Abdominal cells
Abdominal cells are more sensitive to glucocorticoids than gluteal cells, the former have more receptors that respond to fat storing enzymes.
Author: Graeme
When cortisol stimulates fat deposition
When cortisol stimulates fat deposition, it does so preferentially in the abdomen.
Excess cortisol
An eight minute burst of excess cortisol secretion due to stress takes two hours to return to normal.
Measuring stress
You can measure stress by using heart rate variability, blood and saliva.
How your body responds to stress
The body responds to stress by activating the sympathetic nervous system and secreting cortisol, an essential stress hormone.
The art and science of weight loss
Weight loss; as simple as eating less and exercising more? Good question!
Graeme Jones has the answers…
An overweight client walks into my office; let’s say they have a BMI of 28 and their body fat level is 8% higher than they desire.
Do I recommend that eat less an exercise more? In some cases, yes, but in reality this is something I have recommended very few times in last couple of years. In fact, I cannot remember the last time I said this to a client. Clients are often coming to me with years of dieting under their belts, no pun intended, with dysfunctional metabolism and system-wide clinical and sub-clinical problems. Looking through food and exercise diaries kept over weeks and calculating calories often shows a calorie deficit, yet no weight loss, so what’s happening here?
Truth or lies?
Maybe the client is lying? Yes, this could be the case and maybe they are eating more than what they are reporting. I generally assume that most clients are underreporting what is actually going into their body; I think this is human nature. Ask any doctor on alcohol unit calculations and they will always add more to what the patient reports.
However, lets assume the client is telling the truth for this discussion. Why clients lie is a whole other subject.
The physiology of fat loss
For a number of reasons the physiology is primed not to burn fat, or to lose fat weight, and the challenge is reversing this for both the confidence and health of the client. The question is where do you start?
Many questions immediately come to mind; is the client balancing their blood sugar? What’s their stress level like? How is their thyroid functioning? Do they have a dysbiosis? How is their krebs cycle functioning? How is their liver working? How much are they sleeping, what is the quality? Are they self-sabotaging? Where are their insulin levels? Cortisol, oestrogen, testosterone? What is the balance of their autonomic nervous system like?
These are just some of the questions that will help to answer why a client is unable to loose body fat. The next question is how do you then measure each one of these, where do you start and what do you do with the information to help the client start moving towards their goal?
Want to help your clients lose weight?
Graeme Jones’ course, Success strategies for weight loss and management, addresses these very questions and is full of useful information that practitioners can use straight away to benefit their clients. The course also provides you with an understanding of tests you can use with your clients to help guide them to lasting results.
To learn more, book on and develop your understanding of the art and science to weight loss.
28th June 2015, Wakefield, West Yorkshire.
Physiology and the Acute Stress Response – why does our body produce the same response for all stressors?
The body mobilises the sympathetic nervous system, secretes stress hormones and inhibits others in response to a stressor. And whatever the stressor – whether you are too hot, too cold, having an argument, lost a loved one, or running for the bus – we activate the stress response in the same way.
But before we talk the physiology of stress, let’s talk terminology first. A ‘stressor’ is something that throws your body out of allostatic balance and the stress response is your body’s attempt to restore allostasis. Allostasis is a concept grown from homeostasis, which in recent years has been mainly built upon by Dr Bruce McEwan of Rockefeller University.
Homeostasis vs. allostasis
Homeostasis basically says there is a single optimal level, amount or number for any given measure in the body. Also, that you reach this set point through some local regulatory mechanism. Whereas allostasis recognises that any given set point can be regulated in many different ways, each with its own set of consequences.
Homestasis is about amending this little process or that. Allostasis is about the brain coordinating body-wide changes to achieve a result and that includes changes in behaviour.
The generalised stress response
As we have acknowledged, the body mobilises the sympathetic nervous system, the stress response, in the same way, whatever the stressor. As a physiologist this seems strange. Why would the body do the same thing if it were too hot or too cold – surely, as I was taught during all those lectures at university, specific challenges to the body provoke specific responses and adaptations? Warming causes dilation of the blood vessels, chilling causes the opposite – constriction of the vessels and shivering. Being too hot seems a very different physiological challenge to being too cold and logic would tell us the body’s physiological response should be different.
Survival mode
Why should the body have such a generalised stress response regardless of the situation you find yourself in? However, when you think about it, it actually makes sense. If you’re a starving bacteria stressed by food shortage you can go into a dormant state. But if you’re a starving lion, you’re going to have to run after something to make a kill.
For us humans, the core of the stress response is built around the idea that we’re going to have to work like crazy to survive and therefore the muscles need energy, right now, in a usable form, rather than it being stored away. Glucose and the simplest forms of proteins and fats come pouring out of your fat cells and the liver and are delivered to the working muscles that are going to save you. Blood pressure increases, as does heart and breathing rate to help with the increased demand.
Shut down
Another feature of the stress response is that long-term ‘building projects’ all shut down. Why waste energy on physiological processes that are not needed for your immediate survival. Systems such as digestion and reproduction are closed for business – there’s no need for them if you are not going to survive the next few minutes. Immunity, which does do some interesting things during stress, also shuts down.
The story of the stress response is, don’t waste energy on physiological processes that are not important for immediate survival and divert everything that is relevant to help the body stay alive.
Acute stressors move us away from allostasis quickly, and the stress response is about mobilising the troops to get us back to that point. That’s why our body produces the same response, whether you are too hot or too cold, running for the bus or having argument.
For more information about the physiology of stress, why not join Graeme for his next course? Stress – A Modern Day Epidemic will run on 27th June in Wakefield Yorkshire. Book now!
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