Stress and The Scale

Something y'all may not know about me is I am a biologist. So when I hear something that pertains to the body I typically understand it. This makes losing weight a little easier for me, not much mind you, but a little bit. So stress, stress is a bad, bad thing, but no one can ever be stress free. For sure not me, a college student with several jobs and a sick mom, so stress is a part of my life. Unfortunately stress does raise cortisol levels and cortisol is a steroid hormone that is released in response to low blood sugar (skipping meals) and stress. All cortisol does is try to increase blood sugar, and it tells your body "hey we are starving when we do get food store it as fat" because fat is a quick easy energy storage device in the body. This is a great hormone if your a nomadic person with weeks between meals, however most of us are fairly seditory whose next meal is a drive-thru away. All that being said our stress in our lives is very real and when you are trying to lose weight it is something we have to deal with.
Here is a plus, exercising produces serotonin this is an amazing stress reliever and this will help lower your cortisol levels, but what happens when the exercising is causing the stress. For me it is the scale, now in the beginning of my journey I weighed myself before I started working out and then did it once every three months. In the beginning my weight loss was suuuuuuupppppeeerrrr sloooooow, I will explain why in a later post. So when i saw that first 20 pounds i was so happy. However this summer I started going hard to the gym, and I started weighing my self more, like once a week more and this is bad. Your body weight fluctuates sooooo much. Weighing once a week is insanity don't do it, learn from my mistakes. Weigh in once every two weeks or even better once a month. Or don't weigh in at all, let your doctor do your weighing at your regular check up, just workout and enjoy the shrinking inches and dropping pants sizes. Don't let the scale stress you out, there is so much real stress in your life there is no need to add to it. You will be happier for it I promise!