Episode 104- Cortisol & Belly Fat: How the Stress Hormone Could Be Sabotaging Your Sleep, Mood, and Weight Loss
Episode 104 Show Notes
Are you constantly tired, holding onto stubborn belly fat, craving sugar and salt, or feeling wired but exhausted? You might be dealing with cortisol imbalance— and it could be wrecking your energy, sleep, mood, and weight loss goals.
In this episode, Tiffany Wickes—nutrition & fitness coach and mom of 7 — breaks down what cortisol is, why so many moms have too much of it for too long, and what you can do to get it back in balance.
You’ll learn:
What cortisol does in your body (and why you need it—but in the right amounts)
Common symptoms of cortisol imbalance, from belly fat and PMS changes to mood swings and afternoon crashes
Surprising triggers that spike cortisol (including some “healthy” habits)
Why skipping meals, fasting too long, and overdoing cardio can backfire
The connection between cortisol, melatonin, and poor sleep
Simple, doable strategies to reset and recover
Tiffany shares practical tips you can start today—from eating protein within an hour of waking, to strength training instead of endless cardio, to prioritizing rest and smart supplementation.
If you’ve been feeling stuck, sluggish, or like your body isn’t responding no matter how “healthy” you eat, this episode will help you understand what’s going on under the surface—and how to fix it.
Links & Resources:
Join the 5-Day Cortisol Reset → Only $20! Starts on the 18th. Learn how to nourish your body, balance your hormones, and feel functional again. Sign up here or visit Tiffany’s Instagram.
Thank you for supporting my small business. Here are some brands I trust and use myself with a discount for you:
Equip Protein - 15% off with code WICKES
Masa Chips - 20% off code STRONG $50 or more
Let’s Connect! I share tons of fitness tips and more behind the scenes on my social accounts.
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If you're constantly tired, holding onto belly fat, no matter how clean you eat and feel wired, but exhausted, this episode is for you. We're talking about cortisol, the stress hormone that could be sabotaging your weight loss, sleep, mood, and energy. What is cortisol? So cortisol is a hormone that's released by the adrenal gland. It's meant to help you handle stress like a temporary burst of energy in a moment of crisis. The problem
is most moms are in a constant low-level crisis mode. Your kid forgets his soccer shoes and now you feel like it's your personal emergency. This means that the cortisol level, which is important and valuable and 100 % needed or you will die, is often too high for too long. What happens when the cortisol stays high? First off, fat storage, especially around your belly.
You get muscle breakdown, it slows muscle growth and repair. Think about it, your body thinks it's running from a bear, even if you're just trying to find your kid's soccer boots, which by the way, I don't think is your responsibility. If he forgets it, he forgets it. He either can practice in bare feet or he just doesn't go. Like that's his problem. I don't know why you're making it yours. Next is insulin resistance. So when you're insulin resistant, it makes losing fat so much harder. And oftentimes
because you're exhausted, have stronger cravings and typically your body's looking for sugar. It's looking for energy because it feels like it's running from a bear. Next thing is that you can have poor sleep. So cortisol and melatonin have an inverse relationship to each other. So when your cortisol is high, your melatonin is low, which means you're not getting quality sleep and you know, sometimes vice versa, right? Because cortisol is the hormone that gets you up and moving. Melatonin is the hormone that gets you calmed down, ready for sleep.
All right. And also you oftentimes your adrenals are completely burnout. They can't keep up. And that's where you get the fatigue, the irritability and brain fog. So some common symptoms of cortisol imbalance, cause right, we're not trying to eliminate cortisol. Okay. Hear me again. You do not want to eliminate cortisol. You can't, your body needs it to survive. What we want to do is help balance it. So
Tiffany Wickes (02:17.678)
So here's some common symptoms if they are imbalanced. So you wake up tired, but you can't go to sleep at night. You're craving salt and sugar like it is your job. You have irregular periods or your PMS symptoms have worsened. And no, by the way, if you're having PMS symptoms aside from like, oh, you know, it might feel just slightly moody or, you know, I ovulated a couple of days ago and my right ovary was just having a time of it. And I felt like
this crushing kind of pain and even some low back pain with ovulation on my right side. That's not typical, but it's happened a few times. But I don't have imbalanced cortisol actually. I've got blood tests to prove it. But if you have worsening PMS symptoms, which are not normal to begin with, that could be a sign that your cortisol is imbalanced. So belly fat.
Belly fat has got a lot of associations. One of them could be retaining water and bloating, but another one could be that your cortisol is imbalanced. If you've got this belly fat that just won't move, or in the afternoon after you've slept what should have been a decent night, you've had some decent food for the day or whatever, and you're just crashing in the energy department in the afternoon, that could be a sign of a cortisol imbalance. Mood swings, anxiety, depression, stuff like that, that could all...
all be associated with a cortisol imbalance. So here are some things that could trigger cortisol to be released when it doesn't need to be. So skipping meals or fasting too long, especially for women in their 30s and 40s, what would too long be? Really, it's not even, I don't know if it's so much as a question of too long or too much, but it's too long and too much in cooperation with one another, right? So if you're
Like I'm one of these women who only eat once a day, know, they abbreviate it online EOD eat once a day and you're fasting for 36 hours or something crazy. It's like, all right, girl, you got to eat. If you're doing too much cardio or HIIT without rest days, that's also a problem. And also if you're not utilizing proper food pairing, I'm not talking about an individual food. I'm talking about a philosophy of eating.
Tiffany Wickes (04:34.126)
That can create problems too. So if you're under eating on protein and calories, which by the way, I feel like I need to do a whole episode where I talk about the difference between under eating and a calorie deficit because I'm seeing it online everywhere and it's making me bonkers that all of these dude fitness influencers, all they're talking about is like, well, it's thermodynamics. You just got to be in a calorie deficit. But a deficit in under eating are different.
Okay. A deficit is just slightly under where your maintenance caloric needs are. But under eating is when you are sick, there's a significant gap between the calories your body requires to breathe, digest, move, heartbeat, know, bowels to churn versus being a slight deficit, slight couple hundred calories, you guys slight. Um, okay. If you are just living on coffee and a dream, that's a problem.
Hey man, I like to drink my coffee first thing in the morning. don't, I wake up and this is another thing too, is if you wake up and you are absolutely not hungry at all, that's a problem with your metabolism because typically you have now fasted for at least 10 hours, should be more like 12 to 14 if you stop eating around five or six at night. And I get it. There's a lot of parents and families out there where that is not possible because they've got kids that have
practice until five and six o'clock at night. They're not getting home till seven. They're trying to sit down and eat dinner as a family. mean, my suggestion would be, there another time of day that you guys can get together as a family? If breakfast is the time that everybody's at the same table and you can make a family breakfast before they go to school, yes, you're to have to get up earlier than everybody else. But if that's the time, then that's the time.
Otherwise, try eating your dinner before you pick up the kids from practice and then be fasting from five or six at night until six or seven in the morning would be ideal to get at least a 12-hour fast, ideally somewhere between 14 and 16 hours. But if you wake up and you are hungry and you choose not to eat, that's a different ball game altogether. That is some good metabolic flexibility where you're choosing to tell your body, hey, we're going to use some stored body fat because we all have some stored body fat, unless you're one of these freaks of nature.
Tiffany Wickes (06:46.006)
that are down here at like 9 and 10 % as a female should be worrisome. I really don't think females should get any lower than probably 15 or 16 % body fat. And that's pretty darn lean for a woman. All right, I've kind of gone off the rails here. Okay, triggers. So emotional stress, you know, if you've got a high mental load, if your relationships are strained, if there's money issues, that can all be a cortisol trigger.
So, you know, this is probably not the podcast to go into to talk about how to regulate your nervous system and how like it, I know it's so easy. It just flies off your tongue, right? Like, hey, don't worry about this stuff. It all kind of works out. But I mean, look at everything you've gone through up to this point. Things do tend to work themselves out and worrying has literally never solved a single problem in the entire world. If money is your concern, then you have to actively
address that concern, but sitting there just wringing your hands over it and worrying has literally never solved anything. All it's going to do is continue to deconstruct your own body's resilience. So maybe don't do that. All right. So here's some basics to kind of recover your cortisol and get it better in balance. So if you eat within an hour of waking up, definitely get some protein in there.
Midlife women need somewhere between 35 to 50 grams of protein. If you don't like eating a whole meal, then just blend up a protein shake. You don't have to put a bunch of fruit in it and make it heavy, but even just some almond milk and some good quality protein in there, that's adequate. And then get some protein going, get just a little bit of fuel moving, and then go for a walk, watch the sunrise, practice some box breathing.
And you definitely have to stop skipping your meals. Listen, I've got a whole house full of kids, a busy family life. I'm on my own most of the time. Like I get it. It's really easy to skip meals because it's just simpler and you get more done if you don't sit down and eat and you just keep going and like liquefy your lunch into more coffee because coffee suppresses your appetite very naturally. So if you are like, I'll just have some more coffee. Like get some more goat juice, suppress my appetite and just keep moving. Like
Tiffany Wickes (09:00.27)
I get it, I've done it a thousand times, but it's not good for you. So stop skipping meals, especially if you're exercising. You need to be fueling properly and appropriately after whatever you're doing for fitness. But how you refuel is not always the same either. It really depends on what you did for your fitness. All right. You really have to reduce caffeine or have it after you have something to eat or have it in unison with your protein shake.
If I have had a good fast, when I wake up, I have been having a 40 gram protein shake, just liquid protein shake. I basically just chug that first thing in the morning and I get my electrolytes. did a podcast episode a few episodes ago on what my morning supplement stack looks like. At that point, I've already broken my fast, so I'll put all of my supplements into my water bottle and I'll start sipping on that. By the way, if you don't have a very large water bottle and you're putting electrolytes in there, I mean,
There's salt in there, so that does create a more acidic environment for your mouth. You are more prone to cavities if you don't just guzzle that down. But my water bottle is so big that it probably takes me 45 minutes to an hour to drink all that water. That's fine. I'm not in any greater risk for cavities. But if you are drinking it in a higher concentration, I would suggest drinking that faster and then just get that in there. so yeah, reduce the amount of caffeine. Like one mug, guys.
One, that's it. I want more too. I get it. But just one, like let's limit it. All right. You could also switch to matcha tea. So matcha does have some caffeine in it. It has some, you know, natural things in there that help you to like still get that feel good, get up and go that coffee does, but it doesn't hit you in the adrenals quite as hard as coffee does. So you might want to consider switching to matcha if you feel like that's a comparable substitution. I don't. So
I won't be doing that, but maybe it will work for you. Just being honest over here. All right. So strength training, you need to do more of that rather than doing excessive cardio. Like I love to sweat just like a lot of girls do because you feel like you're working harder if you're sweating, right? It's a good sign that your detox pathways are open, but it doesn't always mean you had a better workout just because you feel half dead at the end of it or that you're covered in a, you know, half a cup worth of sweat.
Tiffany Wickes (11:23.916)
That's not, they're not correlated. Okay. So listen, you also need to take rest very seriously. Okay. You need to walk often. I tell people all the time that I am constantly moving in my house. The time for me to stop moving is about nine 30, 10 o'clock PM. And right about then I'm getting ready for bed. Or if Adam's home, then maybe we're snuggled up watching a show or something on TV, but we just watch one show.
unless it's really good, then I might push it out for a second episode if I make him promise to wake up with the kids the next day. I digress, but you do need to take rest far more seriously. Take walks, take baths, take naps, set appropriate boundaries. If you know, there is a soccer team that's asking your kid to practice from eight to nine PM, maybe consider not playing soccer that year because that is insane for a kid to be up till nine o'clock at night, leaving a soccer field, having to refuel.
after said fitness and then get home, shower, get enough rest in order to get up the next day. And teenagers need more sleep as it is. So I think that schedule is a little bit bananas. I would pull my kid out, but I also don't take sports as seriously as a lot of American families do, which is kind of bonkers to me. All right. So supplementation use that wisely. Okay. Magnesium is fantastic. Remember there are
I 10 different forms of magnesium, tons of different ones. I mean, my favorite brand that I don't represent or affiliate or get paid on at all, but I mentioned it, is a bioptimizer. I think they have a fantastic magnesium, multiple kinds, but Mag Breakthrough is the one I take. Some other, you can use some adaptogens like ashwagandha. Getting a good high vitamin C is fantastic. I don't think you always need to have that in a supplement form.
Obviously that's abundant in fruits and vegetables, but if you need a little bit extra, feel free. Indulge. Now listen, if any of that stuff with the triggers and the symptoms, if any of that sounds like you, listen, my five-day cortisol reset is the perfect place for you to start.
Tiffany Wickes (13:33.558)
It's only $20 and it's designed specifically for busy moms like you, like me. And you're going to learn how to nourish your body, balance your hormones and more specifically your cortisol and start to feel human again and functional. So if you're interested in getting a hold of this program and getting into our group, it starts on the 18th, then head to the link in the show notes or visit my Instagram to get signed up and I will see you there. Okay.
All right, cheers guys, thanks for being here. Stay strong, mamas, and keep showing up.