sounds counterintuitive to women who were used to go go go to think What do you mean, I could do yoga and use my body fat more effectively.
Hi, friends, happy Friday. And welcome to another episode of Bitesize Biohacks my mini episodes where I give you little tips and bio hacks or maybe clips of previous interviews with action packed recommendations that you can put into practice to really improve your life one step at a time. And in this week's clip, I'm actually sharing an interview that I did with Dr. Libby Weaver who is a nutritional biochemist, and really understand how the impact of stress is impacting women's hormonal problems. And it's something that I'm seeing a lot of myself in my membership in my programmes with my clients, I think that everyone feels under a lot more stress at the moment than we have been. And the problem with this is that we do them pump out a lot of adrenaline. And in response to that, over the long term, our body produces more cortisol, really as an anti inflammatory mechanism initially, but that can cause its own set of problems over time. And in this clip, you'll hear about how Dr. Libby Weaver explained the link between elevated levels of cortisol and the storage of abdominal fat and also that fat storage around your upper back around the bra area that a lot of women struggle with, particularly in the peri menopausal years and don't want to be there. And she explains exactly how that mechanism is happening. So I can dive into that clip in just a moment. But I also want to let you know that over in my membership, we are doing a whole month this month on stress and resilience. And this week, in fact, we've been doing a seven day challenge on managing stress with daily meditations and affirmations and journaling steps to really help you get that under control. And we are now going to close the founding members offer of just $27 a month. So that's actually going to close at the end of July. So if you've been thinking about joining, check it out at https://bit.ly/female-biohacker . Because we are going to close the founding members offer now. It's a really wonderful community of women there. I'm loving the vibe that's in there. And we really want to maintain that. But if you're thinking about joining a community of women biohacking on your own, just feels a bit lonely and you'd love to be around other women who really want to live their best life, then maybe the female bio hacker is for you. So that's https://bit.ly/female-biohacker . And now let me return to this clip with Dr. Libby Weaver, if you want to listen to the full episode afterwards is episode 105. It was one of the most popular episodes in 2021. And so if you haven't listened yet, I think you'll want to go back after it. But listening to this short clip now that will help you explain these mechanisms. And just why actually, maybe you need to be doing a little bit more Yoga and Tai Chi, to get your metabolism back on
track. You know, we've got these little things across the day that just lead our adrenaline to keep going up and up and up, rather than the way it was historically, which was just a spike when someone jumped out at us. And then yeah, we might have had three weeks, as I said, without any adrenaline. And so because of the pattern of adrenaline production today, we end up with all these inflammatory compounds zooming around in our body, and the body knows that they're degenerative, and very ageing from the inside out for us. And so thankfully, inside of us, we have some very powerful anti inflammatory substances that can go to work, our body naturally produces anti inflammatory substances, and one of them is cortisol. So we then move into the second stage of the stress response because you've got all this adrenaline creating always inflammation, and now your cortisol level has to increase to act as an anti inflammatory. And cortisol is our chronic stress hormone. So we only produce cortisol when the stress has gone on long term, and historically, long term stress with things like floods and famines and wars. And when we think about all of those scenarios, food was scarce. But in modern times, our long term stress tends to come from things like worrying about our relationships, or our bank balance or our health or the health concerns we might have for a loved one. But the body hasn't yet learned to discern between the cortisol we would make if there really was a famine and the cortisol we make when we're worried about how much money we have. It's all the same to the body. Cortisol simply means long term stress. And because that long term stress has always meant there's no food left in the world. One of cortisol jobs is to slow your metabolism down. It's actually a catabolic hormone. So catabolic, meaning it breaks your muscles down. And the reason it does that is because muscles use more energy than body fat. So the body in its wisdom wants it thinks there's no food left and it wants you to still be alive once the food supply has been reinstated. And so to do that, it needs to slow your metabolism down and it does that by decreasing your muscle mass and increasing your body fat levels, but it will be very confused. into a modern woman who was still eating and moving the way she always has. But now her clothes are getting tighter, it won't make any sense if she believes the calorie equation is the only thing that creates that scenario. So cortisol has a very distinct fat deposition pattern, you get fat around the middle, and you grow what I lovingly call it back veranda so you get back fat. And the reason the cortisol thickens you up on your torso, is because all of the organs that keep you alive are all housed inside other than your brain, they're all housed inside your torso. And if there really was a famine, they're going to need protection and warmth and nourishment to get you through these lean times. So your body has this extraordinary wisdom, but your body responds to the information you give it. So if you have all of this long term stress, because we're in stage two stress now with elevated cortisol, and we've still got elevated adrenaline because we we haven't addressed that, you get all these metabolic changes, which leads to body fat increasing. It's these are survival instincts. So they're always going to override how much you eat and how much you move. And then if some people stay in that second stage of the stress response long term, whereas others go into the third stage of the stress response, which is when cortisol levels go very low. So on top of everything I've just described, you now have lost all the anti inflammatory actions of cortisol. So you now get very stiff. When you go into the third stage of the stress response, which some people will call adrenal fatigue. It's become known really as HPA Axis dysfunction. So hypothalamus, pituitary, adrenal axis dysfunction,
other others will refer to it as burnout, one of the aspects of burnout is these very, very low cortisol levels, so you lose the anti inflammatory protection. So you're very stiff, you feel like you've aged 10 years overnight. You're, there's a deeper unrelenting fatigue. So it's not just, Oh, I'm tired today, because I worked hard yesterday, it's every day and the tiredness is deep in your bones. And people who experience this worry that they're never going to feel like themselves again. So you can recover from all of it. But so much of our, all our actions, and our behaviours are driven by our beliefs. And we often don't know what we believe about ourselves, we're very good at knowing what we believe about things outside of us, we know what we think about that person or that situation or that political party. But if I said to you who do you have to be to be loved by a particular person, it's a lot harder to identify that because it's all tied up in how we see ourselves, and our beliefs come through in our language patterns, but we can't hear that their beliefs because we say it, and we think it's real. So we don't even realise that we're speaking of perceptions rather than, and so we don't see them as beliefs. So it can be tricky to unpack that. But it's, it's a very worthwhile thing to do. And, obviously, it's incredibly it's amazing to witness people recover from that stage three stress, but that's they're just some examples of, of things that will impact metabolism and whether your body's getting the message to burn fat or store fat, I have an online course for women where I go into over nine factors
on how to burn fat, which is so important, isn't it, because I think, particularly for women as well. And this is the thing that makes me the saddest in a way and I did leave a successful career, you know, as a as a partner in a corporate law firm. So I am one of those women that came out that found it really difficult to combine with children. But I think that our perception of what's going on, as you say, you know, I was in an environment where we used to leave our suit jacket on the back of our chair, if we went out for a drink with friends. So we could come back to the this was when I was a junior lawyer, so the partners didn't know. And you were still in the office at 10 or 11 o'clock at night. But that perception is really real and you are so you feel that stress. And then I think it just compounds doesn't it? Because women were the primary carer for the children, then your children start growing up, they're sort of going into adolescence. That's what I'm experiencing the beginning of with mine now. And they have their own set of problems and drama. And yeah, it's that balance. But you're right, really what women are doing when they're just almost punishing themselves with saying, right, well, now I must do two workouts a day, I must go for a long run, I must fast for 16 hours. And I must do a really strict elimination diet that is just actually raising adrenaline and cortisol higher and higher. Right, which is completely counterproductive. I know as well. One of the things you talk about because I want to come on to the beliefs in just a moment is energy as well and mitochondrial health and the importance of muscle mass. And that kind of ties in a bit with and this is what I talk to people a lot about as we lose I think it's three to 8% of our muscle mass per decade if we're not deliberately strengthening our bodies. What What have you found then just to kind of finish on on that, on that exercise metabolism and energy pathway? What is the ideal sort of exercise routine like what would you do or with your own I know you don't practice Just in terms of seeing patients anymore, but what is that kind of ideal balance, I've spoke to Dr. Stacy Sims about it, you know, the author of raw and women, not small man. And she very much feels from her research that, particularly as women get older, we need to create this polarisation where it's like, let's be low and slow and enjoy walks and yoga and keep it light, but then sometimes just go really hard. But to keep those sessions short, so that we're not elevating cortisol too far too high. For too long, as she's curious what you found.
It's a very, that's a very wise approach, I think that we need to tune into ourselves. So rather than follow some kind of prescription from someone else, or some sort of old fashioned model that we might have, I've got to burn calories and work really hard. That's a fast way to burn out with all of the things that women now juggle. And so I think there are times so our focus on building muscle mass is incredibly important, because from the age of 30 onwards, as you said, Angela, if we don't do anything to counteract it, we start to lose our muscle mass from 30 onwards. So, weight training, I think is very important. But I do agree that it's very important to do it in a way where you're not pushing yourself to the point of exhaustion, because then that's counterproductive, you'll end up making a whole lot of stress hormones that goes against what you're trying to achieve. I also think that if someone's in, in stage three stress, where their cortisol levels are actually very low, restorative practices are the most powerful thing they can do. Because they, their body needs to get the message that they're safe, because we need to remember adrenaline says you're not safe, which has a big flow on effect to our thyroid, our adrenals, our digestive system, our ovaries. So when we have to create a sense for the body, again, that it's safe, and a breath in breath, focus practices do that. So what I meant to say when I talked about the tai chi, and there are many breath focus practices, when we do long, slow, diaphragmatic breaths away, you're doing tai chi, in meditation in restorative yoga, for example, when we breathe diaphragmatic ly you communicate to your body that you're safe, because you activate a part of the nervous system called the parasympathetic nervous system, which is the beautiful calm arm of the nervous system. And when when we are living on adrenaline, and we're doing short, sharp upper chest breathing, that drives what is called the sympathetic nervous system response. And so many rushing women. When I wrote rushing woman syndrome, essentially, its sympathetic nervous system dominance, it's as if you get stuck with that sympathetic nervous system activated your breathing is usually very shallow and rapid, and it just perpetuates the whole stress response. Whereas the diaphragmatic breathing the restorative practices communicate to your body that you're safe again, which is incredibly restorative for your energy to your nervous system, and also to your body feeling safe to use fat as a fuel because when you're not producing huge amounts of adrenaline you can use your fat efficiently as as a fuel again, so it sounds counterintuitive to women who are used to go go go to think What do you mean I could do yoga and use my body fat more effectively, I'm not burning as many calories and I know there's so much more to it than that you want to communicate safety to your body because when the when inside you that chemistry knows it's safe, you're using that very effectively as a fuel.
