June 19, 2019
Beware of These Exhausting Activities
While we are agreed, many things can cause stalled weight loss, it’s important to assess what is exhausting the body completely (and therefore stalling your efforts), and what you can do about it.
- Exercise. It’s natural and healthy to move, though with many different types of exercise, be mindful of how much stress you are putting on your body. Light yoga and walking will support the oxygen flow and leave you feeling refreshed, while a HIIT workout or heavy lifting will require multiple days to recover and rebuild. These workouts exhaust the body completely so it can become stronger after proper rest. If you are only pushing yourself and not allowing proper rest, you’re breaking down your muscle tissue and delaying the body’s natural ability to rebuild.
- Sickness. When you are sick, “all hands are on deck,” as your systems and organs fight to make you well. The design is beautiful, and you’ll require extra rest and care to feel better. Otherwise, your recovery will not be speedy and your body will feel stressed and continue to produce cortisol and store fat cells.
- Hormone changes. These can happen at various times, though most notable is the cycle recurring monthly for women, and another shift in hormones later during menopause. “When your uterine lining isn’t invaded by a fertilised egg, the hormones sustaining the environment aren’t needed anymore and the hormone levels plummet. When this happens, your body goes from high alert to nothing hormonally and that shift causes other changes too and all of those changes are exhausting. Until your hormone levels increase again, you are really tired,” cites Cosmopolitan. Additionally, during menopause, “the main cause of...fatigue is the change in hormone levels. Oestrogen, progesterone, thyroid and adrenal hormones are all involved in regulating cellular energy in the body which when compromised can lead to fatigue,” states My Second Spring writer. Physical menopausal symptoms like night sweats and insomnia also contribute to fatigue. So do not feel guilty if you build in extra time to rest while hormones are regulating.
- Poor diet. Candida Yeast feeds off of sugar, and - quite honestly - most everything available to eat contains sugar. So, you know the way you’re eating influences your health, do you know you could be making your body more and more tired, and more and more sick according to your food choices? We need proper nutrition to fuel our systems and when we aren’t getting that, our bodies kick into high gear in an attempt to stay healthy and functioning. Eat nutritiously and you will have energy, your body will work the way it is intended to work, and you won’t feel so exhausted.
- Psychological stress. This is a response to our environments and daily pressures. Science has now been confirming, it too can be a byproduct of a poor diet. Because our gut and our brains are connected, malnourishing our bodies can lead to poor decision making, depression, mood disorders, and fatigue (to name a few). It’s always a good idea to introduce stress relief into our lifestyle and keep tabs on what we are physically feeding ourselves, because as we now know, stress is exhausting and it prevents weight loss.
- Too much screen time. It wasn’t an issue 30 years ago, however, we are now becoming sick and tired due to the rampant use of technology. And it isn’t just that we have jobs that require us to be in front of the computer. No, we also carry around hand held computers, and frequently checking these screens are influencing our minds and bodies. An article titled the Effects of Screen Time notes, “screen time at night keeps adults from falling asleep and sleeping well due to cognitive stimulation and sleep deprivation. Your brain's electrical activity increases, neurons race and divert you from calming down into a peaceful state of mind for sleep. In addition the physical act of responding to an email, text, or video increases the tension in your body which results in stress. Your body then produces the stress hormone cortisol released by the adrenal gland aversive to sleep.” For more on this refer to the Huffington Post (hyperlink: https://www.huffpost.com/topic/screen-time)
