#coritsol

A friend of a friend has called me twice now. She has a friend she wants to set me up with. I politely declined the first time but she will not be deterred and called again. Two things run through my mind on this. One, jeez stop calling, I said nicely I wasn’t interested. And two, why am I so not interested? It’s not that her friend is probably all wrong for me. (I don’t like getting set up - it always seems to be a mess.) It’s that I simply have no room in my life right now for dating. I am feeling selfish.

I could write all sorts of corny cliches about cocoons and butterflies. It’s not that. It’s that I am learning so much right now, stuffing my head full of information and changing the way I go about my life: checking my glucose, measuring, monitoring my food, figuring out how to eat well and planning how to start adding hiking, running, biking, and climbing back into my life. I need to learn all of this now as fast as I possibly can. It’s filling up my days. There’s also the looming possibility of another surgery soon and I will have to figure out how to eat and stay healthy through another one of these. (I’m seeing my doctor today.)

It’s not just about my physical body health. I’m also learning and practicing how to not let stress send my cortisol levels skyrocketing and push me into a feeding frenzy - how to be calm and mindful of my responses and get myself down off that ledge. My health is a big system of many moving pieces. One part is broken or weak and the whole thing careens in the wrong direction. I’ve got this. I’m moving in the direction I want to go.

CORTISOL CRISES

Cortisol is secreted by the adrenal glands when you wake up in the morning and in response to several triggers including stress, food, and exercise. This response is initiated by the pituitary gland situated in the brain and impacts many systemic functions within the body. It primarily aids in mobilizing resources for energy to the necessary tissues depending on the trigger. These resources are carbohydrates, fat, and protein. Under normal circumstances, this effect is beneficial in providing your body with whatever is necessary to perform the physical demands of the triggering situation, however, under prolonged secretion cortisol can be destructive to tissues and facilitate processes that put you at higher risk for a number of other conditions.

With stress levels experienced on an emotional level, cortisol is released. This causes fatty acids in the body to be moved to the deep tissues that require it for energy and the conversion of your muscle making amino acids into glucose at the liver level. It also diverts fat cells into the abdomen and stores them around your organs where they will secrete an enzyme that enhances the exchange of cortisol from an inactive state to active which perpetuates this cycle by increasing the number and size of cortisol attracting fatty cells within your abdomen giving you that kidney bean shape (and a slew of conditions to which abdominal fat is contributed). This type of fat surrounding the visceral organs, unlike subcutaneous fat, places individuals in first place for heart disease and diabetes and makes losing that fat more difficult than gaining glute size on a guy that avoids leg day. And finally, if getting fatter isn’t enough, and because it is a steroid (a glucocorticoid not an anabolic one) it suppresses the immune systems making you a sitting duck for the diseases carried via poor hygiene, poor cough etiquette, and especially your wide range of gym germs in which you douse yourself with every dumbbell.

Stress is not the only thing that can prolong cortisol and produce the above conditions. Since exercise also triggers cortisol’s activity, prolonged working out, unnecessarily ego-fueled dueling of the deltoids, or pec presses with the intent to impress the size challenged guys in the gym, can end up making you the moon faced, bloated guy with the barrel shaped belly busting out of his training belt.

Besides avoiding the now obvious triggers, there are supplements you can take to suppress the prolonged states of cortisol secretion. Following the anticatabolic design of anabolic steroids, a pro hormone, androstenotriol, suppresses cortisol secretion to help prevent the cascade of gut busting events that occur and preserve the protein synthesizing ability of aminos in the body.