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.
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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.
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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.
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About the Author
Josko is the Founder & CEO of Kraken Fitness in North Burnaby and co-host of the Kraken Power Podcast. He’s been coaching for over 12 years and has worked extensively with clients whose results were being held back by stress and recovery issues rather than their training or nutrition.
Brandon is the Co-Owner & COO of Kraken Fitness and co-host of the Kraken Power Podcast. He brings a kinesiology background and hard-won personal experience – including getting shingles at 25 from chronic overtraining – to every conversation about stress, recovery, and what it actually takes to see results.
[Brandon]
Your body doesn’t know the difference between a lion chasing you and a work deadline. If you are someone who is going through a fat loss phase or just trying to maintain lean muscle mass, having too much cortisol over time is actually going to make you break down your muscle tissue faster than someone who has lower level of cortisol. Welcome back to the Kraken Power podcast.
So when I was 25, I was in my last year of university. And as people go through university, it’s one of the most stressful times in my life so far because you’re inundated with exams, but also just trying to live your regular life. I always thought that going to university wouldn’t be that stressful if that’s the only thing I had ever had to focus on. And so even though I’ve been in the fitness industry for a while, I’ve always wanted to get better at my health. And so I was training lots. I was training jiu-jitsu once or twice a day. I was lifting and I was making sure that I was keeping track of my diet. At this time, I was like, “Oh, I want to make sure I’m into a certain weight class. I was actually in a calorie deficit.” And what I didn’t know that doing all these things in combination was actually loading my body up with so much stress. So much stress that what ended up happening was I actually got shingles. And so for those who don’t know, shingles is a byproduct of you having chickenpox earlier in your life. It gets stored in your body and it can come up usually later in life when your immune system is at an all-time low where it seeks an opportunity to come out and take place. And so I was 25 years old having a disease that usually like 60, 70, 80 year olds get because their immunity is so low. And the funny thing is I thought I was doing everything right. I thought I was being healthy. I thought I was tracking my diet really well. I thought I was exercising as much as I could. But underneath the surface, what was going on was I was loading my body up with stress because I wasn’t getting very good sleep. I was extremely stressed because of my exams and how much load I had at university. But also adding in those extra workouts, adding in a calorie deficit was spiking my cortisol level to a level higher than what was actually normal.
[Josko]
To people on the outside, you were basically doing everything right. Everybody’s like, “Wow, Brandon’s exercising so much. He’s so lean. He looks good. He’s doing jiu-jitsu. He’s going to school. Oh, wow. His life must be so good.” But then inside, you were slowly dying. Very, very slowly dying. And it was an accumulation of over time, not just all at once. I mean, you were doing these things all at once, but it wasn’t just like this happened in one week where you just did all these things normally or more than what you would normally do. It was a culmination of months, years of the stress building up to a point where your body couldn’t take it anymore. And so I think this is a really big lesson that you can paint to everyone else – that what you may see with someone going on on the outside may not be actually what’s going on underneath the cover of what’s going underneath the hood.
[Brandon]
Cortisol is a strange thing because it’s actually required. So it’s the thing that wakes you up in the morning. You know, melatonin ends up getting you to fall asleep, but the thing that ends up causing your melatonin to drop in the morning is your cortisol coming up. And that’s essentially what wakes you up. And that’s the reason why people go to coffee – because it actually spikes your cortisol and then so you feel more awake in the morning. So your body’s kind of like seeking that cortisol in the morning. But also cortisol is the thing that kind of keeps you going as well. You know how people say like, “Oh, I function the best when I’m stressed, you know, under stress, like under high pressure in my job and stuff” – that’s cortisol. And the unfortunate side effect of having too much cortisol – because you don’t want to have no cortisol. Cortisol is a good thing in small doses, of course, but the side effect of having too much cortisol, this is where you can get belly fat. Belly fat storage is caused – not primarily caused but it is caused by having high cortisol. Also, high cortisol can cause heart issues. High cortisol can cause brain fog. There’s many things that high cortisol can cause and it’s ultimately what leads to a lot of disease and aging as well. So populations where cortisol is low end up living longer. So like you’re saying, cortisol isn’t a net negative. It’s not always bad. There are some positives to it, but where cortisol can really screw you over in the long run is having it in the long run and having this accumulation over time. Like it was happening to me when I was younger. And I think that where cortisol is going to affect people the most is in people’s sleep. It is there to help wake you up in the morning. But if you’re loaded up with cortisol when you’re supposed to actually be resting and going into a deeper state of sleep, that’s not the point in which you want that level of cortisol. And on top of that, if you’re not getting good sleep, that means you’re just not recovering well. And there’s going to be an endless cycle of you digging yourself deeper and deeper and deeper. Another thing that cortisol affects is your hormones that make you feel full and also the ones that create hunger signals as well. So you can imagine that if you’re feeling hungry all day, it’s going to be harder for you automatically to not open the fridge a dozen times in a day, keeping your portions smaller, right? So that’s another thing that you have to watch out for. Another good reason for you to try to keep your cortisol lower.
By the way, if you’re watching this thinking, I wish I had a coach like that, you can. We coach people online. You get a real dedicated Kraken coach writing your program, checking in every single week through video, all through your phone. The links in the description.
So while we’re on the topic of body composition, if you are someone who is going through a fat loss phase or just trying to maintain lean muscle mass, having too much cortisol over time is actually going to make you break down your muscle tissue faster than someone who has lower level of cortisol. And the reason for that is it is that fight or flight hormone which is buying into the now, getting ready for you to escape or react to some heightened event that you’re experiencing now. Your body doesn’t know the difference between a lion chasing you and a work deadline – to your body, stress is just stress, is just cortisol. So whether it’s your kids waking up in the middle of the night, whether it’s you doom scrolling all the way until 12 a.m., whether it’s work deadlines, whether it’s a spouse argument – that’s all stress. And where the caveman is running away from the lion once every six months or something like that, you are dealing with constant stress day to day and it’s just building up that cortisol. Modern life is technically more stressful than it was back when people were living in the bushes.
So I actually have a really good example of this. I have a client and she was getting ready for a wedding and she was doing everything right. She was in the gym two or three times a week, doing full strength training workouts. She was tracking her nutrition. And at this point, we’re trying to get her to lose weight to fit into her dress. And so she was in a calorie deficit, but she was so stressed about this portion of her wedding being planned that her weight was just really hanging on. And the funny point of the story is that there was a weekend where she met up with her wedding planner and the wedding planner was like, “Don’t worry, I got this. Everything’s going to be good on this day.” And her stress fell off of her. And sure enough, when we looked at their data for the following week, her weight also plummeted after this. Unfortunately, you can’t just offload your stress to a wedding planner throughout your entire life. You know, this is a once-in-a-lifetime situation here, but there are many different ways that you can start offloading your stress and start clearing up your mind so that you can bring down your cortisol. So what kind of suggestions do you have for people?
[Josko]
The number one thing that I would suggest is put sleep as a priority. We already talked about this, but there’s a lot of hormones like leptin and ghrelin are going to control your hunger, but also your sleep is going to be the time that your cortisol comes down and also puts you into a state of deep relaxation. And so that is going to reduce the amount of hunger signals that you have the next day, but also help you recover from that stress that you had during the day. And another thing too is just turning your phone off, getting off of Instagram, putting that away because right now there’s so much stuff going on in the world and that is stress. You reading the headlines and seeing all these flashy headlines about like war and famine and all that – that does create tons of stress. You may not be realizing it, but your cortisol is going to be really high. So turn off Instagram, delete it off your phone, all of that stuff that everybody knows about. And another thing that really helped me was reducing the amount of exercise I’m doing. So I still go for a walk on a daily basis, but the thing that I don’t do is weight train every single day. Especially now that I’m older, my body just can’t handle it anymore. And I feel so much better, a lot better clarity, a lot less mental fog when I’ve reduced my exercise. And so I only train two times per week now. And I’ve tested my cortisol. My cortisol is on the lower side. Not too low, but it’s on the lower side. So I’ve solved that problem for myself.
[Brandon]
And the cool thing, I bet, is that because you’re training less, you can actually dig into those training sessions harder and more effectively. Would you say?
[Josko]
I’m able to train harder now and I do train harder now in those short bursts and then I rest hard after that. So with that, whereas before I was kind of stuck with my strength training – I wasn’t increasing strength anymore – now I’m increasing strength because recovery is way more important. And so if you were to take away anything from this, we don’t always want you to think that more is always better when it comes to cortisol and stress. Sometimes less is more. And so the last piece of practical advice would be to – if you’re battling high levels of cortisol – try subtracting things from your daily life rather than trying to add them to get to where you want to be.