It’s a tough thing that are high in carbohydrates and to some extent protein, and it tends to escort sugar into the blood stream. But when the cells become resistant, it just sits there, and it’s not able to get the sugar into the muscle cells. What is the relationship of cortisol to all of this? Yeah. So insulin, you mentioned there briefly at the end, it also works with the muscle tissue, and skeletal muscle tissue especially. So a cortisol rhythm or lack thereof really determines whether insulin is feeding, kind of like herding all these sheep into one pen here or this pen over there, and those two pens are really the visceral fat and the skeletal muscle tissue. Learn more at http://healthymomsmagazine.net/2017/04/weight-loss-really-calories.html and http://austingosser.bcz.com/2016/12/12/17-day-diet-for-quick-weight-loss/
So subcutaneous fat is more a function of just total food intake independent of insulin metabolism. But the visceral fat is very specific. So if total cortisol production is very high or if that rhythm is disturbed, then those are scenarios by which more of the same fuel goes toward the visceral fat. And that’s a storage strategy. So think about it this way. If you’ve got a good job, things are going well, and you get this windfall, some random distant cousin you barely knew passed away and left you some inheritance.Let me just run this by you. And you tell me if I’m off center here with this. Well, that’s not working. I better get down to ten. Maybe I’ll just have one bite of lettuce. And maybe if what now with this knowledge that you’re giving us about the interaction between cortisol and insulin, I wonder whether or not that was the wrong strategy and they should have been saying, “I better manage my stress. Forget about lowering the carbs even more.” Perhaps that’s really what’s the monkey wrench in the mix here. And that’s the thing. And the term “stress” is a very loaded term to researchers like yourself, people that are clinicians, who have medical training. Stress means anything that disrupts your body’s balance. We call it the total allostatic load. To the public we think about stress as often times the nasty boss or the jerk on the highway. And those are real stressors, but it’s really the sum total of the obvious mental/emotional stressors and the invisible allostatic load type stressors that disrupt that. So it can be a matter of relaxation and meditation, but it also can be a matter of what time you shut off the lights at night or how cold your room is or whether your body is carrying plastic derivatives inside of it. All of those things act like stressors. All these factors that don’t seem obvious collectively work on the same pathways. But the thing, and I want to now get to what people can actually do. And I guess I was going to say that the low-hanging fruit of these stressors, and of course, you’re absolutely right. If we’re breathing something we don’t know about, and it’s causing some kind of a load in the body that we would rather not have, that’s going to be seen as a stressor. But that’s kind of a hard one for people to do. They’re not going to go out and get air purifier measurements. Learn more at https://erinjgz.wordpress.com/2016/01/01/17-day-diet-research-2016/