Under normal circumstances, your body does its best to keep your weight in its genetic sweet spot.
This simply means that if you’re eating foods that your genes like to eat, then you’ll stay healthy.
Keep in mind, this doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll be cut up like a fitness model, it means that your body will be a weight that is associated with your genetic background and you’ll be ridiculously healthy.
The reason I’m stressing genetic background here is because of my experience with at least observing the diet of our Q’ero family in Peru. The Q’ero traditionally live high in the Andes and eat more potatoes then Ronald McDonald (I imagine that’s what he eats…), but they maintain their health even though they tend to have a short and stocky build. The females tend to store more fat as well. So according to their genes and the food that they eat, stocky is healthy.
So, eat your natural diet and stay healthy – and likely relatively trim.
But, there are instances where your body wants you to be fat. I’m going to explore two of them in this third Undeniable Law of Lasting Weight Loss.
Law #3 of The Undeniable Laws of Lasting Weight Loss: Mess with Stress and Get Fat Fast
If you stress, you’ll probably get fat.
You may not blow up like a balloon, but you will have areas of unsightly fat that will make you feel uncomfortable in a bathing suit on your next vacation.
There are three ways stress (or hormones) can interfere with your ability to lose weight that I want to focus on here today. These are testosterone production and stress, and stress, insulin regulation and the hunger hormone stew (Mmmm, sounds yummy.)
I talk a lot about blood testing and – more specifically – testing your hormones, but if you gave me a line up of 10-15 men and women who were between 5-30 pounds overweight and asked them to pull their shirts up to reveal just their bellies, I could – with relatively good accuracy – tell who has low testosterone and who doesn’t.
The reason why is because belly fat is very closely linked to low testosterone – in men and women.
So maybe your testosterone is low, but how did that happen?
Chances are it’s because the pre-hormones that you need to produce the testosterone are being used to create other hormones – and in our modern world, these are undoubtedly stress hormones.
When you stress, your body releases hormones that ramp up some systems and shut down others. Sex hormones are the first to suffer.
In the past – long and distant – if you were being chased by a lion, your body would slow the production of sex hormones because at that moment you wouldn’t likely need to be worrying about snuggling up with your sweetie.
These days, this isn’t the case.
Normal testosterone levels keep your body firm, strong and tight. Low testosterone levels make you soft, pudgy and doughy – so your stress is making your body naturally gain weight.
How do you build up your testosterone?
Obviously, decrease your stress – but that’s easier said than done. I use EFT to help decrease my stress levels. I also go out for a run.
Exercise will not only decrease emotional stress, but it can also increase your testosterone levels.
If you’re having trouble raising your levels to optimal, you can work with a practitioner who’s well trained in natural hormone replacement therapy.
Please note, for women who are concerned about “bulking up” because of higher testosterone levels, don’t worry. Your bodies won’t allow it.
The second lesson inside of the fat / stress connection is that if you have excess cortisol in your body, you will store fat.
The connection between stress, insulin, sugar and cortisol have been studied fairly significantly – the conclusion – if you have excess cortisol in your system you tend to crave sugars, your insulin levels spike and you store more fat.
When you stress you crave sugars because your body is looking for an energy boost. Your body also craves all foods, because excess cortisol can dilute the effect of leptin and ghrelin which are hormones that tell you if you’re hungry and when you’re full – causing over or under-eating which can be more simply defined as binging. That’s the hormone hunger stew I was talking about before — not so appetizing.
When you start to binge, you eat too much sugar (in any form) and you release excess insulin to store it away as fat.
This – again – during times long ago, is likely related to times of stress when the body was equipped to store and food it got in a time of famine. I could be wrong, I wasn’t there, but it makes sense.
So the equation (loosely) goes like this…
Stress + Cortisol + Food + Insulin = Fat
It’s not super-scientific, but I’m also assuming you’d probably secretly try voodoo dolls if they could guarantee you’d lose fat to fit into your old pants. 
But in all seriousness, thinking along the lines of this equation, you can very clearly understand that your stress is causing your to store fat… and not only that, based on the first part of this article, it’s lowering your testosterone as well which is keeping you fat around the waist (and most likely messing with your sex life as well.)
So maybe it’s not really you who’s not able to lose that extra weight, it is a mixture of your hormones that are biologically causing you to stay fat.
Something to think about.
Anyway, the best way to figure out if this is happening to you is take the visual clues – pudgy, soft belly – and combine them with solid blood test results for your testosterone and blood glucose levels and a good health practitioner will be able to give you a good protocol to follow.
But chances are if you step up your exercise routine and cut the stress (and some of the excess processed or non-processed complex carbs), you might just see results within weeks.
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