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Dr. Eric Berg: I want to talk about this hormone called cortisol.

Cortisol in the body is the hormone that reacts to all types of stress.

If you experience physical stress, mental stress, losses, trauma, maybe poor eating,

watching the news, pregnancy, menopause, a fight with your spouse, divorce, that’s what

triggers cortisol.

Cortisol then adapts the body and changes the body to adapt to all this stress.

On this picture right here, you can see in CIBA, these are all the reactions of body

stresses.

Inflammation, brain fog, cholesterol, ulcers, diabetes, allergies, asthma, sleeping problems.

What’s very fascinating is all these symptoms are really reactions to stress but medically

they’re treated as a disease when they’re really symptoms of high cortisol, which you

could see right up here.

This is all the symptoms of high cortisol.

Yeah, interesting, isn’t it?

What we’re going to do is, we’re not going to treat all of these symptoms, we’re just

going to help rid the byproduct of what stress has left in the body.

When you’re 18, you had very little stress.

As years go on, stress accumulates from things like college, having two children, then having

a divorce, and then stuck with the two children by yourself, and then we got menopause, all

these different things.

Stress accumulates.

Here you are, a little stress, and now we got a big stress.

What happens is in the adrenal gland, which is making these hormones, what’s interesting

is it does not have an off-switch.

You remember on that graph we showed you, that tall dial represents the on switch.

The small dial represents the off switch.

With the adrenal, it only has an on.

It does not have an off switch.

What’s that mean?

It means that your body over time has so much cortisol, or so much stress, that this is

stuck on.

Part of the adaptation to this hormone is belly fat.

If you try to exercise, you try to do sit-ups, eat better, it won’t touch it because this

is a dominating hormone.

This is why people can’t lose weight is because of the accumulative stress that builds up.

They don’t realize that number one stress accumulates, and they [inaudible 00:03:05]

realize that it affects the hormones, and they don’t realize that this hormone is a

dominant hormone and that can nullify all the other fat burning hormones.