Welcome to the Dr. Berg's Healthy Keto and Interminute Fasting Podcast, where Dr. Berg takes you on the journey for the truth about getting healthy and losing healthy weights.

Let's talk about the relationship between stress and your muscles.

When you go through chronic stress, which creates an elevation of cortisol,

various things happen to different parts of your body.

But today we're going to focus more on the skeletal muscles. And it's not necessarily just excessive stress. It could be excess amount of cortisol.

Another name for that would be glucocorticoids. Or as an external source, if you're on prednisone,

for example, you're getting a lot of that cortisol, and that can

create the same effect. There's two primary effects that happen with the muscles. Number one, you have

this increased catabolic effect. Okay, catabolic means a breakdown of something. So we're getting

a breakdown of muscle protein. Okay. And number two, you have this decrease of the anabolic effect of the muscles.

So this means you're not going to build the muscles back up. You're not going to make new muscles.

So if we look at the chain of events, we have increased amount of stress or prednisone or an

increased amount of cortisol from another reason. Maybe you had a tumor on your adrenal or whatever.

So there are other reasons why your cortisol might go up. But what happens, it targets the muscle

and you start getting atrophy of the muscle. And what's happening is we're getting this muscle

that's turning into amino acids. And the amino acids are there as a precursor to make new glucose, okay, in the liver.

And that's called gluconeogenesis. Neal, meaning new genesis, meaning the creation of. So we're

making new glucose from non-carbohydrate sources. And in the process of breaking down this muscle protein,

there's going to be two main muscle groups that are going to be involved. Primarily, it could be

other muscles too, but primarily it's going to be your thigh muscles, okay, the quadricep,

and the glute muscles, your glutamus maximus. Apparently those are two muscles that we have in abundance,

so that's what the body is going to go after. And this is all a survival mechanism. And what the

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