Confident Eaters

Help! I Messed Up My Hormones Part 4: Cortisol and Thyroid
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Georgie: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Confident Eaters Podcast, where you get proven methods to end overeating, emotional eating, and stressing about food. We are heading for harmony between your body, food and feelings. Hosted by me, Georgie Fear, and my team at Confident Eaters. Welcome back to the Confident Eaters Podcast. I'm Georgie, and with me today is Christina, and today we're hitting part four, the final installment in our hormone series where we've been talking about how things like dieting, fasting, and over exercising can impact key hormones that control your appetite, metabolism, sleep, and even mood.

Christina: So far, we've covered leptin, melatonin, estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, ghrelin, and GLP one. Today we're digging into two more big ones, cortisol and thyroid hormones. These hormones are deeply tied to your metabolism, your energy levels, and how your body responds to stress and food intake.

Georgie: Let's start with cortisol. Cortisol is one of your main stress hormones. It's made by your adrenal glands and plays a role in your body's fight or flight response. That's helpful when you're actually in danger. But in our modern world, that fight or flight response can get activated all the time by things like undereating, not sleeping, or constant bombardment by work or life challenges.

Cortisol is not bad. It helps regulate blood sugar, inflammation, energy production, and even your circadian rhythm. Cortisol is an important part of your natural alarm clock. Problems happen when cortisol remains elevated for an extended time, or it stops following the normal daily pattern of being highest when we wake up and generally decreasing over the course of the day.

[00:02:00] Dysregulation to this system can also show up as a blunted cortisol responsiveness to a stressor. It's important that cortisol rises temporarily in response to a challenge, and then it should fall back to baseline. As you can see, problems with the cortisol system are not simply matters of too much or too little hormone, but it's the lack of normal responsiveness and return to baseline.

When a person's stress system is not responding in the normal way, they can't adapt or adjust as well to the world around them. That's where the feeling like crap comes in.

Christina: Chronically elevated cortisol contributes to fat storage around the belly, high blood sugar, and muscle breakdown. It can cause trouble falling asleep at night, waking up at 3:00 AM feeling tired but wired or noticing your appetite shifting toward cravings for sugar, carbs, and salty foods. And here's something people don't always realize: fasting intense exercise and low calorie diets can actually raise cortisol levels. These are challenges to the body. When your nervous system senses a threat, which might be an avalanche headed at you or your boss raising their voice, your body releases more cortisol to mobilize energy. It causes more sugar to be released into your bloodstream, so it's ready for you to fight for your life if necessary. That's not a problem short term, but health problems can result if your stress response is turned on dozens of times per day and doesn't really get shut all the way off.

Georgie: You may have experienced how an intensely stressful period of time can leave you feeling totally wiped out, sluggish, foggy, or even anxious even if you're eating and sleeping okay. Researchers have observed this pattern of symptoms occurs alongside increased morning cortisol in people with burnout, chronic fatigue syndrome, PTSD, and some forms of depression. [00:04:00] Importantly, this is not because your adrenal glands are fatigued or broken, despite what you might read online.

It's more of a regulatory shift in how your stress response system is functioning. So yes, long-term stress can lead to reduced cortisol at certain time points, but that's your brain and your entire nervous system trying to hit the brakes. It's not that your poor little adrenal glands have burned out.

It's also important to note, studies have not always shown identical findings. Some experiments indicate that people who are under chronic high stress or suffering from burnout have elevated cortisol responses, where other studies show a lowered cortisol response. This is somewhat expected given that different populations have been studied under different types of stress. Overworked and burned out doctors during the pandemic are a different population from Marines fighting in a war zone, even though both are certainly under excessive stress. It's not astonishing to find out that they show different responses.

Christina: When your system has been excessively stressed for a long time, it can feel like your body is running on fumes. You might wake up groggy, struggle with a major energy crash in the afternoon and find that caffeine barely touches your fatigue. There's often a mental fog that goes with it, and emotionally you might feel more anxious, moody, or reactive than usual. It's common to have much lower stress tolerance. You feel overwhelmed by minor things that wouldn't normally bother you. Physically, recovery after workouts becomes harder, and you might find your heart rate stays elevated longer, or your muscles stay sore for days. Some people even notice disrupted digestion, poor immune function, or changes in appetite like craving salty foods or feeling totally uninterested in eating altogether.

Georgie: And if this is starting to sound familiar, like something you've [00:06:00] experienced and you've been pushing hard with your workouts and dieting, it might be your body asking for a break. Have you been doing early morning fasted cardio, skipping breakfast, cutting carbs, going to bed late, and still trying to hit the gym hard every day?

These habits, especially when stacked together eventually can lead to losing your motivation. Your workouts might start to feel awful, and you start to feel like you're dragging yourself through the day every day. It's your body's way of saying, I can't do this anymore. So if your strategy for getting fit or losing weight has left you feeling exhausted, irritable, I stalled out, this isn't a willpower problem. It might be a hormonal one. Giving your system a chance to recover by eating enough, managing stress, prioritizing sleep, and cutting back on intense training temporarily can help bring your cortisol rhythm back into a healthier place. And most importantly, you will feel human again. You'll feel like yourself and you'll have energy.

Christina: So let's talk about what you can actually do if you're dealing with the signs of dysregulated cortisol. First, the biggest pillar is recovery, and that means taking real breaks from the constant physical and psychological stressors in your life. If you've been doing high intensity workouts every day, consider dialing it back to lower intensity movement like walking, yoga, mobility work, or a gentle stretch routine a few times a week. That might sound counterintuitive if you're trying to "get back on track" or increase your fitness, but pushing harder when your system's already maxed out, usually backfires.

Georgie: And let's not forget nutrition. One of the best ways to support a normalized cortisol response is to make sure you're actually eating enough, especially in the morning. Cortisol naturally peaks in the morning, as I said earlier, so if you're fueling with carbs and protein [00:08:00] early in the day, it helps your body feel safe.

Skipping food or going too low carb can signal a threat which keeps your cortisol level elevated. How low is too low though on carbs? It seems like everybody's recommending low carb swaps for this and that. It depends a lot on your activity level. Speak with a registered dietician if you want somebody to just look at your daily food intake and let you know if it looks adequate or lacking in any area.

One thing we definitely recommend avoiding, and yet we say this all the time, is fasted workouts. It might seem like a badge of honor to hit the gym before breakfast, but if your body's under a lot of stress, this will make things worse. It also impairs your immune system to work out with no fuel in the tank, so you're more likely to catch whatever virus is going around.

Christina: Also worth mentioning is that high cortisol suppresses other important hormones like testosterone, progesterone, and even thyroid hormones. So fasted training can end up impacting much more than just your energy. It might contribute to menstrual irregularities in women, reduced libido or strength in men, reduced fertility, a weakened immune system like Georgie just said, and even slow your metabolism if the stress continues unchecked.

Georgie: So what's the takeaway? If you're dealing with fatigue, irritability, poor sleep, infertility, or menstrual irregularities, skip the fasted training, please. It doesn't mean you have to stop exercising. It's just important to eat something beforehand, to give your body a signal of safety and fuel. Even a small snack with carbohydrates and a little protein like a banana with some almond butter, or one slice of toast with an egg can help make a significant difference in the cortisol surge and support your workout performance without adding undue stress to your system.

Christina: One of the most powerful things you can do to support your cortisol rhythm and honestly your overall hormone health -as this has come up in [00:10:00] every hormone episode so far, is to prioritize sleep. Aim for seven to nine hours of quality sleep per night and try to keep a consistent bedtime and wake time, even on weekends. That regularity helps anchor your circadian rhythm, which is tightly linked to your cortisol pattern. But when your sleep is poor, inconsistent, or your just constantly going to bed late, that rhythm gets scrambled. You might wake up groggy, feel wired at night, or notice dips and energy and mood throughout the day.

Georgie: One simple but super effective trick to help support that rhythm is getting outside in the morning. Exposing your eyes to natural sunlight within 30 to 60 minutes of waking helps regulate your internal clock through something called the super charismatic nucleus in your brain. This morning light exposure supports cortisol rising at the right time and later it helps you produce melatonin in the evening so you can wind down for sleep.

Even 10 to 15 minutes of natural light exposure in the morning without sunglasses can make a big difference. If you live in a dark or northern climate, a light therapy box can help too.

Christina: Now let's talk about stress management. We all know we should reduce stress, but what does that actually look like in real life? It doesn't have to mean meditating for an hour a day. Even just 10 to 20 minutes a day of intentional downshifting can help regulate your nervous system and bring cortisol into a healthier range. That might mean breath work. Or maybe it's going for a walk without your phone, journaling, taking a warm shower, or doing some mobility work on the floor while listening to calming music. These activities help activate your parasympathetic nervous system, also called your rest and digest mode, which works in opposition to the stress response.

Georgie: Many people think of their workouts as time that when they relieve stress, and that can be true, but [00:12:00] exercise is only helpful if you can recover from it.

If your stress bucket is already full from work, lack of sleep, family obligations, or emotional strain, adding in more training sessions might just overflow that bucket. Swapping some of those intense sessions for gentler movement, like taking a walk can actually help you recover better and feel stronger in the long run.

Next up, let's meet the thyroid. This tiny butterfly shaped gland in your neck plays a huge role in your metabolism, energy, temperature regulation, menstrual cycle, and mood. The hormones it produces T four and T three. Thyroxin and triiodothyronine basically act like a thermostat for your entire body. And it all starts with TSH, a signal from your brain that tells your thyroid how much hormone to make.

Christina: When your thyroid is functioning well, it helps keep your energy level stable, supports regular periods, maintains your body temperature and helps your cells use calories efficiently. But when it's under functioning, what we call hypothyroidism, everything slows down. You might feel tired, cold, constipated, depressed, or notice your hair thinning or your cycle becoming irregular.

Georgie: Hypothyroidism can be caused by disease, but sometimes it's due to stress and low energy availability. This includes chronic calorie restriction, low carb or low fat diets, exercising too much or skipping meals for long periods, like with intermittent fasting. Your body is smart. When it senses starvation or chronic stress, it turns down the dial on metabolism so you can conserve energy.

Even short term calorie restriction significantly reduces T three levels, especially if you pair it with endurance cardio training. That's your body trying to be protective, but it's not gonna feel good. [00:14:00] People in this situation often report feeling like they're doing everything right, exercising and eating clean, but their metabolism feels stuck and they feel like they're crawling through the day with fatigue.

Christina: If you are experiencing fatigue, hair thinning, cold, hands and feet, irregular periods, or constipation, especially if those things started after a diet or intense training block, it might be time to consider whether your thyroid is under pressure. So now let's talk about how your diet plays into thyroid function. We've already said that the thyroid is kind of like the thermostat for your metabolism. To keep that thermostat working. Your body needs specific building blocks, and this is where food really matters.

Georgie: First up is iodine. It's the main ingredient your thyroid needs to make hormones. Your body can't produce iodine, so it has to come from food. Things like iodized salt, seaweed, dairy, and eggs. Too little iodine can lead to low thyroid hormone levels, but too much, especially from overdoing it with supplements or kelp can also stress your thyroid. So it's a Goldilocks nutrient: we don't want too little, we don't want too much.

Christina: Right behind iodine is Selenium, which helps convert T four, the storage form into T three, the active form, brazil nuts, fish and whole grains are great sources. Then we have zinc, iron, and tyrosine and amino acid. You get those from protein rich foods like meat, poultry, legumes, and seeds.

Georgie: One thing a lot of people don't realize is that low carb or extremely low calorie diets can reduce active thyroid levels. Even if you have plenty of selenium, plenty of iodine, and all the other micronutrients you need, you still need enough energy.

Your body needs insulin actually to help convert T four to T three, and insulin is of course triggered when you eat carbohydrates. So if you've been on that keto diet or you're skipping meals, [00:16:00] that can be why you're feeling slow, tired, and cold all the time. Aim to stay above 30 calories per kilogram of lean mass to avoid low energy availability.

If that all sounded like gobbledygook, techno-babble, what you need to know is how much of your body is fat-free mass. If you can get an estimate of that, you can multiply that by 30 calories, and that is the baseline minimum level that you should be eating to make sure you're not putting yourself in danger.

Include quality carbs in every meal, like fruit, starchy vegetables, oats, whole grains and potatoes. This is important for thyroid function as well as some of the other hormones that we've seen in this series.

Christina: And then there are so-called goitrogens found in cruciferous vegetables like broccoli, kale, and cabbage. These foods can theoretically interfere with iodine uptake in the thyroid, but honestly, you'd have to eat a ton of them raw and have low iodine intake for this to matter. If your thyroid is healthy and your iodine intake is normal, eating cruciferous veggies is absolutely fine.

Georgie: It's one of the things I often hear people be told by their naturopath or other alternative health practitioner that they shouldn't eat broccoli, kale, and cabbage for that reason. Realistically, I don't think that's actually a risk. Unless you're pounding back like three pounds of broccoli every single day, it's probably not gonna have a big impact.

I would speak with a medical doctor, md, or better yet an endocrinologist. To identify what exactly you need to do if you do have a thyroid disorder, and listen to what they say more than me, more than any other person on the internet that hasn't examined you personally. So in short, yes, what you eat does impact your thyroid, but it's not about obsessing over super foods or buying supplements or eliminating particular vegetables.

The core things are making sure you're eating enough, including a [00:18:00] mix of carbs, proteins, and fats, and getting the key nutrients your thyroid needs to function. If your diet is chronically low in calories or it doesn't have these building blocks, your thyroid might respond by slowing things down.

Christina: Now let's talk about exercise and stress. We just hammered home that too much stress can throw off your adrenal hormones, and it's essentially the same exact story with your thyroid. Too much training, not enough easy days or rest days, and your thyroid levels can be thrown out of the healthy range.

Georgie: You might have noticed the same things that help with cortisol help with thyroid. That's why it made sense to discuss them in the same episode. These two hormones don't operate in isolation. They actually have a very close relationship. When one is out of balance, it can throw the other off Two.

Christina: Right. Think of cortisol and thyroid hormones as part of two connected systems in the brain. The HPA axis, which controls your stress response and the HPT axis, which controls your metabolism. These systems are talking to each other constantly. If your brain senses chronic stress, it will prioritize survival.

That means raising cortisol and dialing down thyroid function to conserve energy.

Georgie: And that happens in a few ways. Elevated cortisol can suppress the release of TSH. That's the hormone from your pituitary gland that tells your thyroid, Hey, do your job. Cortisol also interferes with the conversion of T four into T three. So the active form of thyroid hormone your body actually uses can be impeded.

Plus it can increase something called reverse T three, which blocks the action of T three, kind of like a parking boot on your metabolism.

Christina: It's a hormonal loop and it can become a vicious cycle. Stress impacts thyroid and low thyroid keeps stress hormones elevated. So when you're trying to restore balance, it's important to support both systems.

Georgie: Finally, if you're doing all the right things, but you still [00:20:00] don't feel right, bring it up with your doctor. We know how frustrating it can be to feel like you're exercising and doing the things you should be doing to stay healthy, but you're actually feeling like garbage. The good news is thyroid function is often responsive to lifestyle changes.

You might not need medication. You might just need time and consistency. I.

Christina: So that brings us to the million dollar question. Is it even possible to lose weight without messing up your hormones, specifically cortisol and thyroid? And the good news is, yes, it absolutely is, but it requires a smarter, more sustainable approach than what a lot of people are used to. biggest key is avoiding extremes. Extreme calorie restriction and super high intensity training may give you quick results at first, but they're also the fastest way to tank your thyroid and spike your cortisol. Instead of dropping to 1200 calories and doing bootcamp six days a week, aim for a moderate calorie deficit of about 300 to 500 calories a day and be patient with slower, steady fat loss.

Georgie: When it comes to cortisol and thyroid, as well as all the other hormones we've covered, remember that your hormones are constantly reading the environment you create. If you're fueling consistently moving with intention, but also taking enough rest, your body can relax and your hormones can do their jobs. Personally, I realized a few months ago that my system was totally burned out. I had a combination of physical stressors, like intense athletic training, and then getting the flu plus mental stressors, including grief, depression, anxiety, and the pressure of traveling internationally and racing, and all while worrying about my performance, adding more self-imposed pressure to the mix.

I needed a major step back. So it's been several months now of reduced working hours and instead of 14 or 15 hours a week of really hard training, I'm [00:22:00] just walking for exercise and sleeping as much as my body wants to. For the first few months, I actually was sleeping 11 or 12 hours a day and I couldn't believe that I could possibly sleep so much, but gradually that normalized and now I sleep a more normal amount, like eight or nine hours a night. I also got a new dog named Ruby, and I've been spending lots of time unwinding with her, playing with her, training her, and caring for her. It's a big relief from all the thinking about, am I good enough or am I getting fitter and faster themes, which I admit have become a bit obsessive.

One of the reasons I'm bringing this up is that it wasn't a matter of taking a week off or going away for a weekend or a few mornings of sleeping in to correct things. It's been six months. I'm six months in to this major life overhaul. I'm calling it no stress summer, but it could take you some time too.

I'm feeling better though I'm enjoying my life again, and I'm moving in ways that are enjoyable and not punishing. If I wanna hike, I hike. If everybody else is running and I don't wanna run, I wave and let them run. If somebody had told me in March that I would be doing this for about six months before I felt good again, I would've been livid.

I probably would've been like, hell no. I'm not taking six months. But it takes as long as it takes and it really has been worth it. I feel like I've had a good reset, and I don't mean to come on here and talk about myself for, you know, the sheer reason of talking about myself, but because I think there's a lot of people out there who also feel like, why can't I work out harder?

Why can't I train more? Why can't I be faster and leaner every single season and the season before? And eventually you, you hit a wall and other people might not hit the wall at the same time, so they look like they're fine while you start floundering. Or their body, their physiology and their, their mind body as one unit could be in a different state.

So if you're going through, you know, grief or job loss or a major life transition, you may not [00:24:00] have the same bandwidth for the observable Instagrammable things that people do. So one of the things that was important to me was to get rid of Strava, to stop seeing what other people were doing for their workouts and to just focus on what I needed. And that was a bleep ton of rest and gentle activity. But it's, it's been a, a real learning experience for me.

Christina: Yeah, such a good point. And I appreciate you sharing. I think it's important to hear like it's not all rainbows and butterflies, even if you know and have like a lot of tools and knowledge of what you need to do. We all need rest sometimes. We're all humans. And I think as much as we'd all love our bodies to bounce back quickly, some things take as long as they take, like you said, even just personally moving here to Warsaw and all the changes that I've had, like I've had to dial back a ton of things and it's been a great rest. And it can be frustrating to like, I think the comparison contributes to that too. So

Georgie: Huge.

Christina: even dialing back your intake of like, who else am I looking at? Like what's my journey and what do I need to do? but

Social media

Georgie: can be such a beast that way. You know, like we just see other people that are like, yeah, I'm doing this great thing and before and after. And like the after is always thinner and fitter and more athletic and faster race times. And here we are like, Hmm, I'm doing a fraction of what I did a couple of years ago. Isn't that cute? One thing that I think is important to note is for me, I did go to my doctor and was like, Hey, I am ridiculously fatigued. My anxiety's high. My depression is brutal. And it all started after this, you know really hard training, this international trip, and getting the flu. And they did what many doctors would do.

They did some basic blood work and that does not include a lot of hormonal tests. That does not include some of the stuff we talked about today. You know, blood tests for cortisol or saliva tests for cortisol are not actually all that helpful [00:26:00] in diagnosing things like burnout or over-training syndrome or, or whatever we wanna call what I had.

And so I couldn't look at any lab result and be like, see this hormone's off. But I knew because it was so obvious. I mean, I'm probably very good at denial, but my body was like totally melting down. And so even if you don't have blood work or you don't have a diagnosis, or all the levels appear fine, if your body feels like it's burning out, like don't be afraid to rest it.

I think we all get afraid that, okay, I'll rest, but then nothing will improve and then I'll just be lazier and less fit after taking, you know, months and months of extended rest. But I think if you've naturally been more energetic at points in your life, there's a really good chance that that natural energy will start to come out again after you let your body do some repair and rejuvenation.

So yeah, I felt that fear and I took the rest, and like now my energy is sort of sprouting back again like a new plant.

Christina: It's amazing. Happy for it.

Georgie: Happy for it. Me too.

Christina: But. Yeah, this has been a great four part series on Hormone Health. We hope that you've enjoyed it. We certainly have. If you have send us a message or leave us a review because that supports more people finding the show. We'd also love to know what other topics you would like us to cover next. So send us a message about that as well. Thanks so much for listening and take good care of your hormones this week