Stop Stress Weight Gain: How Slimpod Helps Reduce Cortisol & Belly Fat

Well, hello, I'm Sandra Roycroft-Davis and I'm the founder of thinkingslimmer.com and the creator of the SlimPod program. And today I have got Lindsay Lowe with me, who is a psychotherapist, and she's on our SlimPod program, but she has amazing insights for everybody on how cortisol and stress drive you to eat. And not only that, how that contributes hugely to a, what they call a cortisol belly, or a stubborn fat around the middle. So welcome, Lindsay, and it's so lovely having you here. I— you posted in our group a few weeks ago, our SlimPod Community, because so many people were struggling with the lockdown and you gave such great insights about the whole cortisol and the whole stress, the stress hormones basically, and I just thought it would be great for us to have a chat because obviously that's all, that's all part and parcel of the SlimPod Programme, but it was just having a psychotherapist explain it and to the group was such a wonderful thing, and you got such a great response. And so over to you, because I'd love you to expand on it, and we just— I promised them that we'd have a chat about it.

Yeah, sure. Okay, so I don't know whether it would be useful first of all to say about myself and my Slimpod journey, maybe.

Absolutely, fantastic.

I think I want to, you know, obviously talk a little bit about stress and how it affects our eating, but also I just want people to know that I'm I'm a Slim Podder just like they are as well, because I've been doing it for just over a year and it has totally transformed, you know, my relationship with food really. So I've had 45 years of being a yo-yo dieter, done every program under the sun, the main ones and some of the less mainstream ones as well, and I've been slim a lot of the time, but I've always put the weight back on and Really, Slimpod has actually changed my attitude to food and eating totally. So I no longer worry about it, and I think that's the biggest thing, is that I don't worry about it.

Absolutely.

And so even though during lockdown I have probably eaten more than I would normally, I know that that is because of my reaction to stress, and that's through many years of responding to things that were challenging, difficult, emotionally difficult, by eating, because that's been my pattern over a long, long time.

Yeah, absolutely. And that's, that's also part of this yo-yo dieting cycle, isn't it? Whereby people just get so stressed about their apparent inability to lose weight that then that just becomes a cycle in itself with the, with the stress. And as we know, stress prevents people losing weight.

Yeah, absolutely. So it is literally a vicious circle because we get stressed about the way we're eating and not losing weight, but that stress is counteracting any, any ability we've got to be able to stay in control and to manage it, because the stress hormones are present then because we're stressed about not losing weight or not being able to be in control. But those very stress hormones they stop us from being able to manage it. So it really is a vicious circle, and that's where SlimPod comes in, I think, because for me, that is the thing that can help to calm the system down. So it's counteracting those stress hormones and the chemicals that are within our system when we are stressed, and I firmly believe that you can't lose weight if you're stressed. So you've got to work on the stress level first before you can work on losing weight.

Million percent, absolutely. Fantastic. I mean, it's lovely to hear that. So you feel in control of food now, apart from when it's the lockdown, obviously?

Yeah, absolutely. So, and it's ebbed and flowed through lockdown, is the honest answer. And I think it's useful also to share another personal thing, is that my dad died recently, and so I've had not only lockdown but also a bereavement of somebody very close to me, and quite a lot of challenge and difficulty around that. But in the past, In the past, I would have castigated myself for losing the plot, if you like, so for not sticking to eating healthily or exercising. But now I don't do that because I know that this is part of being overwhelmed by stress, is actually that I can't focus on eating correctly necessarily all the time and doing all the exercise things that I want to do. Actually, I cut myself a bit of slack and go, "Do you know what? This is a really difficult time." And all the things that I know about our nervous system tell me that my nervous system is reacting to what's going on at the moment. So yeah, it is a— essentially it's a life-threat situation, isn't it?

You know, absolutely.

I might not personally think that I am at risk, but my nervous system can't tell the difference. My nervous system thinks, actually, lots of people are dying, therefore you could die too. And what it does then is it goes into an automatic process, so it starts to release stress hormones like cortisol, like adrenaline, and that's a normal process that our body will go through when it, when it assesses that there is a danger to life, and that's what it's doing at the moment. So we have to understand that and give ourselves a bit of leeway in terms of how we manage that, because some days we'll do better than others, some days we'll be okay and we'll think, yeah, I'm feeling controlled today, today I've made I've made healthy choices about the food I've eaten, I've been for my walk, and I've done the exercise. But then other days just won't go as well as that, and other days will be more tricky. And I think we just have to give ourselves permission to, you know, some days have a bad day.

Absolutely. And, you know, it's not just about lockdown, is it? I mean, we were going through a kind of a stress epidemic anyway, and mental health problem in the country and probably worldwide actually anyway, and people just, just daily life is stressful and then it kind of all accumulates, doesn't it? And it just, and the more you, the more then that you eat as in response to stress, the more of a habit then that that becomes because your brain associates it with with pleasure and coping.

Yeah, absolutely. So it's not only the stress hormones that are in your body that are telling your body you need to eat more, and you need to eat more quick energy food because that's the way evolution has taken us. So our body is told it needs more energy, so let's eat something that's high fat and high sugar. But also, we, we are driven by habits, and our brain does this thing called pattern matching, and those then get ingrained as habits. So it thinks, oh, this is a situation that reminds me of X, Y, or Z, which was very dangerous, uncertain, and I felt really stressed about it. This situation reminds me of that. And what did I do in that situation? Oh, I ate a lot of chocolate and crisps. And so our brain is already pattern-matched to do that very same thing. So we've kind of got a double whammy, really.

Yeah. Absolutely.

You know, that is where SlimPod comes in, isn't it? Because it helps you to unpick all of that. So much as I do in therapy with individuals, you're doing with the program in terms of getting people to look at what are the habits that I have accumulated over my however many years it is of eating poorly or whatever.

Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. And I suppose, you know, with, with our program, I've, I've been encouraging people to really, really use the Chillpod as much as possible. And I know that you said about that on your post as well, but exercise is so important, isn't it?

Yeah, absolutely. So it's kind of, it's one of the big changes for me, I suppose, over the last 18 months is that I have become, I guess, not addicted to exercise, but certainly I notice when I don't do it. I notice that I don't feel as good. So one of the big changes for me is that I no longer weigh myself. I might as well give the scales away to a charity shop once they're open again, because they're just in a cupboard and I never get them out. But I can tell in myself by how I feel and by how my clothes feel and how much energy I've got as to how well I'm doing in terms of looking after myself, because essentially that's what we're doing, isn't it? We're talking about how we look after ourselves and our physical body. And exercise is a big part of that for me now. So I know the day— I mean, earlier this week I wasn't very well. It wasn't the dreaded coronavirus, but I had a couple of days where I was unwell, so I didn't exercise. And then I had a day when I thought, right, I'm not going to exercise today because I'm only just feeling better. But today I've exercised and I felt so much better because I've done it. And it really does boost our dopamine levels. And that's what we need, is we need the dopamine hit to come from something like exercise rather than coming from food, whatever our food treat is, because it's nicely, you know, it's the same chemical in our brain, and we all need that, and we get it from lots of different sources, as you know, but one of the good ways we can get it is from exercise.

Absolutely. And that's what the SlimPod actually does, is create this kind of bridge where you are no longer getting the— it's almost like a metaphorical switch that you are no longer getting the buzz from food. You're getting it, hopefully, from exercise, unless you're, you know, you sometimes you might need to give yourself a little bit of a kick with that, but a lot of people find that that's what happens. So yeah, I mean, honestly, it's been, it's been, it was such a revelation when I saw your post, because I just— sometimes it requires somebody else to, you know, to help with the process of explanation, I think, because it's such a difficult subject as well. It's a really difficult one to get your head around, how your hormones can actually be responsible for driving you to eat. It's just the whole the whole cortisol, adrenaline, the whole, you know, nervous system. It's a really difficult thing to explain to people.

So it is, and it's really helpful to understand it, I think, in terms of it's part of our body, our nervous system, all the hormones and nervous system all interact with each other, and how that all works together. It is complicated, and I only know it on a very basic level. There'll be other people who know it in a much a more profound way than I do, maybe. But I understand it in terms of how it affects me and how it affects my clients. I've done a lot of work with people who've suffered abuse as children, or as adults, actually. It's all connected to our response to trauma, really. And actually, you know, I just kind of want to mention that because I'm sure there are lots of Slimpodders who've experienced those things in their life as well, and that means we have a much more sensitive response to, to the hormones as well. So it's worth understanding that. I think if you are a person who's experienced any significant amount of trauma in your life or difficulty as a young person, then that will likely have affected your response to the hormones, and your nervous system will be acutely triggered by stress. And that's not to say you can't change things, because you can. We are in control of our mind, body, our destiny, But if you understand it, you understand that this can happen to you and that your hormones can hijack you at times, then you've got a much better opportunity to be able to stay in control and to understand what's going on.

Yeah, absolutely. If you're aware, then that's like the first thing on the road to— well, that's where empowerment comes from, doesn't it?

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

So anyway, look, I'm not going to keep you any longer. Thank you so much. It's— I really really appreciate you spending the time to talk about this because it's just been over the last 6 weeks of lockdown, it's just been such a huge subject and something that I just felt that, you know, we needed to do a little bit more of an explanation of. So thank you so much, Lindsay, and yeah, Thank you, and also thank you for your kind words about the program.

Oh, you're welcome, and it's all true.

Thank you, take care.

All right, take care, bye.