Four Things Getting In Your Way

Do you ever feel like you are doing ALL the things and yet you can’t seem to move the needle forward on your health? 

We talk about that a lot around here, but today I want to give you 4 specific things that could be getting in your way of the success you are looking for. 

           STRESS

Let’s just get the hardest and most impactful one out of the way. Seriously. You’ve likely been told enough times that stress can kill you, but do you know what that actually means? 

Stress can look different to different people as well as be caused by a zillion different things. What might cause your body stress, does nothing to me and vice versa. 

This individuality is so important and is part of the reason why I refuse to believe that there is a one-size-fits-all solution to our health crises in this country. 

But back to stress. 

When the body is under stress, whether from running a marathon to sitting in traffic when you are urgently trying to get somewhere or fasting for too long, it goes into protection mode. 

Some stress is good. This is referred to as “hormetic stress”. This stress creates good pressure on the body to make changes that will benefit you. This is how we burn fat. This is how we build muscle. This is how we detoxify our clogged drainage pathways. 

But chronic stress is not helpful. It tells the body that all resources need to go into preservation mode. We stop burning fat. We stop being able to make babies. We don’t sleep. 

Chronic stress might look like over-exercising. It might look like fasting 18 hours a day for 2 years. It might look like a toxic load of chemicals from your food. It might look like a parasitic infection. It might be the phthalates in your skin products you use every day that are actually obesogens (something that causes obesity). It might even look like chronic exposure to arsenic through your city water (yes, this is a thing). 

Stress releases cortisol, our most famous stress hormone. When it’s elevated, we become insulin resistant. This prevents us from losing weight, increases inflammation in the body, and leads to poor sleep (which in turn leads to more insulin resistance, and the nasty cycle continues). 

You learn all about this in much more detail and how to prevent/reverse it in my paid program, Reclaim Your Metabolism, btw. 

Focus on lowering your cortisol for YOU and see your health improvements compound. 

BUILDING MUSCLE

Building muscle is an important and often overlooked strategy for improving health outcomes. When you have less muscle, you have less insulin receptors, which means that you have less places for the body to shuttle glucose from food, leading to (you guessed it) insulin resistance. 

Eating high-quality protein will prevent/limit muscle breakdown and improve your metabolic rate as well. More muscle = more fat loss.

Muscle mass is also one of the KEY determinants of longevity, so that's awesome. Build muscle. Eat protein. 

TIMING OF YOUR LAST MEAL

Melatonin, which helps us fall asleep at night, is actually produced in the morning when we get natural light in our eyes. When melatonin is up in the evening, we actually become more insulin-resistant. If you are eating late at night when the sun has set and your melatonin production is on the rise, you will naturally store more of your carbohydrates as fat. I coach clients to aim to be done with their last bite between 6-7pm most nights.

SLEEP

When I was in college I had a friend ask me if I thought pulling all-nighters was good for her metabolism because she was using/burning more calories by staying awake. I was young and dumb, but even then my intuition knew that her thought process was incorrect. I remember saying to her “no, actually your body needs to rest in order to keep its metabolism burning efficiently.” I actually don’t know how I knew that, but I did. 

In order to have good quality sleep, which is important for so many reasons, your body can’t be busy breaking down and digesting foods in your stomach, small intestine, or colon. When we sleep, our brains shrink and our body goes to work cleaning and repairing what’s damaged and broken. If there is food in the system, these processes are impaired. At 2am, your liver naturally begins to dump glucose into the bloodstream because it can sense that your levels are dropping. When there is lots to dump, you may even be woken up. If you’ve just had a meal before bedtime, not only will you have more glucose to dump that’s fresh in your system, your melatonin is elevated so insulin will move more of that glucose into fat storage. That’s a double negative for your health goals. 

In studies looking at sleep and insulin resistance, there is a direct correlation to just one night of sleep deprivation and increases in blood glucose. Not just by a little bit. These studies show that glucose shoots into the diabetic range! 

It may seem simple, but sleep is important. 

Ok, but you’ve tried all the things and you still aren’t sleeping well? 

You may need to look at blood sugar regulation during the day, assess your screen time, your stress level, and your nervous system. 

Do any of these four resonate for you? Find out what else you can do to level up on your health by enrolling in my FREE course. 10x Your Health in 2 Weeks was designed to help you find the key areas in your life where you can make easy changes to help improve your health.

Enroll HERE and send to your favorite people and walk through it together. Strength in numbers, right?