128: Naturally thin nervous systems: How cortisol/stress impacts your weight and what naturally lean women do differently

I know there's so much information out there on social media right now about cortisol and stress and how stress can maybe cause weight gain or a lot of people saying the reason why you can't lose weight is because your cortisol is so high and you just need to lower your cortisol. I want to share my perspective on this and it's good news because even if your cortisol is high you can still be naturally thin. I want to share how that works, what you can do about it and what's actually going on from a nervous system perspective as well as what might be different about the nervous systems of women who are naturally thin and have never struggled with food or their weight. My name is Ashlyn, I'm the host of Heartlet Wellness. I am so lucky and grateful and blessed to be here with you once again for another episode and let's dive right in. I am really excited to record this episode. I'm sitting in my childhood home. I'm visiting my family helping my parents take care of their dog and I'm sitting here. It's a foggy rainy morning. I have some lamps on hazel. The dog is laying right next to me. So if you hear snoring or deep breathing, it's her. I have a lovely fuzzy heating pack over my womb. It's cycle day two or three for me. Everything feels really cozy right now and I love recording podcasts when I feel this way. I really want to talk to you today about the nervous systems of naturally thin women, what's different about their nervous systems versus yours and really about stress and cortisol and how they may impact your weight. I know so many people think that stress automatically causes weight gain and that cortisol is this like villain hormone and everyone posts on social media reels of before and after saying, "I just lowered my cortisol and look how much weight I lost or look how much less puffy I look." There's so much more to this story that I think gets missed because if it were true that stress automatically caused weight gain or cortisol automatically caused weight gain, then even naturally thin people who get stressed and have high cortisol would gain weight. They don't. I know a lot of naturally lean people who have gone through very stressful seasons of life who potentially even had actual high cortisol in their hormonal profile and their weight actually didn't change at all. And the real problem isn't necessarily cortisol or stress. It's how your nervous system responds to that stress, which I think that's a much more empowering message because if we just assume that cortisol is the reason for weight gain. It kind of gives us no power. It's like, "Well, I'm just a victim to the stressful season and there's nothing I can do about it. I just need to take a bunch of adrenal cocktails and cortisol lowering concoctions and do low intensity workouts and then magically maybe my body will lose excess." But here is what's actually going on. So when we have high cortisol or when we are in a season of stress, chronic stress especially, our adrenal glands release a steroid hormone called cortisol. And this hormone is very, very important. We don't want to just demonize this hormone because we need it to survive. And it's a hormone that helps our body respond to stress. It helps our body get activated into that fight or flight state of our nervous system into that sympathetic activation. And we also need cortisol in just a normal rhythm throughout the day. So it's a hormone that actually wakes us up in the morning, which is why it's the highest in the morning. And then it kind of gradually declines all throughout the day and reaches its lowest point at night time so we can fall asleep. And it also spikes during exercise, which is really important. We want it to spike during exercise. So we have energy to do that exercise. And so we don't want to just have like no cortisol. We don't want to try and make our goal to have the lowest levels of cortisol as possible because that can actually cause other issues like adrenal burnout or adrenal fatigue. And so we want to have cortisol. We just want to have it in the appropriate amount. Cortisol's main job is to make sure that we have energy available to deal with what's happening in our life. When we are in a stressful moment, a stressful season in cortisol gets released, it actually tells our liver to release glucose energy into our bloodstream. And so cortisol is actually mobilizing energy into the bloodstream. So we have energy. It's not actually storing fat. So this whole narrative that if you have high cortisol, it's just going to make you store more fat. That's not exactly how it's working at like a biochemical level. And I do want to say that of course, like having high cortisol is not necessarily a good thing for your health. I made a whole podcast episode about this. This is actually the most listened to episode out of all the episodes, which I find very interesting because it's such a like, I don't know unique thing that I recorded. It's not always about relationship with food and nervous system stuff. But I think it's episode 57 if you want to listen to that one that goes into the root causes of why you have high cortisol. But cortisol is not the direct reason that you're carrying excess storage on your body. And I'm not saying, okay, well, let's just ignore the fact that you have high cortisol and focus on something else because of course for your health, it's probably not great to have super high cortisol levels. But we're not going to, you know, just lower our cortisol with supplements and then magically lose a bunch of weight unless we also change our relationship with food at the same time. Another thing I did want to mention is that when I'm talking about how cortisol doesn't necessarily cause weight gain in this episode, I'm not referring to extreme circumstances like syndromes like cushing syndrome. I don't know if you've ever heard of that, but it's, it happens often when people have a certain tumor and it causes their body to release insanely high amounts of cortisol and leads to a very specific set of symptoms, characteristics. And that is a whole different conversation. I'm talking about the majority of you out there who have quote unquote high cortisol from chronic stress or from trauma or from under sleeping or over working over exercising. And you feel like you can't lose weight because of that. I'm talking to those of you who have that not cushing syndrome. Think about cortisol kind of like coffee. I'll give you two analogies in case you're not a coffee drinker like me. But think about cortisol kind of like coffee in the right amount like in a normal amount. Coffee wakes you up. It gets you moving and keeps you alert. Maybe it helps you have a bowel movement. But if we just pound back coffee all day long for days and days and days and days. You're going to feel jittery. You're going to feel wired. You're going to feel burnt out. But the coffee doesn't make you gain weight. It's what you reach for when you're tired, when you're burnt out, when you're jittery like maybe the comfort food or the extra pastries or the candy in the break room. That eating in response to the jitteriness is what actually causes the weight gain coffee isn't going to make you gain weight. Same thing is true with cortisol. Cortisol can make us feel certain ways that make us reach for excess food. But it's not actually causing weight gain magically without you understanding what's happening. The other analogy that you can think about is a fire alarm. If there's a fire alarm going off in a house, the alarm itself is not going to burn the house down. The problem is what you do when it's ringing when the fire alarm is ringing you panic, you're grabbing random things you're forgetting the exit plan. That is what's going to cause an issue if you're not exiting the building in the proper way. But the alarm itself isn't the problem. Same thing with cortisol. Cortisol is like the alarm. But it's not actually responsible for the weight gain. It's how we respond to that alarm. That can change how the plan ends or how the situation ends. Naturally, thin people, they also have stress. They also produce cortisol. They experience stressful seasons of life just like you may. The difference is they don't use food as their main coping strategy when the alarm bell goes off. I don't know if you can think about some naturally thin people. Don't think about the wellness influencers that are forcing themselves to be thin through crazy macro tracking things and overexercising and GLP ones or who knows what else. Think about people you know in your life who have truly even thin like from the beginning since you've ever known them. They've never struggled with food. They're truly just eating whatever they want. They probably eat a lot of carbs and sandwiches and pizza and sweets and things like that. They are human just like you. They have stress. Some of them might even have high cortisol. Some of them might even have metabolism issues or parasites or mold. And they're still lean. And the reason why is because of how they respond to cortisol and nervous system dysregulation. They have the same nervous system that you have. They get activated into fight or flight. They make it went to shutdown. They also have times where they're feeling stable. The difference is they have a different relationship to food than you. do and you can learn how to have the same relationship with food that they do and become naturally lean yourself, which is something that I can guide you to inside heart-led eating. So let's talk about your nervous system and food and what actually happens because when your nervous system goes into sympathetic into fight or flight, this is when we have a release of cortisol. This is when many women lose that normal rhythm with food. If you struggle with food, if you have a history of dieting, if you've struggled with under-eating or overeating or binge eating or counting calories or tracking macros, if you've had any experience with food, there's a good chance that when your nervous system goes into sympathetic fight or flight, your normal rhythm with food gets a little bit wonky. And so when we are in a regulated, calm, ventral vagal state, this is when our digestion is the best it will be, our hunger cues are accurate, our food choices feel intuitive, we can hear fullness cues more easily. But when we go into anything other than a state, if we go into fight or flight or we go into shutdown, our, well let's talk about fight or flight first, our body is flooded with adrenaline, with cortisol, our mind starts to race, our our body literally goes into survival mode. And when we are in this survival mode, if we have a wonky relationship with food, we will often experience phantom hunger, which I'm going to talk about in a minute, more urgency around food, we have a hard time hearing our fullness cues, and we also probably have more cravings for sugary processed foods outside of the context of hunger. If we go into the state of shutdown into dorsal vagal, this is often when we feel numb, we feel disassociated, we kind of have no awareness of food in our body, it's that bottomless pit feeling where you feel like you could just eat any in eat and never stop. That's because you're literally numb, your body is numbing you on purpose to try and protect you from intense sensation. And so we often overeat or binge when we're in this state as an attempt to regulate and sooth. And so when we are eating from dysregulation, it often leads to overeating and creating excess storage on the body. We're using food as this regulating tool to help us shift states. So I know I say this all the time, but eating when you're emotional or eating when you're stressed, it's not about a lack of willpower, it's your brilliant nervous system, your brilliant body, attempting to create regulation or create safety. And eating actually helps stimulate the vagus nerve with the chewing and the swallowing. It gives you that quick hit of dopamine and oxytocin. So it literally does temporarily create regulation and safety. And this is a learned response. Naturally thin women don't have this automatic connection between nervous system dysregulation and food. So they might experience stress or exhaustion or overwhelm, but they don't have that neural pathway that has linked up. Oh, when I feel this way, I eat and then I feel better. So I'll just keep doing that every time I feel stressed. They don't have that that neural pathway linked up. They have other ways of dealing with that stress. And I'm not saying that they're all good because I do know some quote unquote thin people who have some other not so healthy coping mechanisms, whether it be shopping or scrolling or even alcohol or drugs or cigarettes. Like I'm not telling you that you should just swap your eating for another unhealthy habit. We want to actually learn how to regulate without food. And so I hope you can see that it's not cortisol that's causing the weight gain. It's how your nervous system responds and how you choose to use food in those moments that impacts your weight. Let's get a little bit more detailed about what's actually going on and some specific things that might happen to you when your cortisol is high. That will actually contribute to access storage. The first one is what I call phantom hunger. And phantom hunger is hunger that feels real but isn't actually real. I can't tell you how many clients I've worked with where we've discovered the fact that they've been eating from phantom hunger for a lot of their life. And they have a huge light bulb moment when they understand the difference between body hunger and brain hunger or body hunger and phantom hunger. Phantom hunger is it's not driven by energy needs. It's not coming from oh my body needs caloric intake right now. It's coming from nervous system chaos nervous system dysregulation. And then the interesting thing is that if you start to pay attention to your emotions on a somatic level. This is something that I talk about all the time in heart-led eating. We feel emotions most often in our torso area. We feel them in our chest and our heart and our gut and our throat kind of in that that torso area of our body. We don't usually feel emotions like in our fingers or toes. They're really in in our heart space area. And if you think about where your stomach is it's in the exact same area. And a lot of times when we are feeling stressed or emotional there is an actual turning sensation in the gut that can often be mistaken as hunger. And we feel like there's this like motion in our torso or this movement or this like void in our torso. And we're thinking oh that must be hunger when it's really emotions moving through our body. And this is why it's so so so important when we're healing our relationship with food to pair it with lots of somatic work to actually be in the body. So we can start to understand the difference between all of the different cues and signals that are coming from our body. So often we're really stuck in our head and we're eating from the head we're eating from the brain. We're even trying to process our life through our head with talk therapy and journaling and writing and there's so much mental processing going on. But we're so disconnected from the body itself that we have not a strong familiarity with emotions and what they feel like and hunger and fullness and all of these really intelligent cues that are existing in your body and not in your brain. When your nervous system is activated so a K when you have lots of cortisol pumping through your blood our interoception is less accurate and can get kind of scrambled. And interoception is just your ability to sense internal cues within your body like hunger, fullness, if you need to pee, if you're tired, if you're sore, it's your ability to be in your body and feel what's going on inside your body. And so when interoception is less accurate because you're stressed, you can't hear, grullen and leptin, these hunger and fullness hormones as easily as when you are quote unquote regulated. There's kind of this interoception confusion that can happen. The cool thing is we can strengthen our interoception, we can grow our ability to sense these internal cues and get to know the difference between phantom hunger, true hunger, emotional hunger, brain hunger, true hunger. And this is something that I teach in depth inside heartled eating because I truly don't think we can fully heal our relationship with food without doing this work. When I talk about reading your built in calorie calculator and learning how to trust your body's built in calorie calculator, I'm talking about interoception. I'm talking about the ability to feel into your body, into your stomach, into your energy, into these very subtle cues that are coming from your body. That tell you exactly when to eat, how much to eat, what types of foods to eat. There's this really incredible guide. It blows my mind the more I learn about it. Inside your body that literally tells you exactly when what and how much to eat. The problem is you're probably eating from your brain instead of your body. And you've lost connection to that built in guide, that interoception. And we can grow your ability to reconnect to that guide. You're not broken. There's always a solution. One thing that I find interesting is how research has shown that naturally thin people, people who are thinner and have always been that way for their life, they actually have more accurate interoception even when they're stressed. So even though our interoception can get a little bit less clear when we're stressed, naturally thin people seem to maintain that connection even with stress. So if they're experiencing overall infatigue exhaustion, they're still able to hear true hunger and stop at their ideal fullness level even when there's other emotional stuff going on. They have more of a separation where they can keep the lines clear between food and emotions. Kind of like how imagine your, I always go back to those analogy, but imagine you have a super stressful thing going on in your life. And all of a sudden you're like peeing routine just drastically changed. Like you just like, oh my goodness, I need to go sit on the toilet and try to pee even though I don't have to pee and you're like obsessing about peeing, you're sitting there trying to make yourself pee and then maybe you're already peed, but you're like still sitting there because you feel like you should keep going. Like that just doesn't happen. There's a clear separation how those are two separate things in your life. You can have stress going on, but you can still have a normal rhythm to your peeing. You wait till you have to pee, then you go to the bathroom, you stop when there's no more pee left. Like it's like, duh, there's just, that has nothing to do with my emotions. Same thing can be possible with food. I know it's a little bit different because peeing doesn't necessarily create nervous system regulation and eating can, but naturally thin people, they feel that way about eating, that you may feel about peeing. It's just this thing that they do every day when they're home. hungry, they stop when they feel at their natural fullness point. And whether there's a lot going on in their life, not a lot going on, they're stressed, they're happy, whatever it is, on vacation it doesn't matter. Their rhythm with eating is still there in the background. It's the same. It's consistent because they haven't linked up this connection between food being an emotional regulator. Kind of like somebody who's never struggled with alcohol. If you've never struggled with alcohol, you can probably moderate your consumption of it. You know when your body probably doesn't want it, you know when maybe a little bit of some alcohol would feel good to you. But there's no like struggle with trying to keep yourself from drinking on an emotional day because you've just never struggled with that. Well somebody who has struggled with alcohol, it's a different story because they've linked up this association and their brain between dysregulation and alcohol providing relief and providing soothing. And so as we heal our relationship with food, we're really uncoppling food from nervous system dysregulation. We're learning how to eat within the boundaries of the body and we're learning how to tend to our nervous system all the other times that we don't want to eat within the boundaries of our body. So that way they are separate again. Another thing worth talking about is cravings. A lot of times when we are stressed we might experience cravings for highly palatable sugary, high fat, high energy foods. And the reason why this happens is because once again our bodies and brains are so brilliant and they want us to fuel up for the stressor, for the threat. When we are super stressed we burn through energy much more quickly than if we are regulated arresting laying on a beach. Our body has to use a lot of glucose and a lot of energy to maintain that state of fight or flight. And it sometimes triggers that same feeling of hunger and craving for high energy foods to try and provide our body with that energy. Because if we eat some candy or some sugar or even like energy drinks coffee, a lot of times we crave stimulants when we are stressed, it gives our body that energy to survive that stressor. And so you could have access storage on your body, like you are not under weight, you have access on your body, but your stress in your body is like I need more food, I need more energy. And even though you have plenty of calories in your storage, you have energy in your storage, your body is scared that it is going to need a ton to go through this stressful season and it is sending you that craving for energy to have enough so you can survive that stressor. And so that is one reason why you might notice those cravings happening in stressful seasons. So of course this goes back to the conversation of we want to get to the root of why your cortisol is so high in the first place so that way there isn't high cortisol and you don't need to even have those cravings. You don't need to have those cravings. They are triggering those cues or you don't need to have the cortisol there triggering those cravings for you to eat that food. Hazel is distracting me. Okay. Moving on to the next thing. Let's phantom hunger and how phantom hunger can impact your weight when you are stressed. But something else that can also happen is eating past fullness. And when we are stressed or we have a lot of cortisol in our body, it's very common that we will overeat even if it's very subtle. We just might slightly be eating a bit more than our body needs because we are using food for comfort, for grounding. It's kind of like this internal hug, it's this buffer in your stomach. And I really, I have been using this analogy lately and it's been really clicking with a lot of my clients. And that is how eating excess can feel like noise cancelling headphones to a stressed system, to a stressed soul. I know this analogy really lands for me when I think about the times in my life where I have been super stressed before I had necessarily done a lot of work on my relationship with food and I would often binge at night or overeat a lot or just have those urges to overeat. And it literally feels like you're putting this like dimmer on the stress, you're putting this like coating of food, blunting the intensity of that emotion when you overeat or when you crowd your stomach full of food. Even if it's just subtle, there's just this extra little like internal, that just like protects you from that feeling. The next time that you are super stressed, I want you to pay attention to first of all how your body is feeling but in that season, like what's actually going on in your body? What sort of sensations are you noticing that tell you that you're experiencing stress? And then I want you to pay attention to how that sensation feels after you eat. And I would guarantee you that it's going to feel very different when your stomach is full versus when your stomach is empty. Because when our stomach is empty, we actually can feel our emotions more fully, which is why a lot of times we avoid hunger and we want to feel full all the time because we don't feel safe being with our feelings. I know I had a very like real time example of this literally happening to me last week where I was feeling super, super anxious so much going on, so much uncertainty happening in my life right now. And I was also hungry and I could like really feel that anxiety in my body. And of course, there's so many tools that I use now to help myself be with this, but for the sake of this example, I'm going to simplify it a bit for you. And then I made myself lunch, had lunch. And I noticed after I was done eating that that anxiety was much quieter, it was much dimmer. Of course, I could still feel it a bit because I didn't overeat, I didn't crowd my stomach, super, super full of food. But it was definitely less intense. And that's because food literally provides this like energetic sponge to soak up stress, to soak up intensity in our body. And that happens because of course, feeling weight in your stomach can just be a visceral distraction from the anxiety instead of just feeling the pure vibration of anxiety in your body. You can also feel the weight of food in your body so it does provide a bit of a distraction for your brain. But also of course, eating helps regulate our nervous system. It helps bring us into ventral vagal. It provides a lot of neurotransmitters and hormones and feel good hormones. And so it literally does buffer us from our feelings. And a lot of us when we are experiencing stress, we take that a little bit further than just like eating to respond to hunger and we end up overeating or we end up binge eating. And it really does dim the intensity of that emotion. And so I wanted to explain that to you because perhaps it can help give you a bit of compassion and gentleness for yourself if you are struggling with overeating or bingeing or you have access storage on your body. You're not doing anything wrong, you're not broken. It's your nervous system trying to create regulation, trying to get relief, safety, soothing, and it makes so much sense that that is happening. It sounds awful thinking about you moving through your life or a stressful season without that coping mechanism. And like that feels very scary, very raw, very vulnerable, which is why it's so important that we actually do the safety work to help you create safety in your body in other ways. So you don't feel like you're just stripping away this regulating tool of food and leaving yourself kind of hanging with nothing else to do. And when I say safety and regulation tools, I don't mean like bubble baths and face masks and like calling a friend or going for a walk. I mean, deep nervous system capacity training work that helps you process and be with feelings in your body. You don't need anything outside of your body to do this. It's a specific method that I've created through working with clients that helps you grow your capacity and process life through your nervous system instead of avoiding it or running from it. So naturally thin people, they do get stressed. They experience stress just like you do. But they don't pair it with food based regulation. Their default isn't eye-fix stress with food. You're probably not saying that in your mind logically, but it's happening subconsciously in your nervous system. They don't have that programming in their nervous system. They might use other ways to move stress through their body. Some of them healthy, some of them not healthy. Like I mentioned, you might notice a lot of times I see a lot of naturally thin people when they're super stressed. They pace around a lot. They talk about it a lot. They're kind of like moving and fidgeting a lot. That's one way that they might release stress or maybe they have other ways of doing it. And something else is a lot of them actually eat less when they're stressed. And I'm not saying that you should necessarily do this. But I can say for myself, I've definitely noticed this shift after doing a lot of nervous system work. That now when I go through more like stressful or sad seasons, it's more common for me to actually lose my appetite than it is for me to gain an appetite versus old me when I was stressed I ate more because everything I just explained to you. But now food feels so unattractive when I am stressed most of the time. I'm not perfect, but I'll say a lot of the times food feels unattractive. It's kind of like it's like you're imagine you have like a ton of energy and you're like bouncing off the walls. You're so excited. And somebody is like, you need to lay down and take a nap. It would just feel almost repulsive because it's so against what your body is asking for. Same thing can happen with food where you are not hungry and you're stressed. It's like, of course I'm not going to eat right now. I'm not hungry. Like that sounds awful. And it's not that you're like, holding yourself back from overeating or from binging, you just genuinely don't want to do it because of the way that you've disconnected food from nervous system regulation. And so I'm not saying that you should avoid eating when you're stressed. I'm just saying it's interesting how naturally lean people genuinely eat less when they're stressed instead of the opposite of eating more. So you can see that it's not the cortisol, that's the problem, it's the coping pattern that's wired into your nervous system that creates this whole thing in the first place. So what do you do about it? If you're like, this makes so much sense, but what do I do? There are three things that really are important if you want to learn how to eat like a naturally thin woman and really heal your relationship with food. The first one is we need to figure out, we need to identify, we need to figure out what your subconscious root cause is because there's probably something that is driving your cortisol up super high. There's something driving the nervous system dysregulation in the first place. And this is why I don't believe in like a band-aid approach to healing your relationship with food. We need to actually address the root cause behind it all or else we're just gonna be playing band-aid for the rest of our lives. Oftentimes I see chronic perfectionism, chronic control issues, unhealed trauma from childhood, suppressed emotions, not feeling safe in the body, having low self-worth, self-savotage, lack of safety, like I mentioned. These things are really at the core of that high cortisol and until we heal those things and teach your system how to slow down and feel safe and feel enough and feel worthy, we're just playing walkable and we're not actually addressing the root cause. You can't necessarily lower your cortisol with a bunch of adrenal cocktails if you have chronic perfectionism in the background. Like it's just not gonna move the needle. I'm not saying don't drink adrenal cocktails. I'm just saying we need to go deeper and address the real root cause. So that's step one. Then from there we need to grow your nervous system capacity and that is your ability to be with stress without turning to food. We don't need to get rid of all the stress in your life in order to eat normally. We don't need to have this like fairytale life where you move to Europe and live off grid and never talk to anybody and make a bajillion dollars to have a healthy relationship with food. You can be in a stressful life, you can have kids, you can be a mom, you can be a menopause, you can be in any season of life and still have a normal relationship with food when you unlink food from regulation and you do that by growing your nervous system capacity. And then of course the third thing is you just need to learn like the basics of how to eat like a naturally thin woman and sometimes we don't need a more inner work, more healing, more subconscious rewiring. That's everything I just mentioned but we need to just get to the nitty-gritty details of the difference between real hunger and phantom hunger and exactly what hunger level to start eating at and exactly what fullness level to stop eating at and feeling okay with spaciousness in your stomach instead of crowding it out all the time. We need to increase that interoception, that ability to read your body's built in calorie calculator and this is how naturally thin women eat and you're designed to eat in this way too. This is how you ate as an infant. This is how most kids eat. Oh, this is how most kids eat if they're not exposed to diet culture and you can learn how to do it. You just need a step-by-step system that retains you how to do it, especially if you've spent years dieting or struggling with food. So all of this, I teach all of it step-by-step in this exact order inside heart-led eating and I would love to support you there so you can see that stress doesn't magically make you overweight, make you carry excess. It's dysregulation that just makes you eat when you're not hungry and past fullness and it's really not as complicated as you might think you don't need to keep chasing functional medicine, protocols and all the things to lower your cortisol. Of course, do that if it feels good for you but don't do it to try and lose weight. He'll your relationship with food so you can live in a body that feels good to you and then do all the health and wellness stuff because it's a bonus to your life. It makes you feel even better and because you believe in it but not because you're relying on it for weight loss. So that's all I have to say with you for you today. I hope you learned something new and if you're feeling called to joining heart-led eating I would truly be honored to support you there. You can click the link in the show notes to find out more about it and join. I love you so much. I'm gonna go take Hazel for a little walk and I will talk to you next week. (upbeat music) (gentle music)