You’re going to the gym. You’re tracking your food. You’re doing everything right – and the weight isn’t moving. Or it’s moving the wrong direction. This is one of the most frustrating patterns coaches at Kraken Fitness in North Burnaby see, and the answer is usually the same: cortisol. In Episode 23 of the Kraken Power Podcast, Brandon shares how chronic stress gave him shingles at 25, and Josko and Brandon break down exactly how stress hijacks your body composition – and what to actually do about it.
Catch the Full Episode
Watch on YouTube:
Listen on Spotify:
What Cortisol Actually Is (And Why You Need Some of It)
Cortisol is not the enemy. It’s a hormone your body genuinely needs – it’s what wakes you up in the morning. As melatonin drops, cortisol rises, and that’s what pulls you out of sleep. Coffee works partly because it spikes cortisol, which is why your body craves it first thing. Some people function best under pressure – that sharper focus, that ability to get things done when the stakes are high – that’s cortisol doing its job.
The problem isn’t cortisol. The problem is cortisol that doesn’t come back down.
Brandon tells his story from when he was 25. Last year of university, training jiu-jitsu once or twice a day, lifting, running a calorie deficit, managing exams. From the outside, it looked like discipline. He was lean, active, on top of his nutrition. What was actually happening was his body was under a level of accumulated stress it couldn’t sustain. The cortisol kept climbing and never got a real chance to drop. After months of this, his immune system finally gave out. He got shingles – a disease that typically hits people in their 60s and 70s when immunity is at its lowest.
The lesson isn’t that exercise is bad or that tracking your food is bad. It’s that too much of multiple stressors running in parallel, without enough recovery, pushes cortisol into territory where it starts working against you in every direction.
What Happens When Cortisol Stays Too High
Chronic high cortisol has a long list of downstream effects – and most people have no idea it’s the cause.
Belly fat storage is one of the most visible ones. Cortisol drives fat to be stored centrally, around the abdomen. People who are exercising regularly and eating reasonably but carrying persistent belly fat often have elevated cortisol as the underlying factor.
Brain fog is another. High cortisol over time impairs cognitive function, makes it harder to concentrate, and contributes to that feeling of being mentally depleted even when you haven’t done anything physically demanding.
There are cardiovascular effects too. Chronically elevated cortisol raises blood pressure and contributes to inflammation, which is a downstream risk factor for heart disease. And because cortisol is linked to accelerated aging at a cellular level, populations with chronically lower cortisol consistently show longer lifespans.
The hormonal disruption goes further. Cortisol interferes with leptin and ghrelin – the hormones that regulate hunger. Leptin tells you you’re full. Ghrelin tells you you’re hungry. High cortisol suppresses leptin and amplifies ghrelin, which means you feel hungry more often, feel full less easily, and the pull toward food is stronger. This isn’t a willpower problem. It’s a hormone problem. And it makes fat loss significantly harder regardless of what your training and nutrition look like on paper.
Your Body Can’t Tell a Lion From a Work Deadline
The stress response was designed for short, acute threats. A predator. A physical danger. Your body floods with cortisol, you get a burst of energy and focus to deal with the threat, and then – when the threat passes – cortisol comes back down and the system resets.
Modern life doesn’t work that way. Your boss’s email doesn’t go away after five minutes. The news cycle runs 24 hours. Parenting stress doesn’t clock out at 5pm. A spouse argument at 9pm, doom-scrolling until midnight, a kid waking you up at 3am, a project deadline at work – to your nervous system, all of that is stress, and it all produces cortisol.
Where the caveman’s lion showed up occasionally and then disappeared, modern stressors are constant and overlapping. There’s no recovery window. Cortisol that should be dropping is instead stacking. And because the body doesn’t distinguish between physical and psychological threats, the same mechanism that would help you run from danger is now quietly running in the background of your commute, your inbox, and your social media feed.
Brandon’s point in the episode is direct: modern life is technically more stressful than life in the bush. The stimuli are different, but the biological response is the same – and it was never designed to run continuously.
Why Stress Stalls Fat Loss (Even When You’re Doing Everything Right)
Brandon had a client who was training consistently, tracking her nutrition carefully, and staying in a calorie deficit – all to fit into her wedding dress. Her weight wouldn’t move. Weeks of doing everything correctly and the scale barely shifted.
The variable was her wedding planning. She was managing enormous logistical stress on top of her normal life, and that stress was holding her weight in place through elevated cortisol. Then she had a meeting with her wedding planner who took the whole thing off her hands. Everything’s handled. Nothing to worry about. Her stress dropped significantly that weekend.
The following week, her weight dropped noticeably.
Nothing changed in her training. Nothing changed in her nutrition. The only thing that changed was the stress load. That’s cortisol directly affecting body composition in real time.
Cortisol also causes muscle breakdown. It’s a catabolic hormone – in a fight-or-flight state, your body will sacrifice muscle tissue for fast energy because surviving a physical threat right now is more important than maintaining muscle you might need later. If you’re chronically stressed while trying to lose fat or build muscle, you’re working against your own body’s chemical signals. Eating right and training hard can’t fully overcome that if the cortisol isn’t coming down.
How to Actually Lower Your Cortisol
Sleep is the first and most important lever. Cortisol drops during deep sleep – it’s one of the key recovery processes that happens while you’re unconscious. When sleep quality is poor, cortisol doesn’t get the chance to reset. Then you wake up already elevated, hunger signals are disrupted from the start, and you spend the day trying to eat well and feel good while running on a hormonal deficit. The whole cascade begins with sleep.
Reduce your phone and news consumption, particularly in the evening. Reading alarming headlines before bed, scrolling through social media, or staying mentally activated late into the night keeps cortisol elevated at exactly the time it should be winding down. This isn’t new advice, but most people underestimate how significantly it affects their recovery.
The third lever – and the one that surprises people most – is training less. Not harder. Less. Josko now trains with weights twice a week and walks daily. He’s had his cortisol tested and it sits on the lower side of normal. Before he reduced his training frequency, he was stuck – his strength wasn’t progressing, his recovery was incomplete, and he was grinding through sessions that weren’t actually producing results. The reduction in volume was the fix.
Exercise is a stressor. That’s the whole mechanism – you apply stress to the body, the body adapts, you get stronger. But if you’re already carrying high stress from work, life, and poor sleep, adding four or five training sessions a week doesn’t give the body anything to adapt from. It just adds more load to a system that’s already buried.
Less Is More: The Case for Subtracting Before Adding
The default approach to most health problems is additive – take this supplement, add this workout, try this protocol. The cortisol conversation flips that. When your stress load is high, the most effective intervention is usually subtraction.
What can you take off your plate? What workout can you drop this week? What can you stop checking before bed? What obligation can you hand off or delay? Brandon’s wedding client didn’t need a new training plan. She needed someone to take her wedding stress away. That one subtraction did more for her body composition than any additional intervention would have.
Josko tracks this concretely – he tested his cortisol, knows where it sits, and has structured his training around that reality. Two sessions a week, high intensity, full recovery between. Daily walks that support movement without adding meaningful stress. No late-night training. No overloading a week that already has a lot happening in it.
The practical takeaway: before you think about what to add to fix a plateau, look at what you’re already carrying. Stress is load. Life is load. If the total is too high, more gym time isn’t the answer. Less might be.
FAQ
Does stress actually cause weight gain?
Yes, through cortisol. Chronically elevated cortisol promotes belly fat storage, disrupts the hunger hormones leptin and ghrelin so you feel hungry more often, and breaks down muscle tissue. These effects compound over time, making fat loss harder even when training and nutrition are on point.
What does high cortisol feel like?
Persistent belly fat despite exercise, brain fog, feeling hungry all the time, difficulty sleeping, low energy even after rest, and slow recovery from workouts. Most people attribute these to diet or training problems – cortisol is often the underlying cause that gets missed.
Can too much exercise raise cortisol?
Yes. Exercise is a stressor – that’s how it produces adaptation. But when you’re already carrying high stress from work, poor sleep, and life load, adding more training sessions pushes cortisol higher instead of generating recovery. Two or three quality sessions a week often produces better results than five or six.
How do I lower cortisol naturally?
Prioritize sleep quality above everything else. Reduce evening phone and news use. Cut training volume and add daily walking instead. Look at what stressors you can remove from your life rather than what you can add to your routine. Subtraction is often more effective than addition here.
Why am I always hungry when I’m stressed?
Cortisol suppresses leptin, the hormone that signals fullness, and elevates ghrelin, the hormone that drives hunger. High stress literally makes you feel hungrier more often and full less reliably. This is a physiological effect, not a willpower issue – and it’s one of the main reasons stress derails fat loss even when everything else looks right.
Ready to Start?
If you’re in North Burnaby and your results have stalled despite doing the work, stress and cortisol might be the piece nobody has looked at yet. Kraken Fitness coaches take the whole picture into account – training load, life load, sleep, and recovery – not just what’s happening in the gym.
Listen and Watch
Watch on YouTube
Listen on Spotify
Listen on Apple Podcasts
