You might have heard a lot of talk about high cortisol and perimenopause, the link between cortisol and weight loss and how we should all be aiming for lower cortisol and better nervous system regulation.

But the biggie, of course, is the link between cortisol and belly fat.

So in this episode, we’re going a little bit deeper to talk about not just the link between stress and more fat around the tummy, but also the ways in which high cortisol shows up in digestion, bloating, recovery, fatigue, cravings…and even your ability to build muscle.

This isn’t about scaring you into trying to eliminate stress, but about helping you to understand the places where cortisol might be derailing your progress, so you can learn how to work WITH your body instead of against it.

I’m also sharing my own recent cortisol test results - which were genuinely eye opening. Not because I’m burnt out, but because they revealed a pattern I see in so many high functioning women - of high output, low recovery.

If you feel like you’re doing all the “right” things but your body isn’t responding the way it should, this episode will help you spot what’s really going on and give you simple, realistic ways to support your nervous system, digestion, and recovery (without ditching training or living like a monk).

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I know for sure that you'll have heard a lot about cortisol, and particularly about its role in perimenopause and menopause. And maybe you've even come to associate it directly with that belly fat that seems to magically appear in our 40s and 50s.

And for sure, it can have a role in that. But the real impact of cortisol goes way beyond that, into digestion, bloating, recovery, fatigue, and even muscle building as well.

So today we're going to talk about the real impact of cortisol, particularly at a time when we may become more sensitive to it.

Not to scaremonger you or to have you stressing about a perfectly normal and healthy cortisol response, but to show you how it could be quietly derailing some of your progress and how we can work with that knowledge to actually support ourselves more deeply.

I'm also gonna be sharing a little insight into some recent results I got for my very own cortisol test, which has been a bit of an eye opener for me as well. Welcome to the Busy Woman's Guide to Wellbeing. The podcast women who are done with the hustle and are ready to feel at home in their own skin.

I'm your host, Alix, life therap and fitness coach for busy women who want to do less, live more, and feel good from the inside out. Every week I'm going to help you to cut through the noise, challenge the shoulds, and find new ways to live and move that actually feel like you.

Hello there.

Welcome back to the podcast this week and I'm looking forward to diving into this particular subject around cortisol this week because I don't know about you, but I have seen a lot of talk about this in recent years. So maybe you've heard about it in regards to things like menno belly or cortisol belly.

Maybe you've heard about how once you're in perimenopause, you shouldn't do high intensity workouts because they create too much stress, which then leads to the menno belly. And maybe you've taken some of that to heart.

You've got yourself off to a yoga class, you've started some meditation to try and balance some of that out to reduce some of the stress in your life. So I really wanted to dive into this one a bit today.

But what's made this even more interesting actually for me at the moment is that I recently did my very own cortisol test for reasons that I'll come on to, and it just revealed some Very interesting things for me, some very interesting things around, things that I've experienced over the last few years. A diagnosis of SIBO that I've had that I'll talk to you about in a minute and also about my current goals around building muscle.

And I think that this test has given me some very interesting areas for consideration around this. It's given me some stuff to work on that I maybe hadn't necessarily considered before, I hadn't thought about before.

So I'm going to share some of that with you today as well, because I think it's always useful with these things, isn't it, to have a real life example of something?

Because you can look at that real life example and you think, oh, yeah, I see that, or I can associate with that, or I've had that experience and that really helps you to see how it might be happening or it might be affecting your own life right now. Because I think that cortisol has had a really bad rep told it's a bad thing. It's going to lead to fat around your belly. It's awful, terrible.

Stop having cortisol, which is ridiculous and silly, isn't it?

Because cortisol is actually a very good hormone, a very important hormone, a very useful hormone for all of us, and we absolutely need it there for reasons that I'm going to come on to. But yeah, I think it's been really demonized over the last few years and particularly, like I say, around perimenopause and menopause.

And I think there's been a lot of scaremongering out there. So really what I want to do is I want to. To show you it's not as scary as you think it is. There's not a massive emergency around it.

However, for a lot of us, we do need to work on it for various reasons, which I'll come on to in a bit. So before I do that, I'm just going to talk to you a little bit about why I did my very own cortisol test recently.

Now, if you've listened to this podcast for a while, you might know that I've got something called sibo, which is called small intestine bacterial overgrowth. It is something that I have had for. For several years now. And it's basically a gut dysfunction where you get bacteria growing in the wrong places.

So you get an overgrowth of bacteria and that basically leads to lots of bloating. Now, I'm quite lucky. My only real symptom has been the bloating.

Occasionally my Tummy has been a bit painful, but mostly it's been just daily bloating. Some people that have SIBO have real issues.

It can lead to autoimmune diseases, it can make it almost impossible to eat certain things or to eat food. False. Stop. Because everything can set off your symptoms. It can be really debilitating.

It can affect how you absorb certain vitamins and minerals into your system as well. So it can lead to deficiencies in certain ones of those as well. And so sibo is something that if you've got it, you want to address it.

And you know for sure, having bloating every day, it's just uncomfortable. It's just really, really uncomfortable. So I've been working on this for years. It is a notoriously difficult thing to get rid of once you've got it.

And in fact, many people say you will never get rid of it, you'll just manage it better. And so I have done all sorts of things over the years.

I've done elimination diets, I've done antimicrobials, I've done supplements, I've done probiotics, probiotics, like all sorts of things that I've done to try and tackle this. And it has made my gut health much better.

When I've tested my gut health, the results have come back looking much better, but the symptoms are still there. It's not gone. I still have sibo and I am still working on it. It is a pain in the ass. It is an absolute pain in the ass to get rid of.

And so I've been working on this over the years. And as you're going to see in a minute, cortisol actually has quite an important role in this.

And I think that my symptoms stemmed from a time when I was highly, highly stressed. They started several years ago. They started at a time in my life when my kids were still primary school age.

I was running my business and my business was extremely busy at the time. I. I said yes to anyone and everyone. I didn't want to let anybody down. And I was also judging my success and how busy I was in my business.

And so I said yes to everybody and then would.

Would be like trying to juggle like a mad person in between dropping the kids off at school, picking the kids up after school, trying to keep my business running, all these kind of things. And so I definitely was in a very highly stressed state.

Now, the problem with that is that when you've got lots of cortisol rushing around the system, your body's not concerned so much with digestion. So it reduces stomach acid, it reduces digestive enzymes, it slows movement through the gut. It's called gut motility.

It's the speed at which everything moves through your gut, and so it slows that down. And what that then means is that food isn't getting properly digested.

You are starting to, essentially, the food is starting to ferment in your gut much earlier than it should be.

Bacteria is getting trapped in parts of the system where they shouldn't be, and that then creates lots and lots of bloating and like I said, potentially other symptoms as well. I've been lucky that that's as far as mine has gone. But there are other symptoms that you can have if it's not tackled.

So my symptoms definitely stem from a time in my life when I was highly, highly stressed. And I think that this was probably what kicked it off, was the fact that I wasn't digesting properly. My stomach acid was low. My.

My gut motility was slow as well. And so, like I say, I've been working on this for quite a few years.

I've hit a bit of a sticking point where I was making some improvements, but I've. I've really stalled and been going around in circles doing a lot of the same things over and over again, and it's not really changing.

So I recently went to a new doctor and one of the things that he wanted me to do was to do a cortisol test. And I'm sitting there thinking, hey, I've worked really hard on my stress over the last few years. My stress is actually fine.

I feel good, I feel relaxed. I've worked on my expectations, my beliefs around self worth, my how I was judging my success, all those kind of things.

Like my, I am so much more chill than I ever used to be. And that has been an important part of the work that I've been doing on my sibo is really reducing my stress levels, my cortisol levels.

So I'm sitting there thinking, oh, do you know what? It's going to be fine. You're going to. It's going to come back. It's not going to be a problem at all.

But he quite rightly recognized, recommended that I did do this test because as he said, sometimes you can be like a swan on the water and you don't realize even yourself what's going on underneath. We. We have, yeah, we did the cortisol test a little while ago. And you know, the thing is, I'm. I know myself. I'm not in burnout zone.

I'm not in the burnout zone I was in previously. I'm in a very, very, very different place to where I was several years ago.

But the results that came back highlighted I'm maybe not 100% out of the woods. Even though I, I feel good in myself, my system does not necessarily agree.

Now my results weren't really, really high, but they could just do the bit of rebalancing as I'll talk to you about.

So I've been doing some further work on myself, some further work on my cortisol, some further work on my parasympathetic nervous system and switching that on my rest and digest system.

And that's the thing, it literally says that rest and digest, we need to be in a calm state for our body to digest food properly and for us to recover properly and of those kind of things as well. So it kind of does what it says in the tin. So I've been working on that.

But before I share more of that teasing you with this, you're like, what did it say? I'm going to tell you in a minute because first of all what I really want to do is I want to set the scene on cortisol and this is important.

Like I said before, there's been a lot of scaremongering about it.

There's been a lot of posts going out there saying if you're in your 40s, you should not be doing high intensity workouts because of the stress levels and everything.

And of course, you know, as with everything, when it comes to our well being, there is a lot of nuance around this stuff that we need to be aware of as well. It is not a one size fits all approach, but on the cortisol side of things, cortisol is one of our stress hormones.

We've got adrenaline as well, we've got cortisol. When we are stressed, our cortisol rises, when we are less stressed, it reduces.

Right, and that's a good thing because we need to have a healthy cortisol response in our bodies. Cortisol is something that gets us up and going in the morning.

We should have a high, higher level of cortisol in the morning than we have in the evening. Cortisol is really good for activating us, increasing our awareness at important times.

So when you've got a deadline at work and you need to get that thing done, the cortisol is gonna come out, it's gonna help you, it's gonna give you the energy to really activate us and get us through that thing and get us doing that thing. It's also gonna help us in moments of danger. A lot of our moments of danger these days are not real danger.

They're not a bear chasing us in the woods, but they feel dangerous to us. And so we have a cortisol response. But in a dangerous situation, cortisol also incredibly, incredibly important, along with adrenaline.

So cortisol is good, ups and downs are good, ups and downs are normal. We should have a healthy cortisol response. We should have a healthy spike of cortisol at times when that is necessary for us.

The problem for a lot of us is that we've got into chronic stress situations. We are releasing that cortisol more often than we should be. So. And it's become our norm because of that.

It's become normal to have that cortisol, that stress response. And so we start to normalize it, and we can even start to become dependent on it.

And if you are somebody that struggles to rest and relax, if you are always saying stuff like, I just prefer it when I'm busy, if you find it very hard to slow down, there's a decent chance that cortisol has taken over the show and your system almost doesn't know what to do without it. That's why when you sit down to rest, your brain's going and like, oh, God, I really shouldn't be sitting down here.

I've still got that thing to do and that thing to do. And this rest does not feel very restful, and I don't feel very relaxed.

And as soon as that's all going through your head, as soon as you're telling yourself, oh, it's just because I prefer it when I'm busy, what that's telling me is your cortisol has taken over the show. It's giving you the buzz that you need to get going and to do things. And that is the less healthy side of cortisol response.

We need to have a healthy response, a healthy activation of cortisol at certain times. It shouldn't be activating at that low level all the time.

It shouldn't be the thing that's giving you a buzz that's getting you going, that's giving you that energy. That's not what we want it to be doing. We want to be dropping down low as well at certain times.

So if it's not doing that, then it's potentially having an effect on your system. And it's been. It's been boiled down, hasn't it lately to belly fat.

And it definitely is something that cortisol does affect, but there's lots of different things that are also going on. So yes, the belly fat, let's address that. Let's talk about that.

So particularly in our 40s and 50s, as our hormone levels start to drop, then we naturally have this process of fat redistribution. So we start to get less fat around our bum and our thighs and it tends to redistribute around our tummy instead.

But cortisol can certainly add to that. It can certainly speed things up because your body's on alert. So your body wants to store energy where it can access it most easily.

And your abdomen is the place where it can access that energy as easily as possible.

So when you add that to those levels of estrogen and progesterone dropping, then you are going to kind of almost speed up that process of fat redistribution. So for sure it has a role in the belly fat, but it is not just that alone. Another thing to be aware of is that cortisol is a catabolic hormone.

What that means is it burns muscles. So we have anabolic and we have catabolic Estrogen, for example, is an anabolic hormone.

When we've got lots of estrogen, that is for women, that is our main muscle building hormone for men is testosterone. Of course, that has a role for us as well.

But for women, our main muscle building, our main anabolic hormone, or one of our main anabolic hormones is estrogen. That is very, very important to us. And so of course, during perimenop menopause that starts to drop.

Then if you've got a lot of cortisol in your system as well, that is catabolic as well. So that is going to burn muscle. So what happens is you end up with less muscle and more fat.

Plus you're going to find it harder to recover and repair from exercise because the presence of that cortisol in your system all the time is going to prevent that repair. That should be happening.

So if you feel like you're working hard in the gym but you're not seeing results, that could definitely be a part of the story for you as well. So that's really important.

And it's particularly important for perimenopausal women who are told you must build muscle, that cortisol could be working against you. In that case, the third thing, like I mentioned before, it affects your digestion.

So it slows your system, it reduces digestive enzymes, it increases inflammation, so you can end up bloated and sluggish, you can end up not feeling particularly energized. You can end up feeling like you're not digesting your food so well. So for sure it can have that effect on you.

And it can also dysregulate your blood sugar levels. So that can lead to cravings and energy dips and irritability. And it's. It's all tied together.

So what it essentially means is that it's having an overall effect on your system around digestion, around recovery, around repair, around where you are storing more body fat as well.

So if you are noticing any of that, if you're noticing more bloating, if you're noticing more fat around your tummy, if you're not getting the results at the gym, if you feel like you're not recovering well, if you're getting cravings, irritability, cortisol could well be in the driver's seat right now. So I'm going to share with you what you can do to start regulating that better in a moment.

But first I'm going to go back to my own results, because I know you want to know.

So going back to my own results because, like I say, what surprised me about this is I have worked really hard on my stress levels over the last few years and I honestly do feel tons, tons better. But this was a really good lesson in not resting on your laurels, because there are still some things that actually need to change for me.

So the first thing was my morning cortisol is very, very low. Now, that is abnormal. That is just what some people have. But it definitely explains my aversion to getting up in the morning.

But then what happens is once I do get up and in the first half hour to hour of the day, my cortisol spikes massively. So you should have a rise of about 50%. Mine rises by 375%. So quite a big rise.

It's partly because my early number is very low, but what it is speaking to is that once I get up, my brain switches on straight away. I'm starting to anticipate things, I'm starting to think about things. There's like a higher level of mental activation.

Now, cortisol should be high in the morning, right? That is completely normal. We should spike in the morning. That gets us up, gets us going for the day.

And then as the day progresses, the cortisol should gradually come down the curve until it's very low at night. So again, completely normal that I will have a spike.

However, my tests Were basically saying, I'm on the higher end of that in the morning and early afternoon, so I'm not in burnout territory. It's not above what it should be, but it's definitely on the higher end. Definitely reflective of my kind of high functioning physiology, so to speak.

And then in the evening it drops right down, as it should do. So that's a good thing. For some people it doesn't, and that is not necessarily great. But for me it drops right down, comes really low in the evening.

But here's where it gets interesting, because alongside the cortisol, they also test something called dhea. Now, DHEA is a precursor to sex hormones like estrogen and testosterone. So we need that in order to produce those hormones.

And it's also a bit of a cortisol buffer.

So what you need to do is you need to have the appropriate balance of cortisol to dhea, so they balance one another out and that really supports your resilience and your recovery. Now, I'm having a robust cortisol response, not necessarily an issue in and of itself, even though it's on the high side in the morning.

But my ratio between that and my DHEA is very, very low. So I'm high output, low recovery. Now, to an extent, this is very normal at my age, I'm 49 and DHEA levels decline as we age.

But even for, given that, given that they will be on the lower end, that ratio should be low or is expected to be low, even if that mine is on the low end. And so that's potentially affecting lots of things for me.

It's potentially affecting my gut health and my bloating and it's also potentially affecting my current goals that I've got around muscle building, because that is something really aiming for this year, because I'm not getting enough DHEA to buffer the effects of the cortisol, which, like I said, that's a catabolic hormone that's going to be slowing down my recovery. It's going to be preventing me from building muscle. So I need more DHEA to be able to recover more quickly and to be able to get better results.

So in other words, at the moment I'm having to work harder to get less back. That is not ideal, that is not. That is not a situation that I want to be in. So. So right now my job isn't necessarily to reduce cortisol, so to speak.

Yes, it is at the higher end parts of my day, but instead it's to support dhea, which is in Turn gonna support my recovery, is gonna make it easier for me to build muscle. Is it gonna and is gonna make it easier for me to recover. Now I'm already doing a lot of the things that I should be doing.

I've already done a lot of work on myself, as I said about before, but now what I need to do, I'm needing to refine further. So here I'm gonna go on to more general tips in a minute. But this specifically for me are the things that I am doing right now.

So the first one is I'm adding a morning walk. So getting that outdoor light exposure before I even pick up the phone. I don't take a phone with me, I don't take headphones.

I just go for a walk for 20 minutes. And that is going to help me to regulate my nervous system. It's going to help me to reset the circadian rhythm for better sleep.

And it's going to hopefully blunt that big spike in the morning and just help with my recovery. So that's really important.

So there's, like I say, a couple of different things in there is number one, I haven't looked at my phone yet in the morning. Number two, I've got outside for a walk. So I've moved my body, which is good. I've got outdoor light exposure, which is good.

And I have relaxed the nervous system, which is good. So all of those things really important. Second thing, adding in a lunchtime meditation.

Now, I haven't quite done this yet because I've committed to the morning walk first. I'm like, get that in. Get yourself consistent with that. And then we're going to add a lunchtime meditation.

So I'm going to be doing that even just five minutes to sit there and take a few deep breaths just to slow things down a little bit. I have been when I remember because I do forget stuff, I've been adding a few deep breaths in before eating.

So what that does, those big deep breaths, it puts your body into rest and digest mode. It signals for your body. It's time to slow down, it's time to relax. And that is going to help with my digestion.

It's going to help to weirdly enough, speed things up a little bit. It's going to get those digestive juices flowing and it's going to help me with my digestion. So I'm doing that. I'm keeping lifting as normal.

So I'm still doing that. That is totally fine.

It's a really good thing to do to lift as in lift weights, but I am going to be more conscious of adding in some specific deload and recovery weeks every few weeks. So last week, for example, I had a week where I just got on the bike a couple of times and I didn't do any lifting.

So what this has made me very aware of is that I need prioritize that. And then the last thing that I've been doing is adding creatine.

So creatine is a supplement that has lots of good studies around it, particularly for perimenopause because it's involved in energy production.

So what that means is that when I'm in the gym, I'm going to be able to lift a little bit more, a little bit heavier, but I'm also going to be able to recover better. It's also great for brain function as well. So I've been starting to add in creatine every day. I've been focusing on protein.

So protein is great for blood sugar management, great for muscle building, so that's been really good for that. And then also adding a magnesium supplement in the evening. So magnesium is really great for resting and relaxing.

If you're adding magnesium, just be aware of what type of magnesium you're using because there are different, different types of magnesium for different things. So for me, for rest and relax, I'm using one particular type of magnesium, magnesium glycinate for that.

And those things, the creatine, the protein, the magnesium, they again are going to help to buffer the cortisol, they're going to help with my recover. So really that's what, that's what this is about for me.

This is not necessarily about me finding ways to reduce cortisol as such, but this is about recovery for me. This is about my body being a little bit more resilient because I'm not far off, I'm not in a terrible place.

But for sure, when I looked at those results, I thought, wow, this just goes to show that you can feel like you're in a really good place, but actually there's still some work to be done. So that's been really interesting for me. So those are all the things that I'm doing. But what about you?

How can you apply this to yourself for better digestion, better recovery and better results in the gym as well? So number one, just manage intensity.

Now, like I said before, I've seen a lot of things around in the last few years saying perimenopausal women should not be doing high intensity at all because it's too stressful on your body and then you end up getting belly fat. Now that is not necessarily rubbish. But these things are never one size fits all. So be aware of that. And why I always say around intensity is this.

If you are in a place where you're pretty relaxed, your life feels pretty manageable, you're not super busy, you're not super stressed, then you can probably add more high intensity workouts in.

If, however, you're at the other end of that and there is a lot going on and you are really stressed and you are really busy, then lots of high intensity is not necessarily going to do you the good that you think it might do in that particular stage of your life. So it's always about nuance with this. It's always about looking at where am I right now and what do I need to prioritize?

And for somebody that is very busy, very stressed, the most helpful thing is going to be finding ways to recover more. That's why a lot of women turn towards things like yoga and Pilates, because it's going to help you with that recovery.

But that doesn't mean no intensity at all. So focusing instead on strength building. Now it's not an either or situation.

You can still have a bit of intensity and that is in fact really, really important. But for me, for example, I might do one 20 minute HIIT session a week, one intense session a week.

But the rest of it is going to be muscle building with lots of long rests in between sets so that I'm able to recover. So building that muscle mass is going to be really important. It's going to support your resilience in all sorts of ways.

The next thing you could do is support digestion in really simple ways. So like I said before, taking those five deep breaths before eating, slowing down your eating, trying not to multitask while you're eating.

Now I haven't quite nailed that one yet. I just get bored staring into space by myself at lunchtime.

It's easier in the evening when the family's around and I sit down with them, so it doesn't always feel possible. But just what are a couple of things that you can do that when you sit down to eat are going to put you into? Right? It's time to rest and digest.

That is going to help with your digestion. It's going to help with your cortisol levels as well. So that's, that's something else you can do.

Another thing, think about building a morning routine that calms the cortisol. So similar to what I've been doing. So I stay away from my phone until I've come back from that walk.

Because apart from anything, I mean looking at your phone is freaking stressful these days, right? You don't want to be thrown straight into the world as is that time in the morning.

So staying away from that for sure, getting some light exposure, getting outside if you can, or doing some gentle movement, having a protein rich breakfast again that's going to really support you throughout the day. Saving your first coffee to have with breakfast. So try not to go coffee first, try and have it a little bit later.

So those are all things that I've definitely been doing. And you know, for most of us, I think we can definitely put a couple of those things in place, right? Can't we?

So that is going to definitely help to buffer that cortisol spike as well.

Add a nervous system, reset in the middle of the day, just a few deep breaths, switch on the parasympathetic system, a quick wander outside for 10 minutes before you sit down and have your lunch. Just something that is just gonna calm the system a little bit.

And of course last but not least, I can't end this without talking about the work that you do on yourself, the work you do around your beliefs, around productivity and rest your beliefs around self worth. It's all very well adding in these other support systems, it's all very well saying hey, but I go to yoga once a week.

But we tend to be driven on a day to day basis by the stuff that lies underneath, by the beliefs that we have, by the pressure that we're putting on ourselves, by the boundaries that we maybe fail to put into place, all of kind of things. So working on some of that is going to make a huge contribution to.

I'm not going to go into it today, I've done plenty of episodes which talk about this stuff, but that is also going to be really, really important. So like I say, cortisol's had a lot of attention lately. As always with these things, misinformation, scare tactics come along with that.

The fact is cortisol is a good thing. We are supposed to be able to mount a robust stress response. Being able to do that is a sign of good health, but it does also affect our bodies.

If it goes unchecked, if we are having that low level cortisol response for a lot of the day, it's going to affect our recovery, it's going to affect our results in the gym. We're going to have to work harder for less. It's going to affect our energy levels and it's going to affect our digestion as well.

So it's really worth paying that bit of attention to not just how much stress we carry day to day, but also how we're countering some of that, how we're buffering some of that with the actions that we take.

Some of the stuff that I've talked about in this episode so you can keep having that healthy cortisol response, but your system is also robust enough to recover from that and not stay in that low level of stress for those extended periods. So I hope this has been interesting.

I think it's always interesting to get an insight into some real life examples which I have laid bare for you today. So I hope you found that really insightful and maybe you've listened to that and gone, oh, that really makes sense and I can see myself in that.

So hopefully that's really helped you you. It's hopefully given you pause for thought about the role that caught your soul may be having in your life right now.

And so hopefully you can take a bit of action to manage that, to buffer it for yourself too, just as I am working on at the moment. So definitely make sure you share this episode with any other woman in your life that you think might need to hear this.

But for now I'm going to love you and leave you and I'll see you back here again next time. Thank you as always for joining me.

If this episode has hit home, subscribe share it with another woman who needs to hear it and come connect with me on Instagram @lifeeditwithalix for more real talk, mindset shifts and daily inspiration.