How can you get your shape back after losing it? Especially as a women (though also with men), hormones play the #1 part of this equation! If you’ve been frustrated by working hard and even eating well, but not getting results, Angela Fisher lost 8 pounds (5 more than her pre-pregnancy weight), she lost a whopping 4” on her waistline, and had a 40% increase in her strength in less than one month! Listen to what Angela has to say: “How I got my figure back so fast postpartum? BAD45 is how! One of the most intelligently designed programs I’ve had the privilege of testing. I never imagined how demanding and time consuming a new baby is, but these concise 20 min workouts made it possible, with no fatigue, soreness, or injury might I add!!!”
The reason that hormones are the “master switch” on your fitness success is because when you exercise at the wrong time, your body actually responds to it by increasing stress hormones, rather than switching them off. This can have disastrous effects on your fitness: you can be able to work hard, but you gain fat, and you don’t build muscle – you actually will start losing muscle and losing bone density. All of this happens because of a thief called Cortisol.
Cortisol function allows your body to respond to stress. Although stress is an important part of creating positive adaptation in your health and fitness, when it’s out of control, it diminishes your quality and quantity of life; which is why excess stress is the NUMBER ONE killer of our species with 90% of our medically-related issues originating from stress.
Inflammation
Cortisol is a positive hormone because it’s powerfully anti-inflammatory, but the problem of elevated cortisol levels happens when you don’t know about a constant inflammation. Sources of undiagnosed inflammation often include irritable bowel syndrome, food sensitivities, arthritis, allergies, obesity, or other gastrointestinal issues.
Emotional Stress
Financial pressure, being a new parent, changing jobs, losing a family member, relationship challenges, or even a traumatic memory can cause emotional and psychological stress. These are the typical things that people associate with weight gain, loss of libido, loss of sleep, and other issues, but people don’t know that travel (changing timezones), and eating and exercising at the wrong time elevates cortisol levels as well. They’re STRESSORS, and not the positive kind.
Eating
Elevated cortisol interferes with the function of other essential hormones, causing insulin, thyroid, estrogen imbalance, progesterone deficiency and testosterone decrease. Excess cortisol leads to insulin resistance and diabetes because if you skip a meal or fast too long between meals, your blood glucose levels drop, and your body responds by elevating cortisol levels, creating duress on your adrenal glands and leading to adrenal fatigue. Eating medium sized, regularly spaced high-protein, low simple carb, high complex carb and health fat meals at the right time will help balance this but you can’t remove exercise timing from the equation!
Sleep
Sleep repairs you metabolically and psychologically, and helps you recalibrate your daytime stressors. Deprivation of sleep creates incredible levels of stress on the body, and prevents you from resetting at night, because your cortisol function directly influences your sleeping patterns. Too high, your cortisol prevents you from maintaining quality sleep.
Your cortisol level “pulses” with a particular rhythm called the ultradian rhythm. It’s highest in the morning, which helps you get out of bed. It declines throughout the day, and is lowest at nigh, preparing you to go to quality sleep. Disrupt that wave, and you trigger insomnia. If you’re having trouble sleeping at night, consider supplements to help like Melatonin, Magnesium Glycinate, and Phosphatidylserine, but the best way to develop great quality sleep is through exercise timing!
Growth hormone is also released in cyclical fashion under the control of your waking and sleeping cycle. Small amounts of growth hormone are released periodically throughout the day, but major increases occur during the night, if you’re sleeping properly. A lack of sleep during the night can disrupt the natural growth hormone cycle and diminish gains in muscle size. So, too can exercising at the wrong time.
The Cortisol Thief: How It Steals Your Ability to Grow Fitter!
If you exercise at the wrong time, you increase cortisol levels. This is because the building blocks to make cortisol are also used for the building blocks for your muscle and bone growth and even your longevity. You need progesterone to synthesize other important hormones like DHEA, your anti-aging “recovery and repair” hormone. When DHEA drops, aging accelerates! When cortisol elevates, you decrease your ability to make progesterone because the precursors of progesterone are “stolen” to make cortisol! It also means that you cannot produce sufficient growth hormone and testosterone to grow from your exercise!
Hormone release occurs at specific times to control muscle and bone growth: optimized in your day at 6AM and 6PM, when cortisol levels are the lowest. Testosterone, which is essential for muscle-growth, is released during the morning hours. This is why a morning workout enhances the fat-burning effect and androgen receptors increase in early evening, which is why you feel stronger then, as you pick up more testosterone.
Food timing can be planned to enhance the biorhythms effect on nutrients, by following your meals at no later than 7AM and 7PM; within an hour of your AM “wakeup” workout to hit your catabolic window of fat-burning and within an hour of your PM “buildup” workout to set your anabolic window of muscle-building.
If you want to optimize your exercise, so that no matter what your current condition, you can ensure your results, get my BAD45 System for Hormonal Optimization to Burn-Fat, Build-Muscle and Increase-Energy while it is on sale for 45% OFF!
Very Respctfully,
Scott B. Sonnon
TACFIT Founder
