Why You Have a Cortisol Belly (And How to Fix It)

Cortisol and stress was never something that I really took into consideration when I started taking care of my health and when I started working out. And I probably should, because what I didn't understand then that I actually understand now is that that is arguably one of the most important pillars that you should be tackling and that you should be prioritizing and optimizing in order for you to, to be the best version of yourself and be as healthy as you potentially can. And it's a lesson that took me a lot of time to learn. So my goal with this video is to break down exactly that long lesson for you into a short compressed YouTube video so that you can walk away without having to fuck up for a good amount of years and actually implement these philosophies and principles into your own life. And if you're new to the channel, first of all, welcome. My name is Lucas. I'm just a regular guy from Stockholm, Sweden. Over the last 5 to 6 years, I've dedicated all my time and energy to try to solve complex health problems based on my own journey. Because when I started out, I was working a corporate job. I had all these ambitions of businesses I wanted to start, but I was stuck in this constant loop of just putting in the work, not getting the results out of it, and feeling absolute shit. And I wanted to get huge. I wanted to become a bodybuilder. I wanted to get big muscles. But then it come to a point where I completely shifted my focus towards I don't even care how I look. I don't even care how much muscles I have. I just want to feel good. I just want to be healthy. And funny enough, when I shifted my focus, everything changed. This picture or these two pictures are a good representation of this. You know, a couple of years ago, I was doing everything right. I had a perfect workout plan, perfect macros, but I still was dealing with brain fog, energy crashes, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, massive gut problems. I was dependent on caffeine. I had sky-high cortisol and I was fatigued and had no energy throughout the whole day. This is me now, you know, not even wanting to look good. It's actually pretty interesting when you think about it. But this is just a pure sign that a good physique always comes as a byproduct of you actually being truly healthy from the inside. And that's the lesson that I've learned. And obviously on this channel, I've already broken down exactly what I've done in my shoes in order to achieve this transformation. So in this video, I'm gonna break down exactly what I've been doing with 3 of my clients that have, you know, gotten fantastic results in just a very short amount of time. So you can take the same principles and apply it to your own life. So here, first guy is Luca. The common thing with all of these 3 guys is that they are all business owners, right? Once again, if you're— you know this if you've watched my channel— this is not advice for just the average Joe that doesn't have a lot of stress on their table and that just can do whatever for their whole day. This is for you if you have a high stress load, you have a business, you have a high demanding job, you have a lot of shit on your table, excuse my language, and you don't have time to mess around. You just want to get the maximum maximized return on the things you're doing in regards to your health. This this advice is going to be from you. If we take Luca here as an example, it's exactly forty days between these pictures. On the left here, you see a classic sign of like a cortisol belly, bloated, inflamed, water retention. Forty days later, looking like an absolute unit. Here is the proof for that as well. 17th January and then the 26th of Feb here, so 40 days. Then we have Lucas as well, Lucas Medal from Mexico. Lucas is also a business owner, and as Lucas said here himself, 30 days between these pictures, it's exactly the same weight on the scale, 81.5 here. A month ago, bloated, stressed out, soft, flat gut, and stress levels were taxing me. Always been strong in the gym but always suspected it was not the calories or the progressive overload, something else was wrong. Today, 30 days later, same weight, calm, strong focus, crazy sport, blah blah blah. Superman Protocol is rebuilding my digestive system, rebalancing my nervous system. I'm progressing in the gym, blah blah blah. You get the point. Jaren, third one here, just because you could probably tell all these guys are a bit younger, of course it's going to work for them. Okay, here's a 44-year-old business owner from Hawaii, Jaren. Same thing here. 2 months between this, or 2 and a half months exactly. Um, so without further ado, let's dive into the whole protocols and exactly what I've been doing with these guys in order to get these crazy results in such a short amount of time. Once again, you don't get these results from just fixing training and nutrition. Training and nutrition is not very scalable. You can only train so hard and you can only eat so good. It's the rest that creates the masterpiece. So let's dive into that. 3-pillar framework. What first we're going to cover, what they were doing wrong. So overtraining without real recovery, this is the first thing that I always see. Yes, exercise is healthy, but too much high-intensity training becomes a massive stressor. Training 5 to 6 times per week, always pushing intensity and never truly recovering— this is the loop that a lot of people are finding themselves in. Constantly adding stress without ever coming back down is the real problem. So if you go to a regular trainer, a lot of my clients when they come, they've had a personal trainer, they've had something like this where it's like This trainer tells them to go into the gym for six times a week, do all this cardio, and then just completely fry their whole system. Advice from a roided up bodybuilder or a fitness influencer doesn't apply to someone that has a high demanding job and runs a business. That's the first thing we have to understand here. We we are playing two completely different games. So you have to have someone. That understand the rules of the game that you're playing in order to compose a, a plan for you. Late night stress and poor sleep habits— working late, screens late, and mentally stimulated at night— which means that their body never fully shifting into recovery mode. Massive thing as well. Sleep are usually fucked up. They are not prioritizing it. They're having, having this effort mindset— just push, push through, just do the work— and And that's the only thing that matters. I feel amazing. I feel good on 5 hours of sleep. I can just push through. Absolutely terrible. Chronic stimulation all day long as well. One of the biggest modern cortisol drivers is constant stimulation. Caffeine in the morning, pre-workout before the training, more caffeine in the afternoon. Constant input, constant dopamine, always on, never switching off is a massive thing as well. Always multitasking. Always. If I do this, I'm going to answer to emails at the same time as well, and just never giving your body the rest and the resets. I like to view this stress as a chart. If you are constantly activated throughout the whole day, your stress chart is going to go straight up like this, and that is not going to be a good thing. If you actively get some resets in and some switching off in, your chart is going to go like this, but it's going to go up and down, up and down, and up and down. And that's how you balance out and you even out the stress chart for the full day. Which means that constantly activated, boom, getting the resets in, and that is what we are trying to achieve. If we think of this from a chart perspective, digestive stress as well. A lot of them were eating foods they thought were healthy, not digesting them properly, eating quickly, distracted, stressed, eating in front of their computer, doing all these crazy things, you know, listening to podcasts whilst they're eating because once again they want to be as efficient as possible. Constantly bloated, poor absorption, low-grade inflammation all day long is the result of Constant eating and no structure as well. Snacking, eating small meals all day, no real digestive breaks, insulin, which leads to insulin constantly elevated and digestion never resets. I want you to think about your digestion as a washing machine. If you put on a program on your washing machine and you put in a batch of clothes, let's say it's gonna take 3 hours to, to, to, for it to, to be done. It's not like you're gonna come back 30 minutes later and throw in another pair of underwear and then 30 minutes later you throw in another pair of socks. No. You put that program on and then you let it run. That's exactly how you should be thinking about food structure and, and eating. You shouldn't walk around snacking. You're not going to open up the machine and throw in more things when your program has started, right? No, you let it run, then you take a new batch of clothes and you throw in and you put on another program. Simple, simple framework on how to think about this. That is exactly how you should be approaching nutrition— structured meals. So that was the things that all of these guys were doing wrong. Now to what actually fixes it and the reframes that we have to make. This is more of an in-depth advanced guide and explanation of this. If you've seen my earlier videos, you know all the smaller habits that we want to install, all these small things. So this is like the advanced protocol for it. So the first thing we have to understand and doing is to stop trying to lower cortisol all day. One of the biggest myths in the health space is that cortisol is always bad. It is not. Cortisol is normal, necessary hormone. You need it for energy, inflammation, recovery, and even adaption from exercise. In fact, you will not see meaningful progress from training without a healthy cortisol spike. So if your strategy is suppress stress all day, take calming supplements constantly, avoid anything that raises cortisol, you may actually be blocking the exact signal your body needs to get fitter, leaner, and more resilient to stress. That means a classic example of this— cold plunges is getting a massive, massive, um, bad rep right now. Oh, high cortisol, you don't want to do this, it's raising your stress hormones. Yeah, it does, and that's the whole point, right? Short term, it's bad, it raises your stress, but long term, what that is doing is that spike in stress is training your vagus nerve to once again be able to be more resilient towards stress in the future. So That is like a repetition for your body's ability to deal with stress. And the goal is not to completely eliminate it. The goal is to make our bodies as protective and resilient to stress as possible, because that when we do that and we increase our stress capacity and stress budget, we can do more shit without burning out and without fucking ourselves and without shooting ourselves in the foot. So the question should never be like just eliminate, eliminate, eliminate. The goal should always be to expand our capacity and expand our budget so that we can do more and handle more and continue to work, put all these hours towards our business, and continue to be able to train and get into better, better shape at the same time. So everything elevates at the same time, right? Right now, if I'm just thinking of myself, I have no problem working 12-hour days plus workouts plus doing all these things because my body has been so adapted so I can handle that amount of stress. If that was the case three years ago, I would have been completely fried. You know, just a couple hours in front of the screen, and I'm like I'm fatigued. I'm getting energy crashes. I can't focus right now. I can punch through twelve hours, no problem, because my budget has expanded, and my my resilience towards stress is so far greater compared to what it was. So that's how I want you to think about it. If you suppress or if your strategies no sorry I mentioned that action steps. So once again, we want to stop asking how do I lower cortisol? And start asking, is my cortisol pattern healthy? Go once again. Goal is not zero cortisol. The goal is high when it should be and low when it should be low. You got to fix your rhythm, not just your cortisol levels. A healthy cortisol pattern looks like this: it rises in the morning, and it spikes when needed—training, light activity—then comes back down and is low at night. That rhythm is everything because what we saw with these clients was that cortisol wasn't the problem; the timing usually was as well. They were wired at night, flat in the morning, and dependent on stimulation and stuck in a constant negative feedback loop. So what did we do? We built their day around strong activation early, strong downregulation later, you know, wind-down protocols, protocols for in the morning, morning routines. That means light exposure early, training early in the day, caffeine earlier only if doing so, reducing stimulation in the evening. And this alone started changing sleep recovery and that puffy look just by doing Those simple things. You don't want to blunt your training response. This is also huge. This is where a lot of people self-sabotage themselves. They try to fix stress by calming everything down always, even when the body actually needs to activate. Here's the truth there: if you blunt cortisol at the wrong time, you blunt the adaptation. So you blunt the the like the repetition towards a more resilient body towards stress, right? So if you're taking calming supplements before training as an example, or trying to suppress stress signals absolutely always, you may be. Blocking muscle gain, fat loss, and performance. So the key principle is, is here is not all stress is bad. The right stress at the right time is what actually is good and what changes your body and what helps you with your stress budget and your stress resilience. So don't always— even me, I'm saying this chart, right? Don't think of it as soon as you get a stress, you have to compensate. That's not what I mean here, right? We have to be very strategic about how we're approaching this and doing it at the right time, because if we're shutting it down and like fixing the stress at the wrong times, that also becomes not the best once again, because then we will blunt adaptation. So then you— if you— let's take a cold plunge once again as an example. If you do everything in your power to— or let's say you go into a sauna, which is also stressor, but just to give an example always after you do the cold plunge to kind of take away the, the little stress response, well, you're not really getting that adaptation over time. So you're better off just doing the cold, but doing it very short to begin with and slowly building up until the point where you can, you know, be in a cold plunge for 3 minutes, you can go up, and then your body like handles that and is able to recover very quickly by itself, not by any external other source, if that makes any sense, just to kind of use the same example. We want to use stress, then recover fast. Once again, the goal is not avoiding stress. The goal is to creating a big stress response, then recovering quickly. That is what healthy physiology looks like. It means train hard enough to create a meaningful signal, allow your body to activate when needed, and then make sure it comes back down efficiently. One of the key things that I see in a lot of clients when they come to me is they train very, very light because like I don't want to put too much stress on your body, but then they do all this volume instead, which is just like very, very counterintuitive. Instead, how we should looking be looking at this is you want to do super, super little. But you want to do that fucking as intense as possible. You want to get as big of a stress spike you can from as little as possible, and then slowly build that up over time. That's how we should be approaching it, and that's exactly what I've been doing with these clients as well. The body that stays stuck in stress is the body that starts paying the price. So some action steps here: we focus on recovery capacity once again—not just workouts, not just supplements—recovery capacity. And that includes doing small things as breathing practices later in the day. Or when needed, obviously getting adequate sleep, getting proper fueling throughout the whole day, and not stacking stimulation all day long, and not living in a constant mental overdrive state, which is also one thing that is going to mess everything up. Clean up the sleep stress cycle. These clients were stuck in a in a loop: wired at night, poor sleep, exhausted in the morning, reliant on caffeine after that because they had bad sleep, then they crash later in the afternoon, and then repeat that process. So the key shift here is that we stopped. Forcing the body in opposite directions. Instead, we build based on energy earlier, calm later, right? That is the daily rhythm. That is the circadian rhythm. Because when sleep improves, everything also improves. You know, that's one of the highest leverage things we can pull. Cortisol, digestion, and body composition all is gonna be directly affected by you just sleeping better as well. We're also using carbs very strategically. This is where most people get it wrong. They think that carbs are the problem, but in reality, carbs can help regulate cortisol because cortisol is an energy demand signal. When your body gets the signal that energy is available, it can relax. So what did we do? We used carbs post-training later in the day if needed. We still have to think about the Randle cycle and not mixing too much carbs and fats together. So the best thing here is to structure it around the training, but also if we needed a bit of carbs before sleep to help calm down the body. And this will help reduce stress, improve sleep, reduce that wired feeling, and flatten the stomach as Return. So the real fix is actually teaching your body safety again. When we think about this, if I had to simplify everything we did to one line, it would be that we taught their body when to push and when to recover. That is the simplified way of what we've been doing here, because their system had lost the ability to do so themselves. So what does that mean on paper? What it means: clear structure, less chaos, better rhythm, better recovery. When the body feels safe, fueled, regulated, it stops holding on to inflammation, water, and that cortisol belly bloated look. And in return, you're gonna get crazy results like this. You know, 40 days—it's absolutely ridiculous. 30 days on Lucas here, same weight. 30 days, like bloated, inflamed. You look at this, and then you compare it here. V taper starting to come down. Like it's absolutely ridiculous. Same thing with Jaren as well. Two and a half months here. So if you've been dealing with stubborn belly fat, bloating, poor recovery, bad sleep, gut issues, or feeling like your body is always in fight or flight, this is exactly why surface level advice usually fails because this is deeper than just eat less or take this supplement. You have to look at stress physiology, cortisol timing. Recovery, sleep quality, fueling, gut health, nervous system regulation, and your full health picture. It's just not—it's not a one little thing that is going to fix fix it all. This one thing is going to take everything to the next level. That's not how I view it, although I would argue that stress is one of the most leveraged things because that will affect absolutely everything else. It will affect your gut health. It will affect your hormones. It will affect absolutely everything. But so if there's one thing to focus on, you know, you could argue that that's stress. But All the other pieces have to be in place as well for it to actually work in the in the long run, and that is exactly what we do inside my coaching program. You've heard this before, and that's exactly why I'm taking the approach that I'm taking with my clients. We don't just throw random fixes at symptoms; we go deep into your full health and performance protocol so we can identify what is actually driving the issue, whether that's stress, poor recovery, gut dysfunction, bad sleep patterns, under fueling, or nervous system that's stuck in overdrive. We do a current situation audit. So when you come in and you work with me and we start together, I take a full review on how you do things right now because by doing so I can pinpoint exactly what you're doing wrong, right? For example, I had— I have a new client that just came in. He had been trying everything, had been to all the doctors in the world, all these pills, they haven't fixed his sleep, all these things. One thing that I noticed, okay, have you ever spoken about where I saw some patterns based on previous clients? He was peeing a lot during the night, waking up, all these things. Have you ever thought about histamine sensitivity? No, no one has ever told me that. Boom, fixing that by seeing what you're doing and by him what he's doing and understanding his symptoms. I'm able to pinpoint exactly what you're doing wrong, which means that we can pinpoint things and you will also, by us doing so, get results very, very quickly, right? Because usually it's just about fine-tuning and fixing the highest leverage things, and that's always what we want to focus on, right? We want to focus on your specific problems that you have In order to elevate everything else. So if you're tired of guessing and you want to fix this at the root, check out the first link in the description to apply for my coaching. And you're going to be speaking to me or my right-hand man Anton. It's just a discovery call. See where you're at. Understand your situation a bit better and see if the Superhuman Protocol is something for you. Once again, that is my coaching program where we do twice a month one-to-ones. We do a full health analysis. We we focus on everything regarding your health, blood work, absolutely everything. And that is once again. It's not just a training and nutrition plan or program, right? That's not very scalable. Training and nutrition, you can only do so much. As I said, it's focusing on all these small little variables around that will make the real difference in the end. And these are just some of the examples here. Same thing here. Landon, business owner from the US. Radovan, software engineer from the Czech Republic. Rasmus Tonda, business owner. Jaren, once again, my best friend Ludwig, that is defined in the financial Industry, cortisol belly, boom. Laser Sharps, same thing here. Noel, Arthur, I'd argue it's the same situation here, you know, bloated, inflamed, boom. 2 months later, Blake, 3 and a half months later, Leo. You get the point. All these guys get these crazy results because we take a— we take an approach that covers literally everything regarding health. It's not just training, nutrition. It's not going to get you anywhere. We're focusing on every single aspect around your health and dialing every single thing that we can in so that we get the craziest results in the shortest amount of time. Once again, you're not getting results like this by just training right and eating right. You probably already tried that. You've gotten nowhere, right? So if this sounds like something for you, check out the first link in the description. If you have any questions about it, just drop, drop it below or reach out on Instagram. And once again, this is how to fix cortisol belly for good. A bit of a more advanced protocol and explanation. If you want to look at more so habits, what you should be installing in this, you can check my How to Fix Chronic Stress for Good video on my channel as well, where I talk about a bit more things that I've been doing myself. But if you want to fix your cortisol belly and your bloated, inflamed look, this is the advanced explanation on exactly how to do so. Eliminate all the shit that you're doing wrong, fix all these things and understand it, and then Come back in a couple of weeks and thank me. So that's it. How to fix your cortisol belly for good. If you have any questions, drop them below. Appreciate you for watching. Let me know if you have any thoughts about this, and I'll see you in the next one. Ciao.