Why Stress Makes You Hold Onto Fat (And Makes Weight Loss Harder)

You have been trying to calm down. You've been trying to breathe through it. You've been trying to talk yourself out of the anxiety, the overwhelm, the wired and tired feeling that just will not go away, and nothing has been working. That is because you cannot think your way out of a dysregulated nervous system. You have to give your body something it can respond to, something physical, something the body actually knows how to receive. Today, I want to give you 5 tools that I use myself and that I give to my clients. Every one of them is backed by real research, and every one of them takes under 2 minutes. So when you feel that spike coming on, when you feel your shoulders lift up around your ears, when you feel that pit in your stomach start to spin, these are what you want to reach for. I'm Dr. Ashley Lucas. I'm a PhD nutritionist and a registered dietitian. I'm the owner and founder of PhD Weight Loss, where to date we have helped over 13,500 people collectively drop more than 480,000 pounds. I've been sharing more about the nervous system on this channel because you guys have been asking and because I have been living this work in my own life, and it completely ties into how our body can let go of excess fat weight that is no longer serving us. Here is what I want you to understand before we get into the tools. Your nervous system is actually not a set of thoughts. It is not a set of decisions. It is actually an ancient biological system that runs constantly in the background. Now, the framework that changed a lot for me in this work is called the Polyvagal Theory. It was developed by a neuroscientist named Stephen Porges. And it is the reason we now understand that your nervous system has 3 states. A lot of us think that there are 2 states to the nervous system, but there are actually 3. Most of us have heard of fight or flight, but there's a 3rd state your body drops into when fight or flight isn't available, and that is called the dorsal vagal shutdown. In other words, freeze, numbing out, that wired, tired, disconnected feeling. That is not laziness. That is actually your nervous system in its deepest survival state. There is a great book on the topic of the nervous system and how trauma intertwines with the body, and it's called The Body Keeps the Score. The central message of that book is that the body is not just where you feel your emotions; it's actually where you store them. And when you have been in survival mode for many years, that survival is actually living in your tissue. It's living in your fascia, in your gut, in the way that you breathe. This means that the way out is not through your thoughts, but it's actually through your body. And the 5 tools that I'm going to share with you are all doing one thing: they're giving your body a physical sign that says, it's okay, we're safe now, you can stand down, you don't need to keep protecting me. And that signal is what your nervous system is fluent in. That's the type of signal your body needs. So tool number one is box breathing. It's one of my favorites because it takes 60 seconds and there is a ton of research behind it. Box breathing is what Navy SEALs use before high-stress operations, and it was popularized in the special operations community by a former SEAL named Mark Divine. So here's how you do it. You breathe in through your nose for, say, 4 counts. You hold at the top for another count of 4. You breathe out through your mouth for a count of 4, and you hold at the bottom for a count of 4, right? That's it, just one box, and you want to do 4 of those boxes in a row. The reason why it works is because when you extend your exhale and hold at the bottom, you're triggering the parasympathetic nervous system. You'll notice that when you breathe in, your heart rate actually increases a little bit, And when you breathe out, it naturally slows down. And this is why your blood pressure also drops. Your cortisol comes down within a few minutes. And research on controlled breathing consistently shows measurable shifts in heart rate variability, which is really the gold standard marker of your nervous system health. Breathing is like a number one tool when it comes to your nervous system. And the great thing is you can do this at your desk. You can do it in your car. You can do it before a hard meeting. You can do it when you're carpooling your kids. You can do it during a meeting if you find your heart rate elevating. You can do it in the bathroom at a family gathering, right? Nobody really knows you're ever doing it. And really, after 60 seconds, you can feel more back in your body. You can also do it longer than that. Tool number 2 is the butterfly hug. Now, this one might look a little bit strange, but it works really, really well. It's called the butterfly hug because what you're going to do is wrap your hands around your body and you're going to tap one shoulder after the other. This technique is now used inside EMDR therapy, and there's a large body of research showing that bilateral stimulation, meaning alternating the left and the right shoulder, actually rewires the way the brain holds a stress response. Again, a little bit more slowly, here's how you do this one. You actually cross your arms over your chest, so your hands are going to be on the opposite shoulder, and you just gently tap left and right, left and right. Left and right, slow and steady for about 60 seconds. Keep breathing normally while you tap, and what it's doing is engaging both hemispheres of your brain at the same time, which interrupts the loop of your amygdala in your brain and the loop that it specifically is running. It gives your nervous system something rhythmic and safe to focus on while it starts to settle, and it's one of the most effective tools that I have found for the specific moment when your chest is tightening, when you. Really feel like you need to come down fast. One thing that will amplify everything I'm teaching you today is understanding where your metabolism is right now, because a body that is in a chronic nervous system activation is a body that is running more cortisol, and more cortisol is going to change how you burn fat and how you store fat and how hungry you get and how much quote-unquote willpower you feel you have. There is a specific reason your body has not been letting go of this weight, and most people never find out what that is. I built this 2-minute quiz that will tell you exactly what is going on with your metabolism and the one thing to shift first. It's free, it takes 2 minutes. So if you are watching this on YouTube, just click the link in the description. If you are listening to this on a podcast platform, go to themetabolicquiz.com. Take it before you do anything else for your health this week and see what comes up. Tool number 3 is— I'm going to call it the head tilt with the eyes up. So all you're going to do is sit on a chair and put your feet flat on the floor. You're going to tilt your head and raise your eyes up to the corner and hold it for 8 to 10 seconds. And then you're going to turn your chin and look up to the other side and hold it for 8 to 10 seconds. When we can rewire the brain and help the vestibular system feel safe, everything else will start to settle down. When you do this one again, maybe Maybe for 60 seconds worth, and holding that chin and the eyes for 10 seconds before you move to the next. And take deep breaths while you're doing this. Tool number four is humming and vagus nerve stimulation. Your vagus nerve is the longest nerve in your body. It goes through the brainstem, down through your throat, past your vocal cords, into your chest, and all the way into the gut. It is the main highway of your parasympathetic system, and the beautiful thing is that you can stimulate it. Through your voice. So humming and singing and chanting, any of these vibrate your vocal cords, which sit directly on your, or directly against your vagus nerve. And that vibration signals the whole system to calm down. And there's a lot of research on this too. A study on vagal tone showed that humming for as little as 30 seconds can shift the nervous system state measurably. So you can do this for 30 to 60 seconds, just hum a low tone. Sing along to a song in the car. Chant the syllable voo low and long. Voo, something like that, right? Long and low. It can sound silly, but it works pretty fast. And like a strong V, voo, something like that. One of the reasons why you feel so much better after belting out a song in the car is not just an emotional release, it's that your vagus nerve is getting that direct massage and You know, now you know why. Another thing when we talk about the body keeping the score is that the fascia in your body, this thin layer of tissue underneath the skin and above the muscles, it's really, really strong. And it can be conditioned to lay in a certain way. It can be tight in spots, it can be not strong enough in others. And so releasing fascia is actually really helpful in allowing the nervous system to calm down. A company that I have no affiliation with that has some great videos on how you can release fascia by yourself on your own is Human Garage. So look them up on YouTube. They have a 15-minute reset, which is just 15 minutes worth of moves that you can follow along that helps to reduce stress in the body through releasing fascia. You can look up a vagus nerve stimulation, releasing the throat, whatever the areas are that you feel might be tight. Or maybe just starting with that 15-minute reset, because who knows, you probably don't even know what's tight. Tool number 5, grounding outside barefoot. This is one of my favorite, specifically in the morning. I really love to go outside, see the first sun when I wake up in the morning, and put my bare feet on the ground. It's called grounding or earthing. The premise is really simple. You take your shoes off and you stand on the grass or on the dirt or on the sand, but somehow you want your bare skin on the ground. The dew on your grass in the morning is really amazing for this, to help the body ground. There is a lot of research on this as well, and it shows that direct skin contact with the earth reduces inflammation markers. It improves sleep. It calms the automatic nervous system. There is real physiology here. Your body picks up electrons from the earth, and those electrons neutralize the free radicals that built up during chronic stress. With us holding on to our phone all the time, with us around all of this blue light and all of our electronics, all of this we, we want to be able to release, and putting our body on the ground is really helpful to do this. 10 minutes outside barefoot first thing in the morning is one of the most nervous system supportive practices you can add. Get in water if you can— a stream, a lake, a bath with salt, baking soda in the bath, magnesium flakes in the bath. Some traditions use this as a ritual, right? As you stand in the water, you can ask for the energies that are not serving you. And you can do this when you're standing in the water or just standing barefoot on the ground and just ask for the energies that are not serving you to be released, to give it back to the earth. Whether you take that literally or not, the act of the ritual just helps to settle the nervous system in a way that thinking through it and analyzing in the logical mind just cannot do. A few bonus tools that are worth mentioning briefly: doing movements where your heart goes underneath your hips. So like Downward dog or child's pose. Any pose where your head is below your heart uses gravity to reset the baroreceptors to calm you down. Wall pushes, just as simple as standing up and pushing the wall for 10 seconds, release, another push the wall, release. That can be helpful. It can be helpful to discharge stuck fight or flight energy. Cold water on your face helps to activate the vagus nerve. Placing your hand on a tree while breathing slowly I promise you, when I am stressed out or I have anxiety going through my body and I put my hand on a tree and I stand barefoot next to it, significant change right away. Now, what a lot of nervous system content leaves out is the nutrition side of things. You cannot regulate a nervous system that is running on unstable blood sugar. You just cannot. It doesn't matter how much box breathing you're doing. It doesn't matter how many trees you might be hugging. When your blood sugar spikes and crashes, your body reads that crash as a really massive threat. Cortisol goes up, adrenaline goes up, your nervous system enters sympathetic activation, and now you are trying to breathe your way out of a state that your food just put you in. It is a losing game. The nutrition foundation for a regulated nervous system is protein-forward, healthy fats, and no naked carbs. What do I mean by naked carbs? A carbohydrate eaten alone, even an apple by itself, crackers by themselves, a bowl of oatmeal with no fat or protein. These are all going to spike your blood sugar hard and drop it hard. A pumpkin spice latte, a banana bread iced latte, all of those are crap that are not serving your body. Your nervous system is going to pay for that choice 90 minutes later. Every meal, every single snack you eat is protein forward first, healthy fats alongside it, and any carbs you want have to be paired with those 2 things. This is the foundation. It is non-negotiable. I want you to do that for 3 weeks, and half of your nervous systems, I bet you, will start to soften on their own because you've removed that fuel that was feeding the fire. Now, one thing to know about your nervous system is that it talks to your gut constantly through your vagus nerve. Your gut houses roughly 70% of your immune system. It produces most of your serotonin, which is your feel-good neurotransmitter. And when your nervous system has been dysregulated for years, your gut is often the first system to break down. This is why I created GLP-1 Gut Longevity Plus. It is built around a next-generation probiotic called Akkermansia, plus polyphenols like the powerful grapeseed extract and resveratrol to rebuild the gut microbiome that has been depleted by chronic stress. It supports your gut, your vagus nerve, and your body's own natural GLP-1 signaling all in one place. You can find it at drashleywellness.com, or if you're watching this on YouTube, just go into the description, click the link, use code ASHLEY10 for 10% off your first purchase or 20% off your first subscription order with free shipping. Now, here's what I want you to walk away with, and this is the piece that I have had to learn myself the hardest way. There is nothing to fix about your nervous system. The anxiety is not a defect. It's not something to push away. The overwhelm is not a personal failing. These are not problems to be solved. They are your body speaking to you in the only language it has. Your body is giving you messages. Most of us come to our nervous system from fear— fear that something is wrong with us, fear that the symptoms mean something, fear that we are anxious people and are broken people. We cannot calm down like other people can. And a body approached from fear will not calm down because the fear is exactly the state you are trying to get out of. So instead, you're going to approach your nervous system from compassion, and you're going to approach the anxiety with curiosity instead of resistance. And when the anxiety or overwhelm or whatever that feeling is that you do not like When it rises, you're not gonna push it away. You're gonna sit with it, and you're gonna accept it, and you're going to ask it what it's trying to tell you. Because your body is not the enemy. It has been the messenger the whole time, right? Your body never makes a mistake. And these 5 tools, these 5+ tools that I've given you today aren't fixes. They're just ways of showing your body that you finally hear it, that you finally believe it. That you finally are showing up for it and your body will respond. It might take some time, but this is what it's been waiting for. And you don't need to do all 5 of these tools. It's not a rush. What you could do is you could pick one and use it for a week or 2. Now, if you want to go deeper on this work and you're watching this on YouTube, I have an episode called Why Is This Happening for Me? That pairs really nice with what we just talked about. Because the mindset behind the nervous system dysregulation matters just as much as these tools. Mindset is everything. So just click right here on the screen, or you can find it in the description. If you're watching this on YouTube and this landed for you, I encourage you to subscribe so the next video comes to you. And then please tell me in the comments which tools you're going to try this week. I want to know. Or we're a community here and we help each other. So if you have some tools that really help reset your nervous system that I didn't mention above, please share. Remember, you've got to step up to make the change. Lead with your heart, train your mind, and listen to what your body already knows. I'll see you next time.