If you tend to gain weight while eating low carbohydrates, especially keeping away from sweets, and exercising a lot, or in any case burning a lot of calories, perhaps your tendency to put on fat around the navel is not attributable to the diet and sacrifices you make to eat. less and move more. But to stress, and specifically to a stress hormone called cortisol.

Cortisol is a catabolic hormone , that is, it is a hormone that dissipates our energy sources and pushes the body to seek new ones, and against which our body implements a series of “defensive” behaviors to keep us alive and healthy, alerting the immune defenses.

When we have high levels of cortisol, our body is already in alarm: insulin sensitivity is reduced (due to the “preventive” request for additional energy resources: however, if they are not exploited they will convert into fat ), therefore we tend to be more hungry for carbohydrates and sweets, resulting in an increase in blood sugar and the long-term onset of a problem known as insulin resistance; it also increases total cholesterol with a decrease in good cholesterol. This mechanism has not yet been clearly explained by experts: on the one hand, excess cortisol would increase blood pressure, favoring cardiovascular problems ; on the other hand iglucocorticoids such as cortisol could cause increased cortisol production again as a defensive response . 

Some experts speculate that, not being able to eliminate stress (impossible nowadays if you have a normal life), it is the anti-stress behaviors that make the difference in our health . The wrong behaviors in front of this stress hormone will lead us to have high blood sugar, overweight with increased visceral fat, hypertension and all the characteristics of a metabolic syndrome; the right behaviors could even improve our physical condition, allowing us to use cortisol to our advantage. But how? On page two the tips I found for you from the experts.