The Best Ways To Lower Cortisol



Posted: Tuesday, July 14, 2009

by Jimmy Smith

How to lower cortisol is the hottest topic surrounding weight loss recently. You see cortisol is a stress hormone that rises during periods of tension and stress. If you are upset about work or a relationship then it rises. If you just had a hard workout then it rises. Everything that you do, causes cortisol to rise to a certain degree. The problem is when you don't know how to control it. It can lead to some pretty nasty lower ab fat or in worse cause, some bad stomach fat. So the first step is to understand how to control it through your diet and training.

A low carb diet works so well in reducing cortisol since insulin, which is what carbohydrates cause to be releases in your bloodstream. When this happens then your cortisol spikes since insulin will increase fast and drop even faster. This tells the body that you have to "fight" or else something bad is going to happen. This is also bad because your body will pull amino acids from your muscle cells in order to combat this. Thus all the hard work you put into the gym is nulled. So what can you do? Well for starters, I suggest that you eat very few carbohydrates. Look to limit any carbohydrate sources to begin with and only take your carbs, if you have to from oatmeal or brown rice.

Next you want to make sure that you are taking a lot of protein in your diet. Not only does protein help to build lean muscle, which lowers cortisol but it also aids in keeping your blood sugar stable. That's very important because, like mentioned above, blood sugar controls cortisol. If it moves everywhere, then your stress hormones rise which also decrease your anabolic muscle building hormones of growth hormone and testosterone. Focus on eating protein with every meal and consume high quality sources such as chicken, eggs, beef and turkey.

After you have these two diet factors in check, you want to move onto your supplementation. For starters, you need to make sure you are eating high quality omega-3 fish oil, why? Omega-3 fish oil helps to lower cortisol since it will stabilize blood sugar and prevent insulin from crashing your system. That leads to less stomach fat. The next supplement that you want to look into is green tea, not only is green tea so healthy for your body for various reasons but green tea will help to lower cortisol by reducing metabolic stress and toxins that are around in the environment.
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