Hello and welcome to this episode of the ESG Fitness podcast. This episode is going to be all

about cortisol because it keeps coming up again and again in my questions and I thought

I'll do a comprehensive podcast on it once and for all. So here it is. Cautil is a very important hormone that serves many essential

functions in the body, including like waking you up in the morning. Like it's not inherently a bad

thing. Now acute and short term elevations in cortisol in response to stress are normal

and healthy and essential, right? It's when those, so by stress, I mean things like, I mean,

numerous things are stressed, but even things that are good, i.e. exercise increases cortisol. Why? Because

it's a stress. It's a demand on the body.

Now, when these cortisol levels remain elevated, that's when you get a bit of a problem, right?

But when these remain elevated, one of the side effects that may occur is weight gain.

And in some ways, this is quite similar to how we need to think about insulin and blood glucose.

Acute increases are completely normal, are completely healthy, you need them there.

It's the chronic elevation that is the problem. And most people don't need to worry

about these acute increases in either cortisol or glucose or insulin. In fact, if you do worry

about those, you end up doing really stupid things like cutting out through or not exercising

because you're scared about increasing cortisol.

I've actually seen people recommend not doing hit training

because they're worried about increases in cortisol.

I cannot emphasise this enough.

Hit training is one of the healthiest things you can do for your body.

There is an incredible amount of evidence to show that hit

training will improve numerous health outcomes. And to tell people not to do it is like one of my

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