Stress, Menopause & Weight gain

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Hi! My name is Anne and I am a qualified Naturopath, Clinical Nutritionist, and Western Herbal Medicine Practitioner.

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Nov 26, 2021 Anne Reid

There are many contributing factors, and it is not just down to diet and exercise, a big component will be lifestyle factors and your sleep patterns.

When you get to around 35-40 your hormones start to change. They start to decline. Firstly, it is progesterone. Now progesterone is the chill out hormone. It helps calm us, it helps with sleep, and helps to regulate cortisol, your stress hormone. Both progesterone and cortisol are made from the same hormone, pregnenolone, so when the body needs cortisol, the production of progesterone gets sacrificed. So, this combined with already low progesterone means you will become more sensitive to any stressors. This can also lead to oestrogen dominance.

Now I’m sure you have heard about the fight or flight response that our bodies use to deal with stress, but do you know what this is doing in your body? It is an autonomic response; this is our sympathetic nervous system kicking in, in readiness for action.

Now cortisol, (made by our adrenal glands) was designed to help you escape from immediate danger such as running from a lion to save your life.

What happens is that when we feel this sudden impending terror it triggers your heart rate to increase, your bronchial tubes to expand (so you can get ready to run) and sends sugar to the bloodstream to power your muscles. At the same time, it suppresses other systems, including your digestion, to slow down and conserve energy. This is all to give your body the energy to deal with the stressful situation, to be able to get up and run to survive.

There are many contributing factors, and it is not just down to diet and exercise, a big component will be lifestyle factors and your sleep patterns.

“This slowing of the metabolism contributes to weight gain and your inability to lose it.”

Once this situation has passed your parasympathic nervous system comes back into play, slowing down the heart rate, slowing down breathing and your digestion starts to work again. It basically balances you out, making you feel calm again. BUT all the sugar that was mobilized for energy to fight or run from the stress isn’t being used up, so it gets stored as FAT – usually around the middle.

What is happening though is that with more and more stressful situations our parasympathic nervous system is not brought back totally under control. And these days our stressors are not so much physical, instead we all have so many more physiological stressors and even perceived stressors.

What can happen when you are constantly under stress is that you end up living in a slightly hyperarousal state to these adrenal and cortisol surges. This can then make you constantly on edge and super sensitive to the next stressful situation.

Over time this stress response balance can become totally skewed and you become chronically stressed. This can then deplete your happy brain chemicals such as serotonin, make you irritable, anxious and lead to food cravings.

“This accumulated stress can lead to irritability, anxiousness and food cravings.”

Things that can cause stress can be emotional stress, such as moving, starting a new job, even worries and anxieties in the back of our mind can cause ongoing stress. Negative thoughts all contribute to our stress levels. Then we have the physical stressors such as illness, accidents, even exercising too hard is a stressor on your body. These stressors all accumulate, without you even realising a lot of the time.

So, in a nutshell this cortisol slows down your metabolism so your body can focus on survival. Over time if you become chronically stressed your metabolism slows right down. When this happens, you will not be burning or using your energy efficiently. So that even if you reduce the calorie intake and exercise more you can still end up gaining weight as your body is just not functioning correctly.

But wait there is more! Constantly elevated cortisol can also throw your circadian rhythm out of whack. So instead of cortisol being high in the morning, which sees you jump out of bed with plenty of energy, it is low. This reversal, which not only disrupts your sleep, it also affects your eating patterns. A lack of sleep is another contributor to your stress levels.

Our body repairs when we sleep, so if you are not getting a good restorative sleep this can compound and add to chronic stress.

“Stress can cause a domino effect on not only your weight but your overall health.”

If this happens, you can find you may not be hungry in the morning. You might have a cup of coffee instead of breakfast and just graze through the day and by late afternoon you are starving, leading to bad choices. Late in the day, night-time eating of these foods is also what is putting on the weight and the cortisol is helping to drive this and keep it on.

Another result of cortisol being released into the bloodstream is you become less sensitive to leptin. This is the hormone that tells your brain you are full. This hormone is made in your fat cells.

When leptin is not working properly, your body tells you it wants more food. This combined with a slower metabolism can also cause weight gain.