Ever been told you're just "too stressed out," as if it's the root of all evil within your body? Well, pull up a chair and join me, Tina, as I invite you to a candid conversation on Tea with Tina, where we unravel the true impact of stress and cortisol on our health. Let's bust the myths that suggest cortisol is the villain behind our health challenges and instead, shine a light on the real adversaries: our daily lifestyle choices. Hydration, protein intake, and the quality of calories are the stars of the show, as we discuss how they can either be our allies or foes in the battle for optimal wellness. We're not chasing after quick fixes here. Instead, we're equipping you with the knowledge to make informed decisions about your health, from the food on your plate to the cushion on your meditation mat.
In this heartwarming episode, I get personal, opening up about my own health struggles, from grappling with thyroid issues to managing PCOS. The road to wellness is not always paved with high-intensity workouts; sometimes, it's about slowing down and tuning into our bodies' needs. Forget fad diets and expensive supplements; real health wisdom lies in the basics – hydration, balanced nutrition, and sufficient rest. Together, we'll explore how these essentials, coupled with stress management techniques such as yoga and meditation, can be your secret weapons against the so-called "cortisol face" and other unwelcome symptoms. So, let's leave behind the gimmicks and embrace a holistic approach to health, where caring for your body is a daily act of self-love.
Ever been told you're just "too stressed out," as if it's the root of all evil within your body? Well, pull up a chair and join me, Tina, as I invite you to a candid conversation on Tea with Tina, where we unravel the true impact of stress and cortisol on our health. Let's bust the myths that suggest cortisol is the villain behind our health challenges and instead, shine a light on the real adversaries: our daily lifestyle choices. Hydration, protein intake, and the quality of calories are the stars of the show, as we discuss how they can either be our allies or foes in the battle for optimal wellness. We're not chasing after quick fixes here. Instead, we're equipping you with the knowledge to make informed decisions about your health, from the food on your plate to the cushion on your meditation mat.
In this heartwarming episode, I get personal, opening up about my own health struggles, from grappling with thyroid issues to managing PCOS. The road to wellness is not always paved with high-intensity workouts; sometimes, it's about slowing down and tuning into our bodies' needs. Forget fad diets and expensive supplements; real health wisdom lies in the basics – hydration, balanced nutrition, and sufficient rest. Together, we'll explore how these essentials, coupled with stress management techniques such as yoga and meditation, can be your secret weapons against the so-called "cortisol face" and other unwelcome symptoms. So, let's leave behind the gimmicks and embrace a holistic approach to health, where caring for your body is a daily act of self-love.
Welcome to the Tea with Tina, your favorite podcast, where we talk all things health, fitness, lifestyle and maybe a little bit of tea gets spilled. We chat all about this in a super casual environment. So grab your beverage of choice, sit back, relax and enjoy. Relax and enjoy. Hello everyone, today we are spilling a little bit of tea, and that tea is on cortisol.
Speaker 1:
Okay, so you've probably been seeing this going around the internet and the best way I can describe any of these trends is that some of these people are probably very well meaning. They just don't know how to necessarily describe what they're going through like. They don't necessarily know what the true root cause is. So they use you, the buzzwords and the trendy stuff. And some people are evil and hop on this and use it to make money. So you know, I just want to get into this a little bit and I will say that cortisol cortisol is released when we're stressed, right, but I don't think what I'm trying to say. I'm not going to get into the science of how cortisol works, but I want to tell you that just because you have symptoms, that kind of mimic, something, doesn't necessarily mean it's that right. And I always go back to my health and fitness roots. Because let's look at the reality. Like karen over there may be saying that she has cortisol, excess cortisol, because her face is puffy, but in reality she's drinking a bottle of wine every night and she drinks 20 ounces of water. So she's holding on to all this water because she's dehydrated, so she's puffy and inflamed. Water because she's dehydrated, so she's puffy and inflamed. Not because of cortisol.
Speaker 1:
Right like are you moving your body daily? How are your stress levels? What is your water intake? Are you eating balanced, nutrient-dense foods? Are we getting 100 grams of protein a day? Are you even close to that? Most women I see drink 20 ounces of water, eat maybe 60 to 80 grams of protein a day, if they're lucky, are either eating way too little or way too much calories, way too many carbs, way too many fats, super low protein. So they're starving all the time because the carbs and fats get burned up really fast and they're eating it from processed foods, pretty much anything that's not on the outside aisles of the grocery store. Processed foods are meant to make you hungry. They want them to dissolve quickly in your mouth. They don't have a ton of fiber, they don't have a ton of nutrients. They're just kind of empty calories and they leave you wanting and craving more, especially if there's sodium and sugar in there, right? So there's a lot of things. They get crappy sleep, they're waking up throughout the night, and there's so many things and they all interconnect to each other and I think this is what we're seeing, more so than cortisol.
Speaker 1:
Excess cortisol, I would say, for the most part, is relatively rare. You can get something called Cushing's disease, or Cushing's syndrome, I should say, and that could be where your body overproduces cortisol. But it's a medical thing. Your doctor can diagnose it and test for it. I've also seen people having like tumors on their thyroid gland or tumor somewhere that kind of overproduces hormones and that can also mess you up. But again, rare, rare, I think it's on the pituitary gland.
Speaker 1:
Like I said, I don't want to get too much into the science of it, because I'm not here to necessarily debunk like oh you know, this is where the, this is how high cortisol works. I'm more so here to tell you, before you freak out about the next social media trend of someone trying to sell you something like their program that makes you not have cortisol face, or something like that, you need to focus on the basics, because that puffiness again, the water retention when you see the befores and afters you don't know what their lifestyle was like before. I, as somebody who has a hormonal imbalance and I have diagnosed things still go back to the basics. I don't rely on any fancy herbal supplements. Um, I'm really I'm only on levothyroxine, which is basically a thyroid supplement for my thyroid, um, and that's it. I mean I'm on birth control as well to help regulate my cycle, but that's it. And let me tell you that if you de-stress and you put the time and effort into your body to get the proper nutrients, you drink plenty of water, you're eating the whole nutrient dense foods, all the right things the inflammation will go away. When I am my least stressed which a little bit of stress is possible. And it's all about necessarily balancing activities that help you balance the stress right. It's not like we're looking to necessarily reduce the stress Sometimes we do but we also need to bring things and activities that will help lower our level of stress. So, whether that's walks outside, you take a yoga class, you meditate in the morning, you read a book, we need things that are going to counterbalance that high stress level. You have right. I always talk about this with the recovery.
Speaker 1:
The reason that people get burned out isn't necessarily because they're working hard. It's that rarely can they create a rest routine that equally supports the amount of output that they're doing. This goes for your job, this goes for working out, this goes for anything. I want you to think about that right. When we want to work hard or at a busy time at work, we're looking to lose the weight, what do we do? We add more, more, more, more, with an exception to food probably less food, but more cardio, more workout days. You know, less food. We're doing all this stuff that takes up all that energy. But are you doing anything to support yourself in that time? Are we looking to get better sleep? No. Are we reducing our stress? No. Are we doing any yoga or stretching or Epsom salt baths or self-care activities? No, and if anything, they probably get worse because you're burning yourself out through your workouts and you're eating less. So you're getting malnourished, even though you're burning more, and then you just your body's inflamed, your body's inflamed.
Speaker 1:
Our body does a lot of like essential for a lack of a better term spring cleaning, nightly cleaning, detoxing and things like that. Overnight, when we sleep, when we get good sleep, it's our way to kind of flush out things, and when you're not providing it with the right nutrients or enough rest, it can't do it efficiently. And our body's main goal is to survive, so it's going to take the non-essential stuff out first. It does not care if you're holding on to five or ten pounds of water weight, it doesn't care, they're just trying. Your body's just trying to survive. It doesn't care you can't button up your pants, it's just trying to survive, right. So that's why it'll do whatever it can to get through the day, based off of what you give it.
Speaker 1:
I literally actually just had this happen with a client too. She was the same way. She was kind of ramping things up, and I think I see this a lot because people are on short-term workout programs. They don't do this for the long term, so they can sprint for maybe a month at most. And she was working, working, working, and then she completely crashed, crashed. Um, she looked like she was handling it well, but I guess behind the scenes I didn't notice it, um, because she was tracking her food, she was working out at the gym, but between that and her job and everything, she was going five, six days a week. It was just too much and she got sick. She burned. She had to rest all week. Your body will force you to rest. If you don't take rest, it will force you. Whether you end up in the hospital, you crash, it'll do it. And she actually lost six pounds. She lost six pounds on that week of rest. Huh, isn't that weird, right? She did no workouts. She might have briefly tracked her food, drank her water, did nothing. All week Lost six pounds. Why is this? It's not fat. She didn't lose fat. She lost water and inflammation her body was storing.
Speaker 1:
Think about it when you work out, your body becomes inflamed because you're tearing muscles, right, you have lactic acid buildup. But how does your body repair muscles and flush out that lactic acid when you're resting, when you're sleeping, when you're relaxed? And if you can't, it just stays there, it gets stuck and that's why you hold on to water. And this was me. And sometimes, like me with Hashimoto's, I'm already inflamed. I have like a thousand antibodies in my body causing inflammation all the time. I have to be extra on top of my self-care game Self-care game, sorry, tongue tied there To bring my inflammation down Because my body's already in an inflamed state so I got to do stuff to make sure it stays rest.
Speaker 1:
I can't do HIIT training, I can't be sprinting, doing these high intensity things. If I do it more than like one day a week, my body's done, I'm exhausted, I feel puffy, I feel tired and that's why I take walks, that's why I lift weights. You know, that's why I live the way I do, because it supports my body, and before I wasn't and I felt I would drastically go between five to 10 pounds within weeks. I would jump up 10 pounds, my pants wouldn't fit and then I'd drop it. It was just so mentally draining on me and my body and it just frustrates me because I wish more women knew about this right.
Speaker 1:
And so, in a way, yes, you can hold on to water and inflammation because of stress, but that doesn't mean that you need to go on this like cortisol pill or to do this certain protocol. It's more so. Are you doing the foundations properly first, are we having a clean slate for our body to properly carry out the daily activities it needs? You know, I don't care if you have the best herbal supplement in the world If you're drinking 20 ounces of water. Is that really going to work for you? You know what I mean. So make sure that we are taking care of ourselves first.
Speaker 1:
Cut away all the gimmicks. Cut away all of the fad stuff out there that says if you just do this one thing, it will solve all your your problems. Because what does every diet commercial have at the bottom of the screen in really tiny print and the guy says it really really fast so you can't even hear him. He says results with a regular diet and exercise program and it makes you wonder how much of it was from the product, right, right? So you know, at the end of the day it's about creating a good foundation. I actually even say this with medication. I truly believe that medication isn't as effective If you don't have a good base, like if you're super dehydrated, maybe your body's not absorbing nutrients properly, you're not getting enough rest, so it's kind of just like laggy, it's almost like if you're super dehydrated, maybe your body's not absorbing nutrients properly, you're not getting enough rest, so it's kind of just like laggy.
Speaker 1:
It's almost like if you own a car and you never change the oil. You know you never get new tires on it. You let it rust, you don't keep it clean Like it'll run but it's rougher right and it's more likely to break down. But when you take care of the car and you put new tires and you're constantly, you know, doing the oil change on time, maybe a little bit early you're waxing it, you're protecting it, you're keeping it clean, you're being preventative and proactive, it's going to run a lot better. And when you do stuff to it, it's probably going to take to it better versus if you have, you know, a rusty hunk of junk that you didn't take care of. If you try to wax a rusted panel, it's probably not going to work. It would have worked a long time ago if you did it preventatively. That's how our body is right.
Speaker 1:
So the oil change, the tire rotation, that is drinking your water, eating enough protein and fiber, drinking electrolytes you know all the things De-stressing you got to make sure that you're doing those first. And you know what, if you De-stressing, you got to make sure that you're doing those first. And you know what? If you do all those things first and you still have issues, fine, and I'll tell you, I'm stubborn when I had my thyroid issues because I was borderline which doesn't really mean anything, because you could be borderline and feel like absolute garbage. And there's people whose numbers are off the charts, like dangerous, and they don't feel a thing or they'll just feel a little tired. But I was like you know what? Because they test you for about I'd say, six months or so, every six to eight weeks, to see if your levels change.
Speaker 1:
Before I got medicated, I was like you know what? I'm gonna tighten up my routine. I'm gonna be perfect. I'm gonna eat really good, drink my water, de-stress, take my vitamins. I did everything. I'm a fitness trainer, I know exactly what to do and I did it. And guess what? Nothing got better. If anything, the numbers actually got worse. So I knew that this was out of my control. It wasn't something that a healthy lifestyle was necessarily going to change.
Speaker 1:
I was already doing everything right and my assumption is that I probably didn't get diagnosed sooner and my levels were borderline. I was already doing everything right and my assumption is that I probably didn't get diagnosed sooner and my levels were borderline because I was taking care of myself. This was just kind of the straw that broke the camel's back. My body couldn't keep up anymore and it went into hypothyroidism, right, and I've kind of believed that all my life, even with my PCOS. You know they're always like oh, you know you're usually overweight with PCOS, usually have these symptoms, and I'm just such a firm believer that the issues that I have had have been completely kept at bay and very minor and actually overlooked, because they people assume that I'm just like healthy and not experiencing symptoms because I've kept up with my health so long. And now that I've gotten properly treated and I'm on a good birth control that doesn't give me any side effects, I am on the you know thyroid supplementation. My health is better than ever and I feel great because I found out what worked for me.
Speaker 1:
So and I got trapped in the little black hole Listen I went down the route of charcoal detoxes for my armpits to get toxins out. I did green tea, weight loss pills. I looked into all these herbal remedies and I don't know if it's just me, but when I take herbal remedies I'm so against them because my body always reacts terribly, terribly. Does anybody remember Katie Hearn when she, you know, first started Alani New? I think she still has it Balance there was a supplement, balance and it's supposed to help your hormones and help you have regular periods and people with PCOS were like I got my period back, I tried it, I felt like garbage when I took it, like any herbal supplement, my body was like no supplement.
Speaker 1:
My body was like no, and everybody has these great experiences and I never did so. That forced me to go. You know what? I'm just gonna go to the basics with what God gave us, with what was here before man made any of this crap water, good nutrients, rest, sleep and guess what? It works like.
Speaker 1:
Modern marvels are great, obviously, like the thyroid medication and birth control and all that stuff, but nothing beats the basics to keep your car and your body running right. It'd be like trying to find an alternative for gas like would it work? Like you're pouring I don't know like olive oil in your gas tank, like it wouldn't work. That's what you're doing when you try to get these um, you know, quick fix fad diet type things to to you kind of put more fuel on top of the fire. Right, it's a little silly. So think about that.
Speaker 1:
I want you to think about where you're at today seriously and to be honest with you, it's kind of sad. I think the education is lacking out there. You may think you listening right now may think that you're healthy right now and you're doing all the things right, but maybe you're not. And that's another key part of my coaching that I do is I show people the true healthy way, and healthy looks different for everybody, depending on your workload and your stress load the amount of workouts you can handle, the type of workouts you can handle, the types of food you could be eating, how much food you should be eating. You know, I have some clients that are eating 2,300 calories a day and I have some that are at 1,500. It depends on their height, their activity level, their weight, whatever is working for them, their goals. So there's a lot going on. So, if you're confused, that's what health coaches are for. That's what health coaches are for. That's what fitness coaches are for.
Speaker 1:
I'm definitely here to help and I would love to guide you. Just DM me. The word transform. You can DM me at Tina Weiland fit at Instagram, or I'm Tina Weiland on Facebook. You can creep on me, or actually there's a new feature on the podcast. If you look in the episode description, there should be a little link, the first line, that says text me, send me a text, text me that and I'll get that message and we can chat a little bit, because I want to help you out. I just don't think the education is right out there, and I just I want to guide people in the right direction. So I hope you got something from this episode. If you enjoyed this and you know somebody else who would benefit from this, I would love if you shared it with a friend. That is how more people get educated and see my podcast. So, other than that, though, have a great rest of your day, and I'll talk to you soon. Bye.