Stress and Poor Sleep Are Blocking Your Weight Loss Goals

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The number one thing I hear from women is, "I'm eating right, I'm lifting weights, I'm doing cardio, so why am I not losing weight?" And the very next thing they go, "Do you think it's my hormones or maybe my sleep?" Here's the reality. Stress and sleep are often these silent saboteurs that can totally block your fat loss. And I'm gonna share my exact rules I follow because I travel all the time and I got a little bit of stress my life too. How I protect my sleep, what I do to manage my stress hormones, and how I keep my metabolism humming. Because it's not about having a good day or having a bad day, it's about how you manage these things, right? And it's about understanding how cortisol and disrupted sleep trick your body into storing fat. Reality is, no matter how clean you're eating or how hard you're training— in fact, sometimes that can sabotage things— today we're breaking down how stress and sleep disruption stop fat loss in its tracks and exactly what you can do to get your body working with you, not against you.

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Hey, I'm JJ Virgin, PhD dropout— sorry, Mom— turned 4-time New York Times bestselling author. As a certified nutrition specialist, Fitness Hall of Famer, and globally recognized leader in health, I'm driven to keep asking the tough questions and use my podcast to simplify the science of health into actionable strategies that help you thrive. Want an ad-free experience? You can now subscribe to my exclusive VIP podcast at subscribe2jj.com for just $4.99 a month or $49.99 a year. It's like your daily latte, but better for your health. I'd also love to hear your thoughts on the show. And here's the fun part: when you send me your review, I'll reply to you using my on-demand virtual me. That's right. My team and I created a virtual JJ packed with my books, speeches, and wisdom so I can personally connect with you. Here's how you do it. Subscribe and leave an honest review of the podcast. Take a screenshot of your review. Text it to 813-565-2627. That's 813-565-2627. 6-2-7. My virtual JJ will reply directly. And trust me, this will make your day. So subscribe now at subscribe2jj.com and text me your review. Let's keep thriving together. So first, let's talk about how stress hijacks your weight health. And I want you to think of cortisol as your body's built-in alarm system. It's the hormone that gets you up in the morning. But it's also the one that can keep you up at night if you are stressed out. Now, reality is you want that cortisol coming up in the morning, right? You want those short bursts when needed throughout the day. They help with focus, they help mobilize energy, they can help fight inflammation. But when stress is chronic and cortisol is chronically elevated, that's when things go sideways and it all backfires, because chronic stress equals elevated cortisol equals insulin resistance equals fat storage, and especially fat storage around your waist. There was a study in Psychoneuroendocrinology that followed more than 1,600 Dutch adults, and the researchers were measuring long-term cortisol using hair samples. So that's going to reflect about 3 months worth of exposure. And here's what they found. Every step up in long-term cortisol levels meant about 2 extra inches around the waist and 10 to 15 pounds more of body weight. The higher cortisol levels were linked with 3.5-inch higher, larger waists and 15 to 20 pounds more body weight. And over time, people that had the higher baseline cortisol gained about 0.5 to 1% more weight per year and increased their waist size roughly by 1% every year. So, whew! The translation of all that is that higher long-term cortisol— that's that chronic, not acute— means a bigger waistline, right? That's more abdominal fat and slow, steady fat gain over time. But here's the bigger thing. It's not just fat. Cortisol's catabolic. It can break down muscle, which can be disastrous for your metabolism. There was a review in the Frontiers in Physiology that showed that cortisol suppresses the signals that help you build new muscle, and they ramp up the systems that break it down. Cortisol interferes with insulin and IGF-1. It reduces glucose transport into the muscle, and over time it can cause muscle atrophy, weaker strength, and insulin resistance. And of course, less muscle means a slower metabolism, and less muscle also means fewer places to store carbohydrates. That means that you're going to gain fat more easily, even if you're eating the same amount. And then there's the cravings. So stress boosts ghrelin. Ghrelin is your hunger hormone. If your stomach is empty, your ghrelin's up. Stress also blunts leptin. That's your fullness cue. This is a bad combination. And at the same time, cortisol lights up your brain's reward center, signaling you to go search for sugary, fatty comfort foods. A study in Psychosomatic Medicine found that women with more abdominal fat actually secreted more cortisol under stress and reported eating more sweet, high-fat snacks after that secretion. What's the takeaway here? That stress literally rewires your appetite. So if you're wondering why you can't stay out of the pantry at night, that's not weakness, that's biochemistry backfiring. Now, if you're a data nerd and would really love to see what's going on with your cortisol, the way that you can test it is something called an adrenal salivary index. It's where you spit 4 times throughout the day. Usually it's first thing in the morning, midday, afternoon, and evening. And what it looks at is your cortisol throughout the day, that rhythm of your cortisol, making sure that it's coming up in the morning to wake you up, and then it starts tapering down, especially in the afternoon, and drops down lower in the evening. So there's a normal curve you should have, and this looks at— is the curve normal? Is the curve elevated? Is the curve reversed? And then the other thing that this adrenal salivary index looks at is your cortisol to DHEA ratios, because if you've got issues with cortisol where you're stealing from cortisol, quite often you will start to suppress your DHEA, and that is also problematic. Now another thing that you can do at home is use heart rate variability as an indicator. Heart rate variability, HRV looks at the variability between your heartbeats. The more the variability, which seems counterintuitive, actually is the better. It shows more resilience, your body being able to adapt better. This is especially something I like to use when I'm looking at sleep because of course there's a sleep-wake connection. And here's what most people miss. So getting less than 7 hours of sleep can disrupt your metabolism. Overnight. There was a landmark study in PLOS Medicine on over 1,000 participants, and they found that sleeping 5 hours a night versus 8 caused a 15% lower leptin levels. Remember, that was that fullness hormone. 15% higher ghrelin. That's the hunger hormone, which puts together a perfect recipe, right, for more cravings, more hunger, more snacking the next day. And if that wasn't bad enough, But wait, there's more. There was a study in Nature Communications that used brain scans to show what happens after one night of poor sleep or lost sleep. Your reward centers literally light up for high-sugar, high-fat foods. You know this. I know one poor night of sleep, I'm not craving an egg in the morning. And then your prefrontal cortex, the part that controls impulse and judgment, well, that thing just literally powers down. In other words, your brain is wired to want junk food and say yes to it, like to walk through that coffee shop and have the muffin and the latte. And then Short sleep also changes how your body handles blood sugar. So it's even worse combination. There was a study in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism that showed that just one night of a 4-hour sleep caused 25% insulin resistance increase in healthy adults. And then at Harvard Medical School, the researchers found that in one week of 5-hour nights, insulin sensitivity dropped by 20% and also resting metabolic rate dropped and cortisol levels rose and ability to, to have good glucose control went down. And this was in young, healthy participants. So guess what? You can be eating clean, you can be working out hard, but if you're short on sleep, your metabolism like literally could be running at half speed. I remember this study out of, maybe it was WashU, showed that even if you were eating right and exercising, failure to get the recommended 7 to 9 hours of sleep was setting you up for obesity. I saw this in my husband when I met him Early on in our relationship, it came out that he slept about 5 to 6 hours a night. I was like, oh, this isn't going to work. And he also really loved his sugar. And literally my big focus, one of the biggest first focuses was you got to sleep, and moved him from 5 to 6 hours to 8 to 9 hours. And at that point I was having trouble keeping weight on him. Like he stopped craving sugar, right? And everything evened out. Now, on the longevity side of things, here's the other thing going on with sleep. This is when you release your growth hormone, your repair and recovery hormone. Most of it's released in the first few hours of deep sleep. And when you cut that short, guess what? You're basically shrinking your nightly repair system right now. It's going to be even harder for you to build muscle, to maintain lean muscle. So you got to have that growth hormone effect from good sleep. So these two things go hand in hand. Chronic stress impacts your sleep. Poor sleep is a stressor, kind of the perfect storm. And when you think about it, cortisol, melatonin are really like yin and yang. When cortisol is spiking at night when it shouldn't be, it's basically blocking melatonin and makes it harder to fall asleep. And then even when you do, you've got poor sleep. It's light sleep, it's fragmented sleep. And then of course, if you have poor sleep, your cortisol is gonna be higher the next day, right? So you have this vicious cycle. There was a study from Whitehall, the second cohort in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, and it followed 2,700 adults. And what they found was that those sleeping 5 hours or less had a 15% higher afternoon and evening cortisol compared to people getting 7 to 8 hours. And their morning cortisol rise was smaller. That means they're gonna have trouble waking up. They're not gonna feel as energetic in the daytime. Their daily rhythm was flatter, which is gonna be more fatigue, more weight gain, more burnout. But then it's higher in the afternoon, evening, tired and wired. Now let's talk about perimenopause because that does not help here either. Hate to say it because first off, what starts to happen? Progesterone goes lower. Lower progesterone means lower GABA, which is that big neuroinhibitory transmitter, helps you relax, fall asleep. And then of course, estrogen's going down, leading to night sweats, waking you up. And then melatonin also is declining, which then of course makes it harder for you to fall asleep and stay asleep. So what happens with all of that? You're wired at night, you're tired during the day, you start to gain belly fat, you are not able to recover well. Perfect metabolic storm. All right, well, let's flip the script, right? Shall we fix this? I wouldn't be telling you all of these things if there wasn't something we could do about it. Now, I always like to say that the fastest way to change your health is to change what's at the end of your fork, and of course to eat protein first. And my rule is, especially at your first and last meal, to get in 30 grams of animal or 40 grams of plant and at least 100 grams overall. I do have my protein calculator to help you figure out how much is protein is best for you at jjvirgin.com/proteinfirst, plus some great meals in there as well. So I'll put that into the show notes so you have access to that. But when you eat protein first, some blood sugar and metabolism magic happens. First of all, we know that you've got a better thermic effect of food from protein and that you've got really good satiety. I like to combine that protein with fiber, like 10 grams or more at each meal, so I have great steady release of blood I've got better release of GLP-1 and satiety. And remember, one of the things that can be problematic here is elevated blood sugar or low blood sugar. So this just helps keep things steady as we go. So eat protein first, ideally 0.7 to 1 gram per pound of target body weight. Eat it at your 3 meals. Really focus on getting good amounts at your bumper meals, breakfast and dinner, and get that fiber in there too. They work together, just have that satiety duo and great blood sugar control. And of course, protein's really important. It's part of how you're going to build muscle because of course I'm going to talk about strength training because resistance training not only helps build muscle, but resistance training, you're going to push hard. It's going to help raise cortisol, but it's going to help lower your baseline cortisol over time. There's a 2021 meta-analysis in the Journal of Exercise Science and Fitness that looked at 12 randomized trials in adults over 60. And what they found was that resistance training improves insulin sensitivity and lowers your hemoglobin A1C, right? Your blood sugar measurement over a couple months. And the biggest gains were in the higher intensity programs, by the way. So I say that because I don't want you to be afraid to train hard. You hear stuff out on the internet, "Don't train hard, you're raising your cortisol." You gotta know the difference between acute and chronic. Yes, you're gonna raise your cortisol acutely, but over time that helps with chronically normalizing your cortisol, right? Acute is helpful, chronic can be harmful. So know the difference there. Now, if you're having a little stress time during the day, happens, sure happens to me. Here's what you can do. There was a study in Neuroscience Biobehavioral Reviews that looked at 223 studies and found that slow breathing consistently raises something called parasympathetic tone, your rest and repair system. And by the way, you can do this while you're walking. You can do this before a meeting. You could do this, maybe go outside and get into the grass. But I have found breathwork to be one of the fastest ways I can reset when things are going sideways for me. And I will just do a little bit of box breathing. That is where you breathe in for 4. So you breathe 1, 2, 3, 4. Then you hold it for 4 and then you breathe out for 4. Obviously I'm not going to do this slowly because you'll stop listening, but you get the idea. And then you hold with all the breath out for 4. This is like the easiest thing to do. Try that when you just feel like you're a little anxious, a little stressed. Try that for a reset. That can also be really good before bed as well. So I talked about eating by the plate, but really specifically eating protein first and combining it with fiber. There's another piece in this, and that is eating by the clock. And what we really want to do is get into a normal circadian rhythm. First part of that is stopping eating dinner 2 to 4 hours before bed. There was a study in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism that tested early versus late dinner eaters in 20 healthy adults. And what they found was that moving dinner from 6 PM 10:00 PM, like just before bed, led to higher overnight glucose, lower fat oxidation, and higher cortisol levels during sleep. Just that. So, and I know that I see it on my Oura Ring. If I eat late in the morning, it's like, looks like you ate late last night. It's like someone's watching me. But I also, when I was wearing a CGM, total bust if I ate right before bed. So here's what's happening. When you are getting ready for bed, cortisol's going down, melatonin's coming up, kind of pancreas going to sleep. You're not going to be pumping out a bunch of insulin. That's not what you want to be doing. Along those lines too, you want to make sure that you're hitting a hormonal winner, a good satiety duo before, you know, when you do eat dinner. So you've got that great steady blood sugar response. And then also think about just timing your meals to follow your circadian rhythm during the day. So wake up, eat like 90 minutes to 2 hours after waking up in the morning, then 3 to 5 hours later have lunch, and then 3 to 5 hours later have dinner. Depending on what— how well you deal with caffeine. I am a fast caffeine metabolizer, so I cut it off sometime between 12 and 2. Any later than that and it impacts me. But you might be someone who's a very slow caffeine metabolizer and you might have to cut it off at 9. So know that because that will really impact your sleep. And this is why tracking can be so important, using some kind of a sleep tracker. I've been using Oura for years and I use it more just, you know, now it's just confirming something I already knew, like don't eat late, you know, don't do something I did a big talk at an arena a couple weeks ago, and literally I was so keyed up, I didn't— I barely slept that night. It was, it was really rough. Reminded me of the days when I had rock star clients and they would go to bed at 4 in the morning. And same with Broadway actresses and dancers. They'd go to bed at 4. They couldn't— they were so keyed up from all those stress hormones, you know, as they were working. So use your ring or your tracker to really help you identify what things you need to shift. Because again, one poor night of sleep, you're more insulin resistant, cortisol's higher, you're hungrier, it's not for salmon, and you're better at storing fat. I had a friend who is known as the sleep doctor, and literally he had a group and all they did, they didn't change anything else except for going from being short sleepers, like 5 hours a night, to sleeping 7 to 9 hours a night, and they lost fat. So this is a biggie because eating late at night is gonna mess with that sleep. And again, one of your mantras should be, do not mess with your sleep. All right, let's talk about some of the supplements that can help. And I'm only going to highlight a couple here. One that I love, of course, is magnesium. We all tend to be deficient in this one. You can do a red blood cell magnesium to check. Now, at night, I like to take a glycinate malate combo, kind of calm my body down. I will also take it with my creatine during the day because it actually helps creatine become more effective. There was a study in the Journal of Research in Medical Sciences that found that older adults taking 500 milligrams of magnesium daily for 8 weeks fell asleep faster, slept longer, and had lower nighttime cortisol. So shout out for magnesium. Another one that I've been taking for years is L-theanine. In Nutrients, the 200 milligrams of L-theanine nightly for 4 weeks reduced stress and improved sleep quality in healthy adults. I love theanine with some 5-HTP and melatonin and, uh, inositol. That is what Sleep Candy formula is. And then in the Journal of the American Medical Association, creatine HCL— and they looked at doses of 750 milligrams and 1,500 milligrams a day— improved cognitive performance and increased frontal brain creatine in peri- and postmenopausal women. So better reaction time, better mood stability. And because they were using the HCL form, which is 7 times more bioavailable than monohydrate, they were able to use a much lower, lower dose and then didn't have some of the GI and bloating complaints you'll hear about with monohydrates. So I take that every single day. That's my product, Sheotine, and I use it a lot for if I'm time zone adjusting and have hit any sleep deprivation. So this can be super helpful. Bottom line, these can all be super helpful. I just listed a bunch of tools. Pick one to start with. Habit stack one on top of the next. Make one a habit, then go to the next. Again, as you've been going hearing all of them, the one that you were like, ooh, whatever one was the biggest issue for you, start there, 'cause that'll also make the biggest difference in improving your stress and sleep. Now, if you've been stuck in a cycle of caloric restriction and then exercising and nothing has been working, this could be why. And again, your body isn't lazy. It's not broken. It's just protecting you. When you calm your stress and you repair your sleep, you start burning fat more efficiently. You build muscle faster. You can think clearly. You have a better mood. Feel like yourself again. And that, by the way, no diet app or fitness tracker is ever going to tell you that, but that's the thing that changes everything. So if you're ready to stop Stop fighting your body and start working with it. Make stress and sleep your next transformation target. And again, pick the thing that I like— I gave you all of these things to do. Pick the one that you're like, oh, that's what I really need to focus on. Start there and then just work through all of them. Because when you master your stress and sleep, your metabolism will finally do what it's supposed to do, which is help you age powerfully right now. If you haven't yet, check out my video on cortisol, belly fat, and midlife metabolism and the best workouts Health for Women Over 40, and I'm going to link it below in the show notes. It's the perfect next step. See you there. Be sure to join me next time for more tools, tips, and techniques you can use to look and feel your best and be built to last. Would you prefer an ad-free experience? Join my VIP podcast at subscribe2jj.com for just $4.99 a month or $49.99 a year to unlock uninterrupted ad-free access to all the episodes and insights you love. Also, I'd love to connect with you and hear your thoughts on the podcast. Here's how. First, subscribe to the podcast and leave an honest review. Second, take a screenshot of your review. And third, text to 2-813-567-7677. 5-2-6-2-7. That's 813-565-2627. When you do, I'll reply using my brand new Virtual JJ Virgin. It's my on-demand virtual self built from my books, talks, and years of experience so I can interact with you directly. You'll make my day and I can't wait to hear from you. Thanks for tuning in and I'll catch you on on the next episode. Hey, JJ here, and just a reminder that the Well Beyond 40 podcast offers health, wellness, fitness, and nutritional information that's designed for educational and entertainment purposes only. You should not rely on this information as a substitute for, nor does it replace professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. If you have any concerns or questions about your health, you should always consult with a physician or other healthcare professional professional, make sure that you do not disregard, avoid, or delay obtaining medical or health-related advice from your healthcare professional because of something you may have heard on the show or read in our show notes. The use of any information provided on the show is solely at your own risk.

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