Glam Girl Bikini Presents: Metabolism, Hormones and Stress Response

<p>Do you struggle to drop weight? Are you watery, have trouble digesting foods, and have chronic fatique? If so, listen in while Bikini Coaches @chrisnicole_ifbbpro and @amyehinger address the metabolic compensation that occurs due to chronic stress in this episode. Unfortunately there are so many Bikini athletes that are currently dealing with this issue due to chronic dieting and too much cardio. Their hormones are out of whack and they have dysregulation of key hormones that impact regulation of metabolic functions. In general this seems to affect female athletes primarily.</p> <p>Dieting, cardio, training, stressing to get leaner and general stressing in life all add up to huge stress on the body. Our bodies’ response is to produce more cortisol. If you produce too much cortisol that is when problems start. Your body uses progesterone from the progesterone/pregnenolone pathways to create more cortisol. This is generally fine if cortisol stays in a normal range because for the most part there is plenty of progesterone remaining to still form other hormones. However, when cortisol gets too high, progesterone becomes depleted and you don’t have enough remaining for other critical hormone creation. You need progesterone to create DHEA and eventually testosterone, thus disruption in the pathways will eventually lead you to become low in testosterone.</p> <p>A Bikini athlete with high cortisol, low progesterone, and low testosterone typically ends up being estrogen dominant (which causes many issues, one of which being difficulty losing body fat). The dysfunction also affects the thyroid as it starts to down-regulate due to the disturbances. This does not always occur, but most of the time it’s what we will see happening. So now you have an athlete that is in a much more sympathetic state, not sleeping, insulin resistant, holding water, not burning calories or using them properly, etc. Additionally in most cases they have coinciding digestion issues since the body is not digesting food properly due to the fact