Transcription
Let me paint you a picture. You're doing everything right. You wake up early to be productive. You chug down that morning coffee to get going. You hit the gym hard. You're doing cardio. You're sweating. You give everything you've got at work. And then you come home, eat dinner, scroll on your phone for a little while, and finally get to sleep.
And then at 3:00 a.m., your eyes pop open. You reach for the phone. Your heart is racing. And you're wondering why your body won't just let you sleep. And why no matter what you do, that belly fat is just not coming off.
All those healthy habits, the early alarm, the morning coffee, the hard cardio, the late dinners after long work days, they all have one super bad thing in common. They are all raising your cortisol.
Now, we all know cortisol is your stress hormone. But here's what nobody tells you. When cortisol is chronically elevated when your body is stuck in a low-grade stress state, two things happen that no amount of willpower can override.
Number one, your body physically will not burn fat because fat is stored energy and a stressed body holds on to every single calorie like a life raft.
Number two, your sleep gets destroyed from the inside because cortisol begins rising again at 2:00 a.m. to prepare your body for the next day. But when it's disregulated during waking hours, that rise can turn into a spike and suddenly your eyes snap open at 3:00 a.m. like an alarm went off every single night.
So, I personally tested five cortisol hacks. Some I'd already heard about and most from Dr. Elizabeth Brightite, who I've worked with for years. And I'm going to walk you through all five of them and be honest about which one actually moved the needle for me the most.
So, let's start with hack number one. And this one is going to feel counterintuitive. It's front-loading protein first thing in the morning before anything else, which includes your coffee. Just protein.
Now, let me explain why this matters for cortisol specifically. Because most people think protein is just about muscles. It's not. Your body runs on a steroid hormone cascade. It starts with cholesterol, which by the way is why people on low-fat diets feel like garbage. And it cascades down through pregnenolone all the way to cortisol. What that means is animal fat and protein give your body the raw materials to make cortisol when it's too low and to regulate it when it's too high. Without adequate protein and fat at the start of your day, your body is essentially trying to manage your stress hormones with an empty toolbox.
There's also a blood sugar piece here that's huge. When you skip breakfast or just have coffee, your blood sugar crashes. A blood sugar crash is a cortisol spike. Your body releases cortisol to bring glucose back up. And because cortisol naturally peaks between 6:00 and 9:00 a.m. anyways, your body is now in a heightened stress state before the day even begins. And a body in a stressed state holds on to fat.
Studies show that women who ate a high protein breakfast, 32 grams of protein or more, felt significantly fuller and had better focus before lunch compared to women who ate a high carb breakfast. And in people with obesity, high protein breakfasts have been shown to support weight loss by regulating appetite hormones. Meaning breakfast isn't just about calories. It can directly affect the hormonal signals that drive hunger, cravings, and fat storage.
So, what does this look like practically? For a lot of you watching, this is just eggs and meat. Three eggs, maybe some ground beef, couple strips of bacon, you're good to go. You are front-loading animal fat and protein, stabilizing your blood sugar, giving your adrenals what they need to get through the day.
For me, it's even simpler than that. Most days, I usually have maybe 5 to 10 minutes to whip up a quick breakfast before my morning meetings. I personally open up my fridge and grab this raw cottage cheese. I literally throw it over my leftover ground beef, which by the way, I cook a ton of ground beef over the weekend, and I enjoy it cold throughout the week. This is the best time-saving hack I can share with you guys as a carnivore. This cottage cheese is different because it is extremely high fat. It is raw, unpasteurized, so therefore, the nutrients are very much intact, and it is so easy to digest. Millers is the only farm that can ship direct to me and still be able to ship raw unpasteurized dairy. They actually ship to most states in America and their loophole to be able to do so is by labeling it for cats and dogs. It's actually perfectly safe for humans. I've had so many women in my community who have not touched dairy in years because of autoimmune issues, histamine sensitivity, chronic bloating, then they try Miller's Bioarm raw dairy and feel completely fine.
Now, let's talk about someone who's more animal-based, just like my husband. My husband's holy grail of a breakfast are these lineage protein bars. Now, this is such a gem for anyone who can tolerate a little bit of raw honey. You just rip open a package, eat the protein bar, and you are good to go for your morning. These protein bars from Lineage are hands down the cleanest real food protein bars you can ever find. Literally just real protein from pasture-raised animals right here in America. And they're actually lab tested, so you know what you see on the label is actually what you get. If you guys are interested in trying out Lineage Protein Bars, they're currently running a great Memorial Day sale from May 21st through the 27th. You all can get 20% off sitewide applied automatically and stack it with my code steak and butter for an extra 5% off on top of that. I've also linked them down below in the description box.
So, front-loading your protein is cortisol hack number one. But most people are skipping this and going straight for this right here. But don't exit out yet because I'm not saying you shouldn't be having this. A bit earlier when I said cortisol naturally peaks between 6:00 and 9:00 a.m. Well, that's because your body has something called the cortisol awakening response or CAR. Every single morning within 30 to 45 minutes of waking up, your cortisol naturally surges by 50 to 75% above your baseline. This is supposed to happen. It's your body's natural alarm clock. It gets you alert and ready for the day.
But the problem is that caffeine triggers your adrenal glands to release more cortisol than your body wants to. It stimulates what's called the adrenocorticotropic hormone, ACTH, to pump out additional cortisol on top of what your body is already producing. So you feel like you get an energy boost, but what you actually got is a cortisol spike and then you're going to get that crash. And then your body, which now thinks it is in a state of emergency, holds on to every single calorie you give it for the rest of the day.
And here's why it matters for all of you waking up at 3:00 a.m. That cortisol peak you artificially inflated in the morning, it disrupts the entire rhythm for the rest of the day and into the night. Your cortisol that's supposed to be at its lowest at midnight, it's not anymore. It's still elevated. And when it starts rising again at 2 a.m. like it's programmed to do, you wake up.
So, instead of telling you to replace your morning cup of Joe, because that's straight up hypocritical and very, very difficult for a lot of us, just whip some animal fat into it. One tablespoon or 5g of butter or even tallow. I know it sounds crazy, but here's what's happening. That animal fat gives your adrenals the cholesterol they need to produce cortisol in a regulated, sustainable way. Not a spike, but instead a smooth curve. Try it and thank me later.
Let's move on to hack number three. This one is going to upset a lot of people, but I have to say it. Your workout might actually be making your belly fat worse. Cardio, especially long cardio sessions, more than about 10 to 15 minutes, can trigger a significant cortisol release. Your body interprets sustained aerobic stress as a threat. It releases cortisol to mobilize fuel. That's the mechanism. If you're already chronically stressed, bad sleep, bad diet, life stress, work stress, adding a 45-minute cardio session on top of all that is literally like pouring gasoline on a fire. You are most likely not burning fat because your body thinks it's in survival mode. So instead of releasing stored fat, it will instead hold on to it for dear life, treating it as emergency fuel.
Now, here's what's interesting about the research. Exercise and cardio type actually do matter enormously for our cortisol. A study published in Applied Sports Medicine found that cortisol spiked significantly 1 hour after HIIT training. But, and this is critical, the recovery was fast. The inflammatory markers cleared within 24 to 48 hours. By contrast, long sustained cardio keeps cortisol elevated for longer periods with less complete recovery between sessions.
There's also the timing issue. Working out at night, especially anything intense, raises cortisol and core body temperature right when your body is supposed to be winding both of those down to prepare for quality sleep.
So, here's what I actually recommend. You want to keep your workouts as early as possible in the day. Keep intense exercise short, 15 to 20 minutes maximum if you're doing anything high intensity. Only about 20% of your total weight loss actually comes from exercise and structured workouts. Your gym sessions, your HIIT workouts, your cycling classes. That's really only 5% of your metabolism. The other 15%, which is three times more impactful, comes from non-structured movement. This includes walking your dogs, cleaning your kitchen, taking the stairs instead of the elevator, and standing while you're working. So, on the days where intense exercise is way too much for your adrenals, focus on a 20-minute relaxing walk. It is literally the more metabolically efficient choice and it will help keep your cortisol low while you do it.
Okay, cortisol hack number four is a mineral that directly connects to your 3:00 a.m. wakeups and that's iodine. Your adrenal glands, the glands that produce cortisol, require iodine to function properly. And here's why it matters so much. Your thyroid is essentially the master regulator of your entire metabolism. It controls how fast or slow everything in your body runs. Your energy, your body temperature, your weight, your mood, and it's completely dependent on iodine to do its job. The thyroid hormone T4 literally has four iodine molecules attached to it. T3, the active form, has three. Low thyroid function, slows metabolism, disrupts cortisol regulation, and here's the direct link, causes the cortisol rhythm to become erratic, including at night.
And here's what Dr. Bright has explained in our conversations. High cortisol levels increase the excretion of iodine from the kidneys. What does this mean? Basically, stress depletes your iodine even faster, creating a feedback loop where stress creates iodine loss, which creates worse adrenal function, which then results in even more cortisol, iodine loss, and weight stalls.
And here's one more angle. The mechanism through which cortisol creates visceral fat is via an enzyme in fat tissue called 11 beta HSD1, which converts inactive cortisone into active cortisol, amplifying the local cortisol concentration right inside the fat tissue itself. So basically, your belly fat has its own little cortisol factory running inside it. Adequate iodine by helping regulate the adrenal stress response interrupts the cycle at the source. So it's not that iodine zaps visceral fat directly. It's that iodine helps your body stop producing the conditions that create it.
And the vegetables that most people eat daily, the healthy cruciferous ones, your broccoli, cauliflower, kale, Brussels sprouts, they all contain compounds called goitrogens that block iodine absorption at the thyroid. Now, this is a supplement I've recently added to my own protocol, especially as a woman, because women do need more iodine than men. Two drops of 5% Lugol's in a glass of water or in a gelatin cap in the morning is sufficient to start.
And while we're talking about what your adrenals need to function, Elizabeth just messaged me saying that it's important I include this in today's video. So, I'm just going to read it straight off my phone. Most people walking around with elevated cortisol are also chronically under-salted without even knowing it. Sodium makes up the sodium-potassium pump that is crucial for nerve signaling, muscle contraction, regulating cell volume, fluid balance, and response to stress. And if you're experiencing symptoms, especially on carnivore or low-carb diet, like headaches, fatigue, or muscle weakness, chances are you're just not getting enough sodium. So, you can try the salt trick, which is simply salting your meals heavier than you're used to. Or if you're busy and you're always on the go, you can supplement with a high-quality electrolyte. This one is the one that I've always recommended since day one, 7 years now. This is from LMNT, specifically this teal-colored box labeled the raw unflavored one. I don't truly recommend their other flavors because they do contain stevia, but this one has nothing but the three electrolytes our body needs. Sodium, potassium, and magnesium measured out for you in each packet. Throw a bunch in your bag, rip one open, pour in whatever you're drinking, mix it up, drink it down, and you are good to go. You all can get a free sample pack with any purchase if you go to the URL shown on the screen. Drinklmnt.com/sbgal. I've also linked them down below.
Okay, this is the last cortisol hack and this is the one I would tell you to prioritize if you had to just choose one. It's last on the list because everything we have talked about so far, the protein, the delaying the morning coffee, fixing your workout, supplementing iodine if you need it, all of that is building the foundation. But this is actually what elevated my sleep quality to the next level. And I'm not saying that theoretically. I'm saying that because these last few weeks have been genuinely chaotic for me. And with different time zones, traveling, flying, road trips, moving, all combined, it definitely messed up my sleep quality and my overall routine. And this is the thing that pulled me back immediately. It is basically a four-part night routine, and you could start it tonight.
Now, don't get scared about the part where I said it's a four-part night routine. It really is so simple. Part one is eating dinner earlier, and 5:00 p.m. for me is the sweet spot. Here's why this is a non-negotiable. A randomized crossover study published by John's Hopkins researchers found that eating dinner at 10 p.m. versus 6 p.m. raised peak blood sugar levels by nearly 20% and reduced fat burning by 10%. Even when people ate the exact same meal and cortisol was measurably higher over the following 20-hour period in the late dinner group. And even a late-night snack at 12:30 a.m. can significantly disrupt cortisol secretion rhythms over consecutive nights. Now your body has a circadian eating clock. So when you eat out of phase with it, and the later you eat, the more out of phase you are, you're basically sending your cortisol system into a false alarm, and it responds accordingly. So have dinner before 6:00 p.m. if you can, but before 7:00 p.m. at minimum.
Part two happens right after, starting around 7 or 8:00 p.m., especially now that the days are getting longer. You want to put on your blue light blocking glasses. Blue light from your phone, your TV, your laptop, your iPad. It suppresses our melatonin secretion. And if your melatonin is suppressed, especially before bedtime, your cortisol does not get the message to fall. And that's why it spikes randomly at 3:00 a.m. A 2025 meta-analysis published in Frontiers in Neurology found that blue light blocking glasses significantly advanced sleep onset, meaning you fall asleep faster and reduced nighttime awakenings. A crossover study also found they advanced bedtime and sleep onset and reduced daytime irritability and disruptive behavior.
And here's where this connects directly to fat loss. Because blue light suppression isn't just a sleep problem. It's also a leptin problem. It's the hormone that tells your brain that you're full and that you can stop eating. And it signals to your body to burn fat. And it is almost entirely regulated during your sleep. Even just a few bad nights can lower leptin levels by around 15 to 20%. So, if I'm on my laptop editing my YouTube videos after the sun goes down, there is no way I'm not wearing my red blue light blocking glasses.
Now, part three of the sleep routine is bedside butter. And honestly, this right here is truly the new melatonin. This is directly from my own experience and from Dr. Bright's protocol, and it has worked for tens of thousands of sleepless women and men. And here's exactly why it works. Your liver naturally produces a small amount of glucose during the night to keep your blood sugar stable while you sleep. But when cortisol is disregulated, blood sugar can crash too hard, and your liver overcompensates with a big glucose dump. A tablespoon of animal fat before bedtime, just 5g, no carbohydrates, no glucose, gives your body a slow-burning fuel source to carry you through the night. It stabilizes the blood sugar environment so your liver does not have to panic. And it provides the cholesterol substrate that allows cortisol production to happen smoothly and gradually rather than in a spike that jolts you awake at 3:00 a.m. To this day, women message me saying that their 3:00 a.m. wakeups totally stopped within days, not weeks, days. That's how effective bedside butter is.
But the fourth part is what locks it all in. Let's talk about bedroom temperature. It's got to be cool. Research from the NIH, Virginia Commonwealth University, and Cleveland Clinic all point to the same optimal range. We want to sleep in 60 to 67° Fahrenheit temperature. If your room is really warm, your body cannot cool down properly. So therefore, you stay in lighter sleep stages and cortisol, which is supposed to be at its lowest during deep deep sleep never fully drops down. Published studies have shown that sleeping at 66 degrees for just one month significantly increased their brown fat stores, the metabolically active fat that actually burns energy. And that's simply from lowering the thermostat.
Beyond temperature, and the last and final step is wearing an eye mask or even earplugs if needed. Any light signal or noise disruption can trigger a micro-cortisol spike that fragments your sleep without you even fully waking up. Remove the stimulation. You want to make your bedroom as cavelike as possible. And that's the night routine. And out of everything I tested, it is the thing I did that made the biggest most immediate difference for my hectic life.
And let me be transparent, I am not a doctor. And also, I am not a hormone specialist. But if you are trying to work with a person that you can actually trust, I cannot recommend Dr. Brite enough. She's a physician who has spent decades studying exactly this adrenal health, cortisol regulation, and hormone optimization for women and men. And I want you to hear it from her directly.
There are women watching this right now who are doing everything right. They wake up early. They have their coffee. They go to the gym. They're tracking. They're staying disciplined. And yet they still cannot lose the weight. So tell me what is actually happening inside the body of a woman who is working out hard, eating healthy, and getting fatter.
Anyway, you know, cortisol rules blood sugar. It regulates blood sugar. You can starve yourself and exercise, you know, till you drop, but if that's in a stress state, your body will hold on to the fat because it's energy. Don't do cardio for more than 10 to 15 minutes. High intensity interval training. It was functional exercise and they turned it into a hyper calorie burning exercise. Same with CrossFit, you know, run, run, go through the whole circuit, go as fast as you can, you know, jump boxes and then all this stuff is non-moderate. If you are addicted to exercise, just like sauna and and cold plunges, there's a cortisol issue. If you're healing, you might have to stop exercising. You can't recover if you don't stop and slow down. People are afraid of slowing down because they've been told to go to the gym at 4:00 in the morning. They've been told to go go. Particularly Americans because they're afraid of the consequences of either not having the energy, feeling draggy. But I always say, you know, it's only going to be a few days and if you eat enough fat, you'll feel great.
What is actually happening in our bodies when we eat a huge salad every day or a big sheet pan of roasted vegetables? Are we actually doing the right thing? What's actually happening? Evil stuff because they are plant chemicals that live to make us sick. You have protease inhibitors which are in grains, onions, and peanuts which prevent the absorption of protein from the animal fat. You have oxalates which I'm sure you've heard about which are very inflammatory. They're in vegetables, almonds, potatoes. You've got tannins. They also reduce iron absorption, but that's coffee, tea, nuts. Many, many, many, many people in the world are drinking coffee in the morning or or they're drinking tea, please stop because it's a terrible goitrogen. You want that circadian spike in the morning and you wake up, the cortisol peaks between 6:00 and 9 a.m. And if you have coffee at that time when it's peaking, you're going to push that peak up. You feel like you're getting a bump in energy, but you're really just getting a bump in your body saying, "Well, I can run." Make your body think you're in a stress state, and that'll hold on to weight.
People wake up at night. So many women wake up in the middle of the night because the cortisol starts being produced again at 2:00 in the morning. Slowly, it rises to reach that peak. If it can't properly rise, if it's doing this, you know, roller coaster thing that's going to cause you to wake up because you have a sudden bump and then a crash. Or if you have low cortisol at that time, you're also going to have an insulin response, which is because again, cortisol, you know, regulates blood sugar. The insulin response will be too strong. You'll crash and your liver will make a bunch of sugar, which is supposed to do a little bit during the night anyway, but it's not supposed to have this big impact in response to cortisol. You're afraid because you've been told if you don't have these supplements that boost your energy and substances that boost your energy that you'll feel bad. Hardly anybody does. I had a woman who said, "Oh my god, I'm going to cry. I'm going to be depressed." She wasn't. She felt great. We like that warm warm liquid in the morning. So if you mix butter into it, you can even mix tallow into it. You whip it into it. Already you're starting to balance your cortisol levels in the morning when you wake up. Then you've got the goitrogens, the brassica plants, the bok choy, the cauliflower, the broccoli. So tired of cabbage rice, cauliflower rice. These things do not allow you to absorb iodine and there's so little iodine in our food supply anyway. So people get iodine deficiencies and thyroid issues. Think of all these cultures that depend on cassava all have iodine and thyroid issues. So iodine is really important not just for the thyroid. Breasts need iodine. And having enough iodine prevents breast cancer, uterine fibroids, ovarian fibroids, but the adrenals also have been seen to shrink if there is iodine deficiency. So the adrenals because they are involved in the stress to respond to stress, you use a lot more iodine when you're stressed. So it's really important to understand that iodine connects to all of our tissues. If you're having circadian rhythm issues, definitely you want to start supplementing with iodine.
Plant fiber is indigestible. It's indigestible. We can't digest it. So, it creates inflammation. If you've got polyps or any kind of intestinal issue, stop eating the plants. I've had several patients who had no more intestinal tissue inflammation when they gave up plants. Just as I had patients who had kidney stones and gallstones, it all went away when they gave up plants. Phytochemicals that are in the vegetables exist to make us not eat them. Grain has been associated with mental health issues, schizophrenia. It's very inflammatory. I mean, how do all these things happen? There wasn't a low cholesterol previous to the 80s when they took our cholesterol away, right? Then they saw that people had more and more mental health issues in a low cholesterol state. So, they started measuring people with mental health issues. Did they have low cholesterol? And indeed, they did.
Why exactly do you tell your patients and you tell the whole world over and over to just eat more fat? And what are practical ways to implement? What is butter? What is tallow? What is duck fat? Cholesterol. And that's what we've been told to avoid. The reason why it works is because if you are in a stress state and you've had any kind of mental health issues, immune issues, energy issues. If you add the animal fat, what are you doing? You're lowering cortisol if it's high. You have the raw materials to make cortisol if it's off or low. And you also what are you making ketones which we know is the best, the cleanest, most reliable fuel that there is.
And this is really for the women who've been told that HRT is the answer and also for the women who've been told it's dangerous and they should be terrified of it because both groups do exist. Where does the evidence actually land? Who should be considering this? Who shouldn't? What are the questions women need to be asking their doctors when bringing this up as well? Nobody needs HRT. Okay, we eat fat. We make our own hormones. The steroid hormone cascade starts with cholesterol, goes to pregnenolone. They fan out, estradiol being at the end on the right and cortisol on the left. So, we make this stuff and our body knows how much we need. If you've been told that about perimenopausal symptoms, if you've been told about menopausal symptoms, it's not true. It's an assumption that comes from the history of what I call the medical male gaze. Women decay when they are no longer fertile. It's not true. Men decay, women decay as we get older. It's the same. You don't need to take any kind of supplementary hormones. Even if they take out your uterus, you still don't need them. You eat fat. If you take out your uterus, you will have a stress response to all of a sudden having this imbalance cause, but you still make all the hormones that your ovaries, if they take out your ovaries, are producing because most of these hormones are made in the adrenals anyway via DHEA and peripheral tissues. So 50% of men's testosterone all their lives comes from adrenal synthesis. Why do they know that? Because they measured the testosterone levels of males who were chemically castrated and they still had good testosterone levels. Same goes for women. It's about 85% of our steroid hormone synthesis done from DHEA in peripheral tissue. It's not all in the ovaries. That's what's really important for people to understand.
There are a lot of side effects to HRT. The risks are pretty serious. They raise cortisol levels. They can have off-target binding. So they actually bind to tissue that doesn't want these steroid hormones and they cause cancer. They've always known they cause cancer. From the beginning, the biochemists who first isolated the estrogens from horse urine, they saw that they cause cancer in their animals in the lab rats. The doses are way too high. They're so much more than your body wants. So much more than your body actually makes for the tissues that are looking for it. It causes an imbalance. They're way more powerful. They're like hundreds of times more powerful. Just like taking a cortisone shot is way more powerful than your own body producing cortisol. Now, the difference between HRT and bioidentical hormones is that the bioidentical hormones are just as synthetic. They're not made from cholesterol, but they are not as powerful. They still can have off-target binding, which means that everything in the body that goes into the body physiologically has to bind to a receptor. It has to has a lock and key effect to attach to it and say here I am excuse me the key goes in the wrong lock basically also with the bioidentical hormones but dosages are not as powerful therefore are somewhat less dangerous.
Dr. Elizabeth Bright is definitely one of my personal heroes because she has literally dedicated her whole entire life to helping out women get healthy. And it's not just women who are going through menopause. Young women, adolescents, teenagers, children, myself included. When I was 21 years old, as you can see photos above, I was struggling with my cystic acne, my psoriasis, and eczema. I was feeling fluffy, inflamed, and tired all the time. Good Fat is Good for Women pulled me out of my spiral. That's exactly why Dr. Bright and I built her private community, not as a course, not as a generic place for advice, but as the closest thing you can get to working with her personally as your private doctor. This is the only place where she will review your labs and give you a treatment plan live on the spot. So, if you're watching this and you're thinking, "This explains everything I've been dealing with." The link to join Dr. Bright's group is down below in the description box. And if there's space when you check, take it. Spots are limited because you can only help so many people at one time. Thank you so much for watching and feel free to drop a comment below sharing your thoughts, any questions, whatever clicked for you today about cortisol. I would love to read your comments and thoughts. I'll see you in my next video. A speechy gown.