Many mainstream fitness and diet programs advocate “more is more” when it comes to losing weight and getting fit, however anyone who has attempted to apply this theory may have ended up suffering the repetitive outcome of burnout, self sabotage, binge eating, decline of motivation and becoming trapped in a cycle of “starting on Monday”. This is commonly followed by a feeling of failure and helplessness. Let it be known there are missing pieces to this puzzle, besides your lack of discipline and willpower. There are biological and external influences that have not been considered in the design and marketing of these programs. Following is some insight into the 101 of your biology which may shed some light for those of you who are trapped in this cycle, explaining why “go hard or go home” could be doing more damage than good.
As your coach, all I can do is present the information to you. What you do with it, how you interpret it and how you relate it to your own lives and action it is YOUR STAND. So here is the 101 on one of the primary systems in our biology that you may not have considered which could be affecting your weight loss and wellbeing.
If you have attended a Stand Your Ground workshop, you have heard me refer to The Greater Mind. Our central nervous system otherwise known as the Automatic Nervous System is a function of The Greater Mind relating to our bodies intelligence. We have an involuntary response system built into our bodies that controls many of our organs, muscles and glands. It’s important job is to control our “fight – flight – freeze” response to an external stimulus, information or occurrence.
The two main parts of the ANS are the Sympathetic Nervous System and the Parasympathetic Nervous System.
Following is the 101 for the ANS. The information below had been taken from academia and translated in to a language that relates to our everyday lives in order to help you understand how there is more than just calories in/out influencing your weight loss/gain, energy levels and general wellness.
The Sympathetic Nervous System (SNS) is responsible for getting us ready for action from an oncoming stress stimulus. When activated it releases Adrenaline/Noradrenaline, accelerates the heart rate and blood pressure, inhibits digestion and stimulates exchange of liver glycogen into glucose, amongst many other responses. As a natural response to stimulation of the SNS, the blood sugar hormone called ‘Cortisol’ that responds to stress is secreted into the blood stream.
The word ‘Cortisol’ is beginning to enter our modern language as a known toxic burn-off of too much adrenaline and other biochemicals in the bloodstream due to an over stimulated (or continually stimulated) SNS. Cortisol has a healthy function for our homoeostasis. It allows us to wake up in the morning and stimulate energy production. However due to our modern lifestyles of full time work demands, raising children, financial commitments and environmental factors (without even considering the personal coping mechanisms to emotional stress, past trauma, depression and illness) we are seeing an epidemic of chronic or excessive cortisol in the western world, our world.
If you suffer from an overstimulated SNS that leads to excessive cortisol levels it can induce increased insulin resistance, obesity, inflammation, muscle loss and a host of other nasties that ambush your weight-loss and fitness goals. Feel free to Google the words “cortisol & weight loss” or “stress & fat” to fill in the detail I have chosen to leave out of this article. These terms are blunt, however you will see an overwhelming amount of scientific and medical research that proves this epidemic is the silent poison that has seeped into so many of our lives. The danger to most is that you can be functioning in your day to day life and not realise your SNS is being over stimulated. For many, a tightly timed schedule of multi-tasking has become a normal way of life and you have mentally adapted to that, however your body hasn’t.
The SNS is only meant to respond to short bursts of stress, not to become an adapted state that is permanently switched on (because you are never switched off). Once the instance of flight, flight or freeze is over, the body is designed to shift into the Parasympathetic Nervous System (PNS) response to heal and repair itself if needed. At this point it is important to emphasise that the body doesn’t recognise exercise as the “healthy, positive and empowered” activity that the media and marketing teaches you it is. The body recognises this additional load as STRESS. Yes, we become fitter as our body responds and adapts to the load and in turn becomes more efficient to handle the load (stress). Yes, if you are burning more energy (output) then you are consuming (input) the body will use excess stored fuel (body fat). However, this doesn’t change the fact that the body identifies your run, weights, x-training or any other impact activity as stress. When we are stacking a “go hard or go home” training regime on top of an already over stimulated SNS we run the risk of doing more damage than good that will paralyse weight loss. Without adequate rest and digest, your body will struggle to lose weight.
The PNS directs the body to “reset and digest” after there has been a response to stress. It is designed to slow down the heart rate, reduce the blood pressure, stimulate digestion and increase the blood flow back to our internal organs and skin. It prepares the body to return to homoeostasis, our most balanced state, and most importantly it slowly removes the cortisol from our blood stream. In other words, it is designed to rejuvenate, replenish and heal the body from a bout a stress.
Most modern fitness programs and eating plans are designed to endorse a “more is more” method without any credence to rituals of daily recovery. It is easy to misinterpret these programs and to think that if you’re not smashing yourself to the near point of death, then you are not going hard enough. You are conditioned to think that unless you are hitting a certain intensity or calorie burn, then your efforts are ineffective. Meanwhile you don’t factor in the extreme activity level of your day and the depletion of the vitamins and minerals you haven’t replaced from weeks prior, let alone the fact that you’re still trying to catch up on the sleep you missed out on from 2006! This is not to mention the intense energy demand of your emotional responses to immediate and past events. The Greater Mind of your body is far more intelligent than these generic programs (some of which are extracts from training programs for elite athletes, that don’t factor in your additional daily output of energy, stress and load). If you are functioning with an overstimulated SNS, the body WILL reclaim its state of homoeostasis by forcing recovery; this is otherwise known as burnout. Just because some of you reading this are not at the stage of chronic fatigue, that doesn’t mean you have dodged the bullet. Subtle signs of burnout are lack of motivation, lowered immunity, exhaustion to the point you can’t get out of bed in the morning for your early workout session and of course excessive craving/urges for sugar, salt or fat.
Is this starting to paint a familiar picture for you?
As women we respond to stress differently from men and therefore this provokes a range of biological, hormonal and emotional factors that I discuss further in The Red Print. As a generic antidote for this dis-ease, we must adopt ways to integrate training methods that stimulate the PNS as a part of your weekly, if not daily, routine. At first, my clients find it hard to grasp the idea they will lose weight by integrating non or low impact training techniques into their program because they are programmed to think that they have to get results immediately, otherwise they are not transforming. However, for long term weight loss and wellbeing, the body must FIRST re calibrate to a state of homeostasis before any true transformation can occur.
This is why I created Ema-zen as one of the many training rituals I practice. It is a training method designed to stimulate the PNS so that the body can counteract the damaging response of living in a constant state of heightened stress. Traditionally any non-impact training module that asks us to remain present within the mind such as yoga and doesn’t require the body to “inflame” is a practice that stimulates our PNS.
