The Cortisol Connection Diet

Chapter 6:

Putting It All Together

At this point, you can see the value in using diet and supplements to simultaneously affect cortisol, blood sugar, and thermogenesis as important metabolic "control points" in the regulation of body weight. This chapter presents in a convenient, usable format a plan for helping you to pull all the book's suggestions together to formulate your personalized Cortisol Connection program. By following the guidelines offered here, which are based on the information presented in earlier chapters, you can customize the Cortisol Connection Diet for your needs. Doing so will provide you with the most effective approach to shedding those "last twenty pounds" of weight that are so problematic for millions of Americans.

Perhaps the most important aspect of any effective lifestyle regimen is not so much that it "works," but that it works for you. In this way, the Cortisol Connection Diet is infinitely customizable to your own specific likes, dislikes, and preferences-which means you can use it to help guide you in crafting your own personalized approach to effective, long-lasting, and tasty weight loss.

Be sure to refer to the Daily Log in Appendix C (and carry the log with you for the first few weeks) to help you choose foods and meals with a high Balance-Factor (quality) and at the right quantity/portion sizes (using the Helping Hand as a guide). The log can also help to remind you when and what to eat and how to supplement your diet. In short, the practical nature of the Cortisol Connection Diet will take much of the mystery and confusion out of achieving long-lasting weight loss, because it addresses the key metabolic factors (cortisol, blood sugar, thermogenesis, serotonin, thyroid, and norepinephrine) that cause most of us to gain weight and struggle with weight loss.

Where Does Exercise Fit In?

You may have noticed that very little has been said up to now about the role of exercise as part of the Cortisol Connection Diet. That's because the key benefit of exercise for weight control is not because it burns a significant number of calories. Exercise certainly burns some calories, but far fewer than you may think. Instead, the primary value of exercise as part of a weight-control regimen lies in its profound effects on improving insulin function and modulating levels of blood sugar, cortisol, and serotonin (with cortisol and serotonin control being responsible for many of the "feel good" effects of a good workout).

The metabolic benefits of exercise are far-reaching, but from a weight-control perspective, a regular exercise program "teaches" our muscles to transport glucose more efficiently and to respond to cortisol more effectively. Exercise also improves our body's "sensitivity" to both insulin and cortisol-so we are able to get by with much lower levels of both of these powerful metabolic hormones and therefore avoid many of the health problems (such as weight gain) that are associated with chronically elevated levels.

An interesting side effect of optimizing your control of blood-sugar and cortisol levels is an increase both in general calorie expenditure and in fat burning (otherwise known as thermogenesis). This means that exercise on its own will influence, to a certain degree, each of the primary metabolic control points (MCPs) related to body-weight regulation-so get out there and do it.

Regular exercise is often promoted as a tool for preventing weight gain-and there is good evidence that people who are more active have a reduced risk of gaining weight. One study from the School of Public Health at Harvard University followed a large group of men over two years. At the beginning of the study, the most active men and those who watched fewer hours of television were less likely to be overweight, and after two years, those who were most active and who watched fewer hours of television had gained less weight. Data from several national surveys (in both the U.S. and other countries) clearly show that people who maintain higher levels of physical activity are less likely to gain weight, or at least tend to gain less weight than their inactive counterparts.

However, whether exercise is a good tool for promoting weight loss is controversial. A recent scientific review of studies related to the effect of physical activity on weight loss concluded that adding exercise to a reduced-calorie diet only leads to modest additional weight loss (five to seven pounds), but that regular exercise is strongly associated with maintenance of weight loss. Therefore, although exercise may be a less important tool for initial weight loss, it is an important factor in prevention of weight regain.

So, with most of the available evidence suggesting that physical activity plays a more important role in reducing age-related weight gain than it does in actually promoting weight loss, the obvious question is "Why isn't exercise more effective in promoting weight loss?" The answer is because it is simply very difficult to promote a substantial negative energy balance with exercise. Negative energy balance is the state where a person expends more energy (calories) than he or she consumes. To achieve a state of negative energy balance, one must consume fewer calories, expend more energy, or both. This seems like a pretty simple task, but the reality is that most adult Americans lack a good understanding of the energy value of different foods and exercises. Most people, including professional dieticians and physiologists, tend to underestimate the caloric value of food and overestimate the caloric value of exercise. Consider some of the values in the table below:

*Estimate based on a person who weighs 175 pounds. For a person who weighs more than 175 pounds, the estimated energy expenditure is slightly higher, and it's slightly lower for someone who weighs less than 175 pounds. 
 

As you can see from the above table, you can easily "wipe out" the calories burned off by exercise with a few bites of the wrong foods. With a caloric deficit of 3,500 calories needed to lose one pound of fat, and a general goal to lose one to two pounds of fat per week (a reasonable goal for most overweight individuals), this would require a caloric deficit of 500-1,000 calories each day. For most people, this would mean thirty to sixty minutes of intense exercise daily (which I'd love to see more people doing)-but with most American adults being extremely sedentary and with about 40 percent getting no physical activity, this level of exercise would be difficult to adhere to for most people.

In one study from the University of Pennsylvania, women who had lost weight were followed over the subsequent twelve months. The threshold level of exercise needed to prevent weight regain corresponded to approximately eighty minutes of brisk walking per day. People enrolled in the National Weight Control Registry (NWCR) report a similar level of activity (the NWCR is a large database of individuals who have maintained a minimum thirty-pound weight loss for at least one year). In addition, recent data from Japan suggest that accumulating twelve thousand to sixteen thousand steps per day (measured with pedometers) can also help to prevent weight regain.

*Actual Book content excerpted from The Cortisol Connection Diet: The Breakthrough Program to Control Stress and Lose Weight by Shawn M Talbott, PhD