I always talk to my clients about stress — how to figure out where it’s coming from, and how to manage it. Obviously, stress affects your emotional health, but does it have anything to do with gaining and retaining weight? You bet!

When you experience stress — emotional or physical — it triggers a series of physiological reactions generated by the release of powerful chemicals, particularly cortisol, which send your body into survival mode. A surge of cortisol puts you on alert and tells your body to prepare for the emergency, in part by slowing your digestion.

But your body cannot tell the difference between real threats and other types of high-level stress, so it responds to both the same way. When you stay stressed for long periods, you learn to live that way. Your body stays chronically stressed, never returning to “normal,” and you stockpile food calories as fat. To make matters worse, women often eat more during stressful times, compounding any weight problem.

Clearly, chronic stress is one of the major root causes of core imbalances. Other contributors are poor nutrition, lack of exercise, environmental toxins, emotional burdens, hormone shifts, inadequate detoxification, altered neurotransmitter status, GI issues, inflammation, and impaired adrenal function. All of these stressors interfere with your internal conversation, which causes your organ systems to go haywire. This is why healing your imbalance should be the first item on your weight-loss agenda.

Is your toxic weight a result of one of these imbalances?

Digestive
A digestive imbalance can lead directly to system-wide inflammation, which in turn may be connected to insulin resistance and additional accumulation of fat tissue. Inflammation can also affect your ability to absorb nutrients properly. Digestive imbalance often plays a role in food sensitivities, which can cause us to crave those same foods, and eat them in excess.

Hormonal
The food we eat influences our hormonal balance on a daily basis and can create a cyclical pattern that generates toxic weight gain. Chronic stress raises levels of key hormones, like insulin and cortisol, and can cause you to eat more and gain weight. Sometimes, even the fat on your body can alter your hormonal balance and trigger additional weight gain — a true vicious cycle which is common during perimenopause and menopause.

Adrenal
Your adrenal glands are responsible for the fight-or-flight response at the center of your survival instinct. Today, this response is activated far too often, which interferes with your body’s never-ending quest to be in balance. If high-level stress continues unabated, cortisol begins to take control of your body’s physical actions, which can lead to both overeating, abdominal weight gain, and more. A full 85% of the women I see in my practice suffer from adrenal fatigue by the time they reach menopause, which leads to low energy periods when women often make unhealthy food choices.

Neurotransmitter
To put it simply, your individual brain chemistry can cause you to gain weight and prevent you from losing it. Neurotransmitters carry information that influences feelings — including mood, hunger, satiety (feeling satisfied), and cravings. A neurotransmitter imbalance is another condition that can cause you to crave certain foods, and eat them obsessively.

Inflammation
Inflammation is necessary as a short-term immune response for healing wounds and countering infection. It is an essential, sometimes life-saving function of your immune system. But over-activation of this healing response — often triggered by a pro-inflammatory diet, among other things — leads to chronic inflammation. Chronic inflammation has become a major source of internal imbalance. Inflammatory imbalance can cause obesity and toxic weight gain because it can be traced directly to insulin resistance, diabetes, and metabolic syndrome.

Detoxification
A detoxification imbalance often leads to accumulation of toxins in fat tissue, which makes losing weight especially problematic. Poor nutrition and unhealthy lifestyle just magnify the problem. Some toxins can even act like hormones in the body and cause additional fat build-up.

Determining Your Individual Imbalance

Every woman is different — physically, emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually. And we each have our own “balancing act,” a singular combination of factors influencing core health. The balls you have in the air might include your work, running a household, raising children, caring for your parents, and community service. But each woman has a combination of physical factors to balance as well, ranging from genetics and metabolism, to environmental exposure and health history — infections, surgeries, allergies, anxiety disorders, heart disease, cancer, autoimmune disorders — and all the symptoms those conditions create.

I recommend the Isagenix Cleansing and Replenishing System to my clients to addresses all of the above factors. Once the body is cleansed of the toxins, and gets all the key elements it needs, it naturally knows how to rebalance itself and return to optimal health and well-being…our Birth Right!