We want to educate you

You can do anything, but not everything

We want to educate you

A little snippet of what our Edge Effect members have access to … our aim is to educate them about the mind and body.

You may have heard us talk about cortisol levels, the role it plays in your body & in response to stress. Here’s some more info about what it is & how it works.

Cortisol is a hormone, produced in the adrenal cortex in response to stress (physical or emotional).

Cortisol is useful – it is the thing that helps us get up in the morning and function on a daily basis. In the morning, cortisol rises until it peaks around 8:00am. This helps us feel bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. As the day wears on, it falls gradually, reaching its lowest levels around 3:00-4:00pm.

Cortisol’s big role is as part of the body’s stress response. It helps us deal with stress by shutting down functions, which under stressful circumstances are deemed unnecessary, like reproduction and the immune system.

This allows the body to direct all its energies toward dealing with the stress at hand. These functions of cortisol are supposed to be short-lived, just long enough to deal with the offending stressor. However, our modern lives are anything but stress free and when stress is chronic this becomes a problem as our cortisol levels remain elevated for longer periods of time.

With the shutdown of important bodily functions, there can be serious long-term issues associated with infertility, loss of libido, recurrent illness & injury, weight gain and depression, just to name a few …

Basically when stress levels remain high, the cortisol message becomes disrupted – we produce excess, we fail to produce enough, we produce at the wrong times & in response to the wrong stimulus.

The greatest association we make with too much cortisol is the gain of belly fat and loss of muscle. But adversely, too little cortisol can leave us feeling “chronically fatigued.”

Neither of those things sound very appealing, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg …

We can’t live without cortisol, we need it so our bodies can deal with the daily stressors we face. However, if we continue to abuse our minds & bodies with high levels of stress, we will pay the price.

What gains will you make if you push your bodies past breaking point?

Overtraining? Training on little or no sleep? Failure to fuel an already exhausted body & mind properly? Overcommitting yourself? Beating yourself up?

Stressing about being fat is likely to mean that you will be – it just continues the stress cycle & maintains high levels of cortisol.

Maybe next time don’t “suck it up” & push through. Next time you say “I’m fat”, remember this is only contributing to an already stressed out mind & body.

Think about your elevated cortisol & the negative impacts that will have on your body & mind.

The choice is yours.

T&C xx