#165: Cortisol Belly: What It Is & How to Fix It

You've probably heard the term 'cortisol belly' thrown around on social media. And more than likely, they are trying to sell you a tea or a supplement to fix it.

Here's the thing: cortisol belly is real. But no supplement or new ab exercise is going to fix it.

In this episode I explain what cortisol belly is, and why this kind of belly fat is worth paying attention to - because it's more than just a cosmetic problem.

You'll learn:

1. Why you've grown a 'muffin top' (it's a combination of things)
2. What visceral fat is, and why you want to get rid of it
3. What cortisol belly is and how to fix it

Resources mentioned:

Episode #41: Stress: Why You Should NOT Ignore It in Menopause 

Episode #128: Simple Tips to Sleep Better 

Learn to Lift 10-week program

Enjoy the show!

Transcript

#165: Cortisol belly: what it is and how to fix it

Lynn-Marie: [00:00:00] Welcome to 40+ Fitness for Women. I'm Lynn Sederlöf-Airisto, your host, and I'm a certified menopause fitness coach, helping women to build the bodies that they want to spend the rest of their lives in. 

So you've probably seen the term cortisol belly all over social media and wondered, is this a real thing or is it just another made up way to sell supplements to midlife women? Cortisol belly is real, but no supplement is gonna fix it. So in this episode, I'm gonna explain what it actually is, what's causing it, and most importantly, the best way to get rid of it. And spoiler alert. It is not another abs exercise.

So before I explain what cortisol belly actually is and how cortisol fits into all of this, I need to take a step back. Because to understand the cortisol [00:01:00] piece, you first need to understand what's going on in your body in midlife, and it starts really with a question that you've probably already asked yourself, which is why is this belly fat suddenly such a problem when it wasn't before? 

So the main reason that we're seeing a change is that you are going through menopause and estrogen levels are first fluctuating, and then estrogen really flat lines. Now estrogen has been defining where on your body you keep your fat, and when you have estrogen, it is keeping it on your hips and thighs and your butt. And when estrogen disappears, those fat stores start to redistribute themselves and they really migrate towards your midsection. And the thing that it does is that not only that it ends up around your waist, under your skin there, but it [00:02:00] does something a little bit more devious, which is that it starts to accumulate between your organs. So the so-called visceral fat.

And unlike subcutaneous fat, in other words, under your skin that you can pinch. This visceral fat can't really be seen from the outside the same way. It just kind of, it is like you're a balloon and it gets a little bit more inflated that you're just rounder all around. And so, you know, you've got kind of two things going on here as estrogen leaves the building. Is that the visceral fat is going in and making you puff out like the whole of you puff out, and then your fat stores, even the subcutaneous stuff is more around your waist, and so that really is making your jeans tighter and then giving you that muffin top that everybody hates [00:03:00] so much.

And the thing is, and how this relates to the whole cortisol thing, is that the visceral fat is different than subcutaneous fat, and it is the fat that cortisol loves.

Visceral fat is metabolically active, and that means it doesn't just sit there like the subcutaneous fat does. It actually releases chemicals and hormones directly into your bloodstream, and most of what it releases causes problems. The first thing it does is it increases inflammation because visceral fat is constantly releasing inflammatory chemicals called cytokines. Inflammation is basically your body's alarm system. It's designed to switch on when there's something wrong and then switch off again. But when visceral fat is constantly releasing these chemicals, the alarm is like [00:04:00] it's never turned off, and that causes this chronic low level inflammation damages your blood vessels. It strains your heart, and it makes your whole system work less efficiently over time.

The second thing that this visceral fat does is it increases insulin resistance. Now, normally when you eat, your blood sugar rises, your pancreas releases insulin, and your cells open up to absorb glucose for energy. Now visceral fat disrupts that process because the chemicals it releases makes your cells less responsive to insulin's signal. Your pancreas has to pump out even more insulin just to do the same job. And when there's just a lot of it out there all the time, your body becomes less responsive to it. That's called insulin resistance, and that's something that can lead to type two diabetes.

So together this chronic inflammation [00:05:00] and this insulin resistance are linked to heart disease, certain cancers, and even cognitive decline. So when we're talking about getting rid of visceral fat, we're not just talking about fitting into your genes, we're talking about improving your long-term metabolic health.

So that was about visceral fat. And now let's talk about cortisol because this is where the things start to connect. 

So cortisol is a hormone that your body releases in response to stress. It's your fight or flight system. You've probably heard of that, and it's really actually built to be helpful, . So in the short term, cortisol gives you energy. It sharpens your focus and gets you to actually deal with whatever's in front of you. I mean, in the olden days, in the olden days, caveman time, it was, you know, some kind of lion or tiger that was attacking you.

So cortisol is [00:06:00] caused by stress, but it's not only caused by kind of negative stress. So it's not only about that deadline at work or some bad news you got or worrying about your parents or your teenagers, but it also goes up when you're excited about something, planning a trip, nervous about a wedding, you know, energized by a challenge that you're doing or promotion, even exercise can increase cortisol and that's why you hear a lot of people talking about, oh, you're spiking your cortisol by exercising. Yes, exercise spikes your cortisol, but. Is it spiking your cortisol beyond what you can handle? 

So it it is about learning how to manage stress and making sure you're not putting more stress on your body tha n you can handle. And when you think about your stress bucket and when it's gonna overflow, you need to think about the positive things in your life, the negative [00:07:00] things in your life, and the exercise in your life. So there's, there are a lot of things. And then the ways that you can start to empty that bucket are with recovery and rest, and maybe meditation, petting your dog, cuddling with your honey. There are a lot of things that you can actually do for that.

 The problem really is when you have chronically elevated cortisol. So when your stress bucket is constantly overflowing, you are just all the time having more stress on you than what you can handle, and even, you know, like I said, exercise, if you're doing so much that you can't recover from it, then this is where it starts to work against you.

So here's how this all connects to the visceral fat. So visceral fat has a lot more cortisol receptors than subcutaneous fat does. And so basically when cortisol is circulating in your blood, [00:08:00] it. triggers more of your new fat to go into visceral fat stores rather than into your subcutaneous fat stores. And then you have all this fat stored between your organs where it is not a good thing, and it kind of starts to just spiral, right? You have more visceral fat, and then you have the stress. Then you get even more visceral fat because the cortisol in your blood is promoting your body to store the fat between your organs rather than under your skin. So it becomes this very negative loop.

And this is one of the reasons why there's so much of this talk about, oh, you shouldn't be exercising because you're raising your cortisol because of this loop. So that's what they're talking about when they're talking about that. But they're maybe not really explaining the whole picture of what's going on.

But the thing is that now that we're in midlife, so we're [00:09:00] going through menopause this cycle, this negative cycle becomes harder to break because you have the estrogen declining and estrogen has actually been helping you to, keep your cortisol levels in check. You are just, your baseline level of cortisol in your body is higher. Then you've got the visceral fat shifting into the middle of your body, which is again, promoting more cortisol and you know, it's just this very negative cycle.

Okay, so at this point you're probably like, oh my God, how am I ever gonna break this cycle? So there are really two things you need to do to fix this thing, and the first is that you need to be managing your stress levels. I have a whole podcast on that. So I will link to that in the show notes. And the second thing you need to do is [00:10:00] the real trick, is to lower your visceral fat quantities. Now, the challenging thing with visceral fat is that it doesn't want to budge. Once it gets in there, it is happy to be there, and if you're stressed out, it's happy to accumulate a whole lot more fat there, and it's very hard to shift.

So how are you going to get this visceral fat to shift? It's actually easier than you might imagine, it is by starting to strength train. And I noticed it very early on when I started strength training. I had just started to like get in the habit of it, and I went in for a body composition scan. Then I did another one three months later and my weight had not changed at all, but my visceral fat had dropped significantly. So I was doing body recomposition in the best [00:11:00] possible way, which was I was adding muscle to my body and getting rid of visceral fat at the same time. And by the way, at that point I was not lifting heavy. Yes, I was lifting consistently. Yes. I was tracking. Yes, I was applying progressive overload. But it happened, very much in the beginning of my journey. And I mean, it's continued to go down, but it was a significant drop right at the start. And I'm not a unicorn in that respect. The, cardio queen that I've referenced often on the podcast, she started strength training as well, and I mean, I've seen her lifting sessions. She is not, you know, lifting heavy yet. She's, she's new to weight lifting and she does short sessions before she goes on to do her cardio. And she went in to get a body composition scan too. And she wrote me, she was like, I cannot believe it. I have lost so much visceral fat. She [00:12:00] was so excited about it and, she really is like just in the beginning of her journey. But the thing that you need to be doing in order to get that visceral fat to start shifting is you need to be doing proper strength training. So, you know, following a program, applying progressive overload, and that's easiest to do when you're tracking. So things like. BodyPump or bootcamp classes and those kinds of things while they're great exercise. They're not going to have that same effect on your visceral fat as strength training does. Okay, so strength training is the magic bullet. And it's funny because you would imagine that if you wanna target your midsection, you gotta do some exercises for your midsection, like strengthen your core, do some sit ups, you know, that's what you see all over online like, oh, I did this one abs exercise, and suddenly all the fat around my midsection, you know, melted away or I'm 10 dress sizes smaller around the [00:13:00] waist. But no, it is strengthening your arms and your legs, your back, your chest, your glutes, you know your body. It is the act of strength training and using your muscles that does it.

And so you may be wondering like. What is strength training doing that causes this to happen? And so now I'm gonna get a little bit sciencey on you. So what happens when you're doing proper strength training, so you're actually challenging your muscles, is that very quickly something changes in the surface of your muscle tissues. And that is. These little doors, we can call them doors they're transporters , GLUT4 transporters , they start to increase in quantity. So there are more of them there. And those little guys are kind of the doorways for, glucose to come into the cell, you know, to [00:14:00] lower your blood glucose levels. So if there are more doors that means that your muscle cells become more responsive to. The insulin in your blood, then your muscles are kind of counteracting what is going on with, the negative effects of your visceral fat.

So it improves your overall insulin resistance and it does it quite quickly. So this is kind of a change that happens in your muscles already before you build a whole lot of new muscle fiber or anything. you start strength training, and It takes the muscle that you have now and it makes it better for making your body responsive to insulin. What an amazing thing.

And so this sets off a positive sequence of events, So as your insulin levels start to be more steady [00:15:00] because your muscles are able to pull in the glucose, 'cause your muscles are great, glucose sinks. The insulin levels start to be lower, then your visceral fat is not being signaled to be gathered quite as much, so you start to get your visceral fat used up.

So it's a beautiful I natural way to really improve the metabolic health of your body as a system.

But I wanna say again, that not all workouts with weights are gonna cause this effect. Okay? You need to have a strong enough stimulus, and that doesn't mean that you need to be lifting, you know, huge, heavy weights like, you know, and when I started and when Cardio Queen started, we're lifting. Smallish weights, really.

But it's the fact that we are doing it in a systematic way [00:16:00] where we're progressing, that we are pushing our bodies, you know, we are making our muscles work and. Lifting, close-ish to our limits, progressively overloading, which is a totally different thing from taking a tiny weight and doing a thousand reps and feeling the burn. They are just biologically, biochemically, completely different things. So you need the proper progressive strength training to really trigger this effect and get rid of that visceral fat that. Is getting promoted by cortisol, but then your strength training is gonna counteract that so you can finally get rid of it.

All right, and now to summarize, how are you going to get rid of. Cortisol belly fat, in other words, that visceral belly fat that is caused by the increase in cortisol levels that you may experience in [00:17:00] midlife. Okay? The first thing you're we're gonna do is you're gonna start strength training. So get your hands on a program. I have them Learn to Lift my 10 week beginner program is great for this. I've seen great results for the women in the program, and that will definitely teach you to do the progressive overload. It'll give you a program to follow the structure. I'm there. You know, you ask me any kind of questions you have along the way. I am there to support you. Okay. 

Second thing you need to do is you need to be managing your stress bucket. Okay? We are not as able to handle stress as we were when we were younger because we've lost estrogen, which has been kind of this damper on our stress levels when we've been younger. And I'm not saying we're like weaker or worse or whatever, just. Different. And hey, so take the time for [00:18:00] yourself to. Do a little meditation. Tell your honey that you need a little cuddling or that, that's why you need to get a dog. Take a walk outside, you know, all these things. Lower your stress and lowering your stress is gonna be so important for so much more than just your belly fat. Also for your mental health and, aging and your telomeres and all that stuff. Definitely that is something to work on. 

Third thing is your sleep. Um, and I'm, I'm, I'm not gonna put these really in priority order because all of these are really important. I often say that sleep should be the number one focus of any woman in midlife. And that's because that's the biggest thing that people complain, get disrupted. And when sleep gets disrupted, it's like everything else kind of spirals. After that, your energy levels drop, your, hunger and satiety cues go out of kilter. You don't have [00:19:00] the energy to exercise. You know all the things, so please do focus on getting better sleep. And I also have a podcast episode on ways to improve your sleep. I have a ton of tips in there, so if you haven't been thinking about that yet and you want some tips, please check that one out. And then finally. Once you have those three things under control, because I think those are gonna be the most important ones, then the next thing you look at is your nutrition. Okay? So I'm not talking about going on some radical diet and. The reason I'm also putting this last is that a diet is a stressor on your body, a calorie deficit. I mean, think about it, we are, we are still cavemen. So when we put our bodies into a calorie deficit, our bodies don't know, am I gonna get fed next week or [00:20:00] like two months from now? So that is a stressor on our bodies. But if you're at a level, like for example, you know, I am where I've pretty much dialed in my sleep, okay, stress can always use help and I'm strength training already very consistently. And, and I'm still a little bit like, okay, I still would like to improve this the way I have to say my scores are really, really good, but still, if I still wanna dial this in even a little bit more. Then it's going to be about, gently cutting back on calories, putting myself into a small calorie deficit to make my body have to use, fat or at least living in a maintenance situation and trying to build muscle, in which case your body has gotta take that energy from somewhere and you'll get the nice body recomposition.

Okay, so this episode actually turned out to be a lot longer than I expected. I was kind of [00:21:00] thinking like, oh, this will be like a seven minute one, but this, this topic actually has a lot of nuance to it, and I wanted to mention that next week I am going to be building on this episode to talk more about why it is that the workouts that we have been doing up until now suddenly stopped working in midlife and what you can do about it. So if that interests you, how to start working out better in midlife, then. Remember to hit that subscribe button so that you don't miss the next episode. And with that, I leave you Till next week, happy training.