ever thought possible. This is Running Lean.

Well, hey there, and welcome to episode 58 of Running Lean. My name is Patrick McGilvray, the weight loss coach for runners. And today I’m going to be talking about how stress is making us fat. That’s right, stress is making us fat.

Now, stress is not really something that can be avoided. You know, it’s just a fact of modern life, that we all need a certain amount of stress to function. Normally, a little bit of stress is okay, it’s normal, it’s healthy. We’ve evolved as humans to handle stress pretty well. We have these built-in mechanisms that kick into gear to help us deal with stressful situations very effectively, this works great, but too much stress or the wrong kind of stress can have some pretty serious health consequences.

Stress can make us sick, stress can lead to a host of other chronic diseases. And stress can make us fat. So in this episode, I’ll be taking a look at stress from several different angles. I’ll explain how stress is making us fat. And I’ll provide some options for how you can reduce stress in your life.

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Okay, so let’s talk about this how stress is making us fat. So first of all, let’s define stress. What is stress? What do we mean when we talk about stress? Stress is the mental, emotional, and physiological response of the body to any situation that is new, threatening, frightening, or even exciting. Okay.

So it’s like a mental, emotional, and physical, physiological response to situations that are new or different, that seem threatening, frightening, or exciting. It’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s normal, you know, we all need a certain amount of stress in our lives, you know, there’s a certain amount of optimal stress that happens in our lives that helps us to you know, maintain our homeostasis and maintain adequate health and our athletic performance okay.

But when stress levels reach mental, emotional, and physiological limits, stress becomes a problem. We no longer function optimally, right we become sick we become diseased, we gain weight or it becomes very hard to lose weight or we get injured. You know this is when stress becomes a problem, okay.

So stress is one of the most common problems people face today. And chronic stress really undermines your ability to just stay healthy. An August 2020 Gallup Poll reported that 60% of Americans say they experience daily stress and worry. 60% of Americans say they experience daily stress and worry. And this is up 14% from the previous year.

So in 2019, only 46% of Americans said they felt daily stress and worry, by the way, that 46% is pretty much what it’s been for a long time, many, many years, it doesn’t really change much. 46% is about what it normally is. But because of this global pandemic, you know, 2020 is like the most stressful year we’ve had, in a long, long time, we’re more stressed out than ever right now.

And current estimates indicate that the annual cost of stress and stress-related diseases in the United States exceeds a $300 billion 300 billion with a B dollars annually. And this is mostly due to health care costs. It also is due to lost productivity, and absenteeism as well. So stress is a big, big problem. It’s very common.

It’s a chronic issue here in the United States and other parts of the world, but especially here, we do everything being here, tell me. So we just have to understand that stress can be problematic. Okay.

Let’s talk a little bit about the different types of stress. So how do we react to stress? What is stress? What are the two main types of stress we want to talk about here? So you know, there’s two types of stress, I’ll talk about those in a minute.

But it’s really how we respond to these that makes all the difference, okay, because we’re all going to experience stress, it’s not like you can, you know, wave your magic wand and you’re going to have a stress free life, that’s just doesn’t work. That way, there’s always going to be something that happens to create that mental emotional, and physiological response in your, in your body in your mind.

So you have to just be able to learn how to handle what comes your way. Okay, so it’s how you respond to stressful situations, that makes all the difference, all right. So, the main two types of stress first of all, we have eustress and that is spelled eustress, eustress. This is the beneficial kind of stress.

This is the kind of stress where health and performance continue to improve even though the stressor is there. Okay, so here’s a good example of a type of use stress, lifting weights, this produces a good type of stress. This is the principle behind lifting weights, one of the principles is the principle called overload.

And if you want to develop muscles, you need to apply the principle of overload so when weight training, the muscle must be forced to work harder than normal, and the muscle must be overloaded, in order to stimulate improvement. So you overload the muscle by lifting a weight that’s heavier than you would normally lift, your muscle adapts, by getting stronger.

And then you continue this process. And that’s how you build muscle. You build muscle during the rest phase, actually, right? So you stress your muscle for a short period of time at the gym. And then the next day you rest. And that’s how you build muscle. So that’s an example of a beneficial type of stress, you stress.

Another example of a type of use stress would be doing interval training or speed work as a runner, right? So you would run very hard and very fast for a short period of time. So maybe you do a sprint workout. You do hard, you know all-out sprinting for 30 seconds at a time. Rest for a couple of minutes and repeat that maybe four or five times that’d be a good stressful workout.

But it’s very short. It’s very intense. You’re stressing your body, but then you back off When your body responds by adapting the same principle as the weightlifting here, you’re overloading your muscles by sprinting, you’re overloading your cardiovascular system by sprinting. But your body responds by adapting and getting stronger, getting more efficient and delivering oxygen to your muscles, and building muscle.

So this is the beneficial kind of stress, you become a faster, stronger runner. So this is like the good kind of stress. And this is fine, we want this, we need this in our life in order to grow in order to continue to be a healthy human being, you want some of this good kind of stress in your life. Okay.

Now let’s talk about the other kind of stress. This is the kind most people think of this is, it’s not us stress, this is distress. And this is the negative kind of stress this is the unpleasant or harmful response to stress. When your body has a distress response to stress, this is where your health and your performance deteriorate.

So it would be like, if you lifted heavy weights every single day, without ever giving yourself a rest day, you totally like tax your muscles, they wouldn’t be able to grow because you’d never give them a chance to rest and go through that repair phase. And you’d probably cause injury. And running is the same. Running is the same thing.

Like if you just ran the same like super-fast tempo, every time you go out and run and you ran every single day, you never gave yourself a rest day you never let off the gas. You’re not slow enough to be in the aerobic zone. You’re not fast enough to be creating adaptive responses like doing speed work, you’re in that chronic cardio stressful running mode.

And by the way, a lot of new runners do this. And this causes a lot of injuries in new runners or burnout. You know, it’s really hard to keep your body under that chronic distress for long periods of time. Okay, so those are some examples of distress, okay? Chronic distress can be very problematic, okay, when your body is chronically distressed.

You can increase your risk of all kinds of health disorders. Chronic distress has been related to coronary heart disease, which is the number one cause of death in the United States. Chronic distress has been linked to hypertension, high blood pressure. It’s been linked to eating disorders, ulcers, diabetes, asthma, depression, migraines, sleep disorders, chronic fatigue.

Chronic stress has also been linked to the development of certain types of cancer. Chronic stress is not good. It is not good for us, it causes all kinds of problems, okay. So there are basically two types of stress. Eustress this is the short term beneficial, good kind of stress, our body responds positively by adapting and improving.

And then we have distress. This is long term chronic, harmful type of stress, our body responds in a negative way, our health and our performance decline, and it could kill us. It has a lot of very bad effects on our body and on our health.

So let’s talk a little bit about what happens when we experience stress in the world. Okay. So again, stress is stress in itself is not inherently bad. You know, we’ve evolved as humans to have an amazing response to stress, you know, something in our environment, you know, would stress us out?

We would hear a rustling in the bushes that we’re not familiar with, well, what’s that that’s something new. So we would, you know, our senses would get heightened, you know, and then out pops a saber toothed Tiger. And when that happens, all these things like kick into gear, our brain sends messages to our hypothalamus, you know, into our adrenal glands. We activate the sympathetic nervous system.

This is the fight or flight nervous system, right? The adrenal glands produce adrenaline and cortisol, the stress hormone, you know in our body responds by increasing blood pressure, increasing our heart rate, increasing blood glucose, our liver will actually create more glucose and send it out into our bloodstream because we need that energy to be able to fight or flight right. In turn, our insulin levels go up.

We do some more blood flow to the brain, more oxygen uptake we are breathing increases, our muscles tense up, our muscles strengthen. And we have this sense of heightened awareness. These are all the things that happened in our body in response to stress, okay, so this is all good. This is normal, if there’s a saber toothed Tiger there, okay? This is all good if the stress can be released in some way.

So when you set your body up into this fight or flight mode, you’re getting ready to like do some battle or run away very, very fast. Okay. So in my case, if I see that saber toothed Tiger, I am running away as fast as I can, I am not going to take my chances with saber toothed Tiger, right. So, you know, if the stress can be released in some way, you know if we can run away, or if you want to stand and fight the tiger, awesome. And if you win, then good for you even better.

But you know that stress will be released by either one – we fight the tiger or we run away, something has to happen to get our body back to homeostasis, we got to get back to normal. So we are we need our heart rate to drop our blood pressure to normalize, we need to burn off that excess glucose we would do that by running or fighting or whatever, our insulin levels will get back to normal or muscle tensions would release our muscles would relax, our bodies would relax.

So this is all good. This is the way the stress response system is all set up. This is all good, right? But what happens if there’s no release of the stress? Your heart rate is gonna stay high, your blood pressure is going to remain elevated glucose and insulin levels are going to remain high, your body is going to remain tense, and your muscles are going to be all tensed up.

And this condition I’m describing right here, this chronic stress is how 60% of Americans live their entire lives. Right, there’s no saber toothed Tiger today. There’s other things that stress us out instead, but our bodies have this exact same response to whatever we determine is stress in our lives. Okay.

So that stress could be, oh, my boss is a jerk. You know, I got these three projects, he wants me to get them done by the end of the week, or, you know, I gotta homeschool my kids, or you know, just driving to and from work in rush hour traffic. That can be very stressful, right? Or feeling like there’s never enough time to do everything that has to get done. Maybe you’re not sleeping well.

This can keep your body in a state of chronic stress. Feeling overwhelmed by you know, emails and text messages and social media, being distracted by social media. So we never get anything worthwhile done, right? Information overload. constantly comparing ourselves to others worrying about money and finances. Worrying about COVID.

All these things are what stress us out on a daily basis. All of these things create that same mental, emotional and physiological response in our bodies. They all produce that same stressful response as though there were danger in front of us something frightening, right?

And so it’s very easy for us as, as humans today, in the modern world, especially in the United States, to get stuck in this state of chronic stress is not good. It’s not good for us at all. It’s creating a very healthy, very unhealthy environment and our bodies and our minds. And it’s leading to all sorts of, of illness, disease, ill health, and it’s making us fat. So how does stress make us fat?

Well, your body’s response to stress. One of the things that happens is that your body produces cortisol, that is the stress hormone. Your body produces cortisol, adrenaline, blood glucose, so glucose levels go up; adrenaline, cortisol, and insulin.

And again, this is all great if you’re going to fight off the saber toothed tiger or runaway, you’re going to burn that glucose off the cortisol will lower the adrenaline will lower insulin lower and everything will get back to normal. You would use the glucose for energy right and insulin would kind of level out but that just doesn’t happen today, right, because you’re like stuck in traffic or you never get a good night’s sleep or whatever it is.

So your blood glucose your cortisol levels remain high, your blood glucose levels remain high, your insulin levels remain high. And remember, if insulin is high, your body is holding on to fat. If insulin is high, you are in fat storage mode, your body is holding is not releasing fat from your fat cells, it is holding on to it, you’ve got to get the insulin low in order to release the fat in order to become a fat burner to get your body into fat-burning mode, right?

Cortisol increases our blood sugar. And insulin goes up in response to that. And here’s a little side note, cortisol also suppresses your immune system. So it makes you more susceptible to all sorts of illnesses, including some things that you don’t want these days. COVID-19. So cortisol, you know, it’s a stress hormone, it’s fine to have some cortisol in our system, but we, we don’t want an inordinate amount of this.

And we don’t want stress, and cortisol in our bodies all the time. This is how stress is literally making us fat. Cortisol increases our blood sugar increases our insulin. That’s the main reason we hold on to weight when we’re stressed out. And if you want more proof of that, they make a synthetic form of cortisol. It’s called prednisone.

This is a corticosteroid that they use for some people. Some people use this and they get some good results from using it. But the number one side effect of using prednisone is weight gain. People that take it weight gain over 70% report, I’m sorry, people that take prednisone over 70% of them report weight gain, and the higher the dose, and the longer the duration of, of use of prednisone, the more weight they gain.

So if they keep taking this steroid, they keep gaining weight. And as soon as they stop taking it, they stop gaining weight. And sometimes it takes a while to lose that weight. It’s very hard. But that’s just a little sidebar. Like you know, prednisone is the synthetic form of cortisol. So cortisol is not good. No bueno.

We don’t want a lot of cortisol in our system all the time, a little bit every now and then it’s fine. And that’s what the short term, they use stress. That’s why it’s good to go to the gym workout, you know, stress your whole body out, stress all your muscles out quickly, and then let it repair. That’s good. That’s what it’s designed for, right?

But when we’re stressed out all the time, our hormones are just whacked. Hormone regulation, it’s like one of the most important factors in maintaining a healthy body weight, when your hormones are out of whack, your weight is out of whack.

When your hormones are normal, you tend to be at your normal healthy body weight. So just we got to like get this stuff in check, right? Like stress is literally making us fat. If you’re having a hard time losing weight, then you got to check your stress levels. Okay. So how do you know if you’re stressed? I mean, I think most of us know.

But if you’re not sure, I’ve got a list of some symptoms that you can kind of check out. But you have to be aware, the first step is like you just have to be aware that stress is an issue in your life. And I asked my clients this a lot when we hit a weight loss stall, or a plateau and I say, Hey, how’s your stress level? Oh, you know, everything’s great. I’m eating great, you know, blah, blah, blah, but oh, yeah, work is really stressful.

And, you know, gosh, the kids are just driving me crazy. And, oh, yeah. And I find out that their stress levels are super high, and they’re not taking care of themselves. And we dig into it a little bit deeper. And we find that once we start working on the stress, the weight starts to kind of come off again. So we kind of can break through some of these weight loss stalls or plateaus by reducing stress. It’s amazing. Totally cool.

So you may be chronically stressed and not even know it. Here are some common system symptoms of stress. These are this is not a comprehensive list, but these are things that if you experience these things on a regular basis, any of these things on a regular basis, this could just be that you’re overstressed headaches, sore muscles, like neck, shoulder, back muscles, and I’m not talking about from working out.

I’m talking about just like my neck and back and shoulders are always sore. What is that all about? Well, if your shoulders are up in your ears all the time because you’re so stressed out, that’s what we’re talking about. If you grind your teeth all the time, maybe you have a nervous tic like a finger tapping or toe-tapping, a sudden increase or loss of appetite, insomnia, nightmares, could be a cause of stress, fatigue, just chronic fatigue all the time, high blood pressure, impotence, loss of sex drive could be stress related to pry depression, irritation, irritability, anger are all kind of related to stress.

If you’re like hostile, or you experience a lot of fear, panic, or anxiety, this could be stress-related. Stomach pain or nausea. You know, stress can cause ulcers, you know, so if you’re experiencing some stomach pain or nausea that lasts kind of on a regular basis, and you can’t really identify the cause of it could be stress. Lack of concentration, rapid heart rate, low-grade infection, and just a general feeling of restlessness. These are all signs that we’re chronically stressed out, and we need to do something about it.

Okay, if you’re experiencing some of these are a lot of these, you know, kind of symptoms. Definitely work on kind of reducing stress, see a doctor obviously, if some of these things are going on, and see if, you know, make sure there isn’t something else happening. But definitely work on things to reduce stress.

So if you think you might be chronically stressed, don’t, don’t freak out on me here, there’s some things you can do to kind of reduce the stress. And one of the most powerful tools to help reduce stress is exercise. You know, go back to this saber toothed Tiger example, you know, our body is being primed. When we get stressed out, our body’s being primed to take action to fight or flight. So exercise is like kind of mimicking that in our lives. Okay. So this is like one of the best things you can do to help reduce stress.

So let’s say for example, you’re super stressed out at work. You had a tough day at work, your boss was a jerk all day, you spent the last eight hours being chastised. And then to make matters worse, you’re driving home. And the car in front of you is driving like way slower than the speed limit. And you’re just like, freaking out, right?

The fight or flight response has already been activated from your stressful day at work, right. So now driving home, this guy is going super slow and it’s in high gear, your heart rate goes up, your blood pressure shoots up, you’re breathing, quickens your muscles tense up, cortisol and adrenaline are released. And it’s all systems go, right.

But you can’t do anything about it. Because you’re just sitting there in traffic, you can’t dissipate the stress, there’s no fight or flight response that can happen. So you’re just going to sit there and feel terrible, right. And we do this all the time. Like I used to have to commute to work and oh my gosh, I remember just like it was so stressful.

So really just doing some sort of exercise will help to relieve that stress, okay, you got to do something, you got to like dissipate this stuff from your body, you got to give your body your work your muscles so that they can relax. You got to, you know, do something aerobic to or anaerobic, you know, do some moderate or intense, vigorous exercise to get that blood sugar out of your system. So your insulin levels can go down, right.

So even just like you get home after that commute, and you do like some aerobic exercise for 30 minutes, this can start to relieve tension in your muscles, it can use up that extra energy that you’ve got in your body. And even moderate to vigorous-intensity exercise even produces better results.

And it produces things like endorphins, endorphins or morphine-like chemicals that actually act like painkillers in our body. So they kind of help to kill the pain. But they also have this soothing, calming effect. Research has shown that exercise has an immediate effect on your mood, and that that effect lasts up to 12 hours following the activity. So you want to relieve stress. Get some exercise. It’ll put you in a better mood.

You ever hear people say like oh running I love running, running is my therapy. Well, now you know why. Running reduces stress. It improves your mood for up to 12 hours. After running, people who run regularly are just less stressed out. And generally, they’re just happier, they’re in a better mood. And I would totally agree with this right?

I am in a great mood pretty much all the time. And all the people that I know that are runners are so positive, and, and generally happy and in a good mood and fun. And, and I love that about runners. And this is one of the reasons why I love working with runners is because we’re all in a good mood, we all have a lot of fun, and we laugh a lot.

And by the way, if running makes you stressed out, you’re doing it wrong. Okay? If you run and you’re just constantly stressed, every time you run, you’re not doing it right. So two things you can do.

Number one, you can slow down a lot, like do some really slow runs every now and then just stay in that zone one or two, you know, stay in that aerobic zone. And really just work your aerobic engine, just build some aerobic and don’t overly stress your body. And you can do this for long periods of time, you can run like that. And this is really good for you.

The other thing you can do on the other end of the spectrum is to speed up a lot like do some intense speed drills like sprints, like I described earlier. Those will produce high amounts of stress. But the release afterward is what you’re looking for, you’re looking for that adaptation. You know, and you do this for a very short amount of time, like you’re this isn’t a chronic thing you’re going to do, okay?

So the slowing down or the speeding up the slowing down, you can do for longer periods of time to slow, the speeding up, you want to do very short. But these both produce positive adaptations in your body and in your brain. They both make you feel good. Obviously, there’s many other ways to reduce stress. I just love running. I think this is like the best way to reduce stress.

But other things could be walking, journaling, meditation, getting a massage, yoga, stretching, sleeping, well getting a good night’s sleep. All these are amazing. Like there’s so many things you can do to reduce stress, like you can’t do too many of these things, right? Just find a few things that work for you. For me, every day I get outside and I walk or I run no matter the weather. So it could be pouring down rain, snowing, four degrees doesn’t matter. I’m outside, I’m walking, or I’m running.

I do strength training a few days a week, I do some meditation every single day. I do journaling every single day. I connect with friends on a regular basis. This is one of the best stress relief. Things that I do for myself are connecting with friends. You know, sometimes it’s over zoom, sometimes it’s in person, maybe on a phone call, whatever it is, we have fun, we laugh. And that human connection is so important. And it really does help me to reduce stress.

And then I get it, I try to get a good night’s sleep. So that’s the like little combo that works for me walking, running, strength training, meditation, journaling, connecting with friends, and getting a good night’s sleep. Figure out what works for you. Pick a few things and try them, apply them on a regular basis and see if you can help reduce the stress in your life, it cannot hurt, it can only help you.

And if you’re somebody who’s really struggling to lose weight, or maybe you’ve hit some sort of a stall, then this is a great way to kind of breakthrough that. So I want to encourage you to check in with yourself, how are your stress levels? If you might think you’re a little chronically stressed out, you can do something about it, right?

Pick some pick a few things that work for you, but do something. And if it is the weight, that’s a problem and your diet is good, you know, you’re sticking to a low carb type of diet, maybe you’re practicing some intermittent fasting, you’re not overeating, and you just can’t seem to move the needle. It could be stress-related.

Okay, so this is one time where I think I think running really does help with weight loss in this case, you know, it’s not from a burning calories perspective, but more from a stress relief perspective. So just consider that and pick a few of these things and start applying them and start getting rid of the stress in your life. Well, I hope you all have an amazing day. And if you liked this episode and you got something out of it, please share it with a friend. You guys totally got this. Lots of love. As always keep on Running Lean. I’ll talk to you soon.

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